ClicksyPicsWiggle animations and anything old timey!

AP story:

WASHINGTON – In the Confederate circles he navigated, John Scobell was considered just another Mississippi slave: singing, shuffling, illiterate and completely ignorant of the Civil War going on around him.

Confederate officers thought nothing of leaving important documents where Scobell could see them, or discussing troop movements in front of him. Whom would he tell? Scobell was only the butler, or the deckhand on a rebel sympathizer’s steamboat, or the field hand belting out Negro spirituals in a powerful baritone.

In reality, Scobell was not a slave at all.

He was a spy sent by the Union army, one of a few black operatives who quietly gathered information in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse with Confederate spy-catchers and slave masters who could kill them on the spot. These unsung Civil War heroes were often successful, to the chagrin of Confederate leaders who never thought their disregard for blacks living among them would become a major tactical weakness.

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Try to quickly summon an image of good-with-small-children dog, and chances are you’ll picture something adorably Benji-shaggy. Or maybe a sweetie-pie golden retriever, or a loveball of a lab. It’s not likely, at least not in today’s perception of the breed, that an American pit bull terrier leaps to mind.

But not so long ago, pit bulls were brought in as “nanny dogs,” the trusted caretaker pups to watch over kids.

Vintage photographs recently posted on a personal blog show off the breed as babysitter.

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There’s a cool new project on Abe Lincoln in the works.  Check it out at www.savinglincoln.com.  They are looking for people who can be of help, so if you’re interested - that’s you Civil War buffs and animators - be sure to check it out!

I couldn’t say it better than the title:  Link

Here’s a great article by one of my favorite sites, listverse.com.  I’ve been to #10 several times, a very cool spot.

Really old typewriters

Star Wars figures added to real images from WWII

Anti-suffrage propaganda posters

A very cool fire animation:

Check out one of  Violetsunset’s albums with a great vintage collection here.

The Vanished Hand has a good variety of history items, photos, poetry, and some great music and links.  Check it out here.

This is pretty cool, from the AP:

ALBANY, N.Y. – Years before leading his vastly outnumbered troops to their doom at Little Bighorn, a young George Armstrong Custer was described as accurate in math.

Nearly 30 years before his March to the Sea laid waste to a large swath of Georgia, William Tecumseh Sherman was deemed a “fine energetic boy.”

And two decades before he would earn the nickname “Stonewall,” Thomas J. Jackson’s dreams of a military career got a boost from a man who would help start the Civil War.

Those are some of the tidbits gleaned from more than 115,000 U.S. Military Academy application documents being posted online for the first time by Ancestry.com. The Provo, Utah-based genealogy website said Tuesday that the information can be viewed for free starting Thursday — Veterans Day — through Sunday.

After Sunday, it will cost $12.95 a month for unlimited access to the West Point records and the website’s more than 100 million military documents, company officials said.

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View a great assortment of modern wiggle animations at Schillr.com here.  Be sure to check out the other tabs at the top.  Great site!