Paper cuttings made by 17th-century schoolgirls discovered beneath floorboards

My wife found a cool 1896 Harper's School Geography textbook at an antique shop and got it for me, and it had the original pupil's name and signature (and date of 1897!) written on the front matter, but there are also a few other handwritten notes and the name of the school itself... it's such a neat little self-contained time capsule.

It also boggles my mind:

1. How accurate it was, in terms of map fidelity

2. The quality of the illustrations and prints, many of which are in several (what I imagine was offset?) colors!

3. How well it's held up. The cover looks essentially completely trashed, but the interior of the book's pages are almost entirely intact, and in great shape. (I'm not worried of them turning to dust in my hands, for instance.)

It's always fascinating to see just how little has changed, especially among schoolkids in nigh on 300 years!

Here's essentially the exact book I'm talking about, so it's not _that_ uncommon. Looks to be in almost identical condition, too: https://www.ebay.com/itm/184283104558

looks like you made a sale. Almost makes me wonder if this was an elaborate ploy to promote your ebay store. In which case, well done

Prolly a nitpick, but closer to 100 than 300 years. Rather significantly, too.

Is it due to a bias on our part that we think that it's fascinating? Why would people be different? People haven't changed, we just have phones now.

I believe the GP was referencing the posted article with the 300 years comment.

> we just have phones now

That’s a huge understatement. We have electricity, refrigeration, medicine, mass transit (including international), human rights, enormous increases in population, fast media, internet, nuclear weapons, universal literacy, factory lines, spaceships, cities of many millions of people. Anyone that’s played Civilisation knows how far the tech tree goes once you hit the Enlightenment.

And you can see how much internet and social media have changed society, so imagine the impact of all those things combined on the human brain.

Right but people, their nature, hasn't changed.

I find this a vague, reductionist view. When I have dinner with my family today, there’s more than one nature, while my own nature has changed in the last 10 years. To say most people have had the same nature at least for the last 300 years is only true if you reduce “nature” to something so banal that it means nothing at all.

i feel that by the turn of the 20th century we generally had fully accurate maps. 1897 is not really all that long ago - we were well on our way to discovering special relativity at that point

I have an "autograph book" that belonged to my great-great grandmother, with many signatures from around 1886. It's the equivalent of kids signing a yearbook.

What boggles my mind is how incredible all these kids' handwriting was. Precise, flowing, beautiful cursive.

It's also a quality cover and paper.

A few years ago I visited a high school for some competition that one of my kids was in. They had posters of each graduating class going back decades, and most of the photos had the kid's signature underneath. It was amazing to compare the signatures from the 1970s and 1980s to the modern ones. The old ones were neat, and showed a lot of individual style. As time went on they looked less confident and showed less individual variation -- most of them looked like standard elementary school cursive. The newest ones were the worst, some were a shaky-looking cursive, some were just printed.

Penmanship, and even just ordinary cursive writing, is just not taught anymore. I understand that it's hardly needed in today's world, but there's something about putting thoughts to paper by hand that enforces some deliberate thinking, unlike keyboarding or speech-to-text. Some studies show that taking class notes by hand is more effective than using a keyboard or recording.

The distribution has not changed. Nobody said that an individual data point is fixed and that all data points are equal.

I think what was intended was that _human_ nature hasn't changed.

> by the turn of the 20th century we generally had fully accurate maps

New Zealand may having something to say about that...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_of_New_Zealand_from_m...

I think anyone making that claim is going to have to define human nature in a way that has eluded several fields of study for generations.

I was reading a book (1) which talked about that and emphasized the importance of writing on formulating thoughts and ideas. The funny thing is, it seems it has less to do with writing being some magical input method that makes you think better, and more to do with the fact that writing is just plain slow and forces you to think through and sort of sum up your thoughts as you go. So ironically, it being an inefficient method actually has a positive! But I still feel like you could get most of the way there by just being more deliberate when using a different input method, for example, forcing yourself to stop and think as you type, or using outlining tools, or maybe even artificially limiting your input speed...

(1) "How to take Smart Notes" by Soenke Ahrens

i’m not sure why an article describing the modern day accidental omission of NZ in maps is really relevant. they also often exclude Antarctica - not from lack of knowledge of the existence

I mean the act of signing things is also less common today. My parents put their signatures on credit card terminals and employment agreements; I grew up with contactless payments and Docusign.

I wonder whether a YouTube video, a post on Instagram, or similar artifact of our modern world would ever be able to survive 350 years. This …longevity(?) seems to be something that is unique to physical objects like books, printed photographs, or paper cuttings. In 350 years, will we look back at this time and considering it another dark age because so little of the content we are producing will still exist in an accessible form?

The claim is that humans have changed. Tell me how humans are physically different today than 400 years ago.

Books are not at all special. Only a very small fraction of writings from antiquity are still available to us. Some exist only as lumps of carbon in the Herculaneum papyri and haven't been seen by humans in a thousand years.

Overall, most books ever printed have been destroyed. It's just that we've printed a lot of them. It's mostly a survivorship and recency bias.

We're barely into our first century of producing digital artifacts. Some things have been lost, of course, but we do still have a lot of information about the very earliest machines. We still have some of the first programs, some of the first machines are still running today.

We might be able to preserve things in the very long term if we can convince ourselves it's worth the effort, but more than likely the far future will have lost as much from our time as we have from antiquity.

The behavior of one person over a single lifetime really has nothing at all to do with the behavior of humans as a species over the span of millennia.

Over the course of our history as a species, people have roughly always had the same drive. The same types of people have always existed and always follow the same patterns. Compare Alexander and Napoleon. Aristotle and Freud. Pliny and Darwin. Follow the lines of philosophy, science, engineering, politics, military all the way from antiquity to today. Each has a common thread woven back to the beginning of civilization.

You are not that different from someone living in ancient Rome, no matter how much you want to believe otherwise. Times and culture change, but people have always been what we are now, good and bad both. We have the same drive for greed, generosity, community, solitude, family, power, glory. The wheel of Ka turns and turns.

You should study ancient history, it's pretty fascinating for exactly this reason. People are frequently quite surprised to learn just how similar ancient people were to how we see ourselves now. This is also one of the biggest mistakes people make when studying history: underestimating ancient peoples and framing them as some sort of primitive undeveloped animals. The pyramids were just as ancient and mysterious to the Romans as they are to us to this day.