100-year-old blackboard drawings found in Oklahoma school

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That child with the bubble wand is really well done, especially the bubble itself.

Nice rainbow effect on the bubble top.

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I hope these end up in the Smithsonian.

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I like the one where the little girl is trying to molest the big tom, and he’s looking back at her like “WTF, get away from me”.

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She must be all hopped up on tryptophan.

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Is this old enough to get excited about? 100 years is within a possible human lifetime, isn’t it?

It’s not the age…it’s the medium. These were meant to be erased, so they isn’t much of a physical history of what was on blackboards at the time.

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Seems like nitpicking, but 1917 wasn’t 100 years ago…

Nearly, but not quite :slight_smile:

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The actual article is an ace one though, nice snapshot of history :smiley:

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This is pretty neat.

The thing about the Pilgrims not being allowed to “go to their own churches” is pretty much horseshit though. They left England because of too much religious tolerance; the failure to burn catholics was particularly displeasing to them. It was the Founding Parents who introduced the whole religious freedom thing, quite a bit later and literally over the Pilgrims’ dead bodies.

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1917 is just the date found on two of the blackboards. It’s possible that some of the other boards might have been covered up prior to that year.

From Wikipedia:

“Under the 1559 Act of Uniformity, it was illegal not to attend official Church of England services . . . The penalties for conducting unofficial services included imprisonment and larger fines. Under the policy of this time, (Separatist leaders) Barrowe and Greenwood were executed for sedition in 1593.”

That pretty much sounds to me like “not allowed to go to their own churches”. The Church of England would not allow any other religion to be observed, to the point of capital punishment, so leaving the country in order to practice as they wished definitely falls under “freedom of religion”. Holland was the only country within Europe that would allow them to continue, but they found the place to be too “libertine” an environment. So yes, they came to America in order to practice their faith without the interference or threat of death they would have experienced anywhere else.

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Was there stolen bank loot behind it?

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The “Current Developments in Mathematics” conference was started in the mid-‘90s, at a venue that had a big wall with projector screen that could slide sideways revealing blackboards to be used by the mathematicians. During the next year, the venue was used for innumerable other conferences. At the second CDiM conference a year later, they rolled back this wall and discovered that noone else had used the blackboards in the intervening year – only mathematicians use them any more at conferences. (In particular, the first years’ lectures were still up, unerased.)

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I suppose the renovators were in a hurry to get the new boards up as soon as possible, so they could bill the school board appropriately rather than letting them keep their old, perfectly-serviceable boards.

I also suppose that if the same thing were to happen again, something much more obscene would probably be found by the renovation-bots of 2117.

That’s because everyone else is doing it wrong.

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They used more colored chalk in 1917 than when I went to school.

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“They belong to the museum!” --Indy

Yes, they do - BUT FIRST I WILL DESTROY THE ENTIRE SCHOOL TO GET TO THEM. And then they will tell me about something better to get, elsewhere. It’s okay, I’m an archaeologist.

“Indy!!!”