With ISIS targeting and destroying ancient cultural sites in Syria and Iraq, reducing some to just rubble, it may be that views of these historic structures will survive only in photographs. The Getty Research Institute (GRI) announced yesterday its acquisition of a suite of photographs that offer rare glimpses of some of these places as they stood 150 years ago. Captured in 1864 by French naval officer Louis Vignes, the crisp, well-preserved pictures show sites in present day Beirut, Lebanon, and the Roman ruins in Palmyra, Syria. Among the 47 albumen prints are the earliest printed photographs of Palmyra, showing the Temple Baalshamin and Temple of Bel, both of which ISIS is believed to have recently obliterated, in August and September, respectively. Other images show panoramas of Beirut’s port — the region’s most significant in the 19th century — and views of the city surrounded by grand pine trees.

Source: Getty Research Institute Acquires 150-Year-Old Photographs of Palmyra and Beirut

Opened this week at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Fashion Victims: The Pleasures and Perils of Dress in the 19th Century explores the dangers of style not just for the wearers, but for the peopl…

Source: Fatal Victorian Fashion and the Allure of the Poison Garment

Active repatriation of indigenous remains in museums only gathered serious momentum in the 1980s. That is why Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s demand in August that London’s Natural History Museum return skulls of men believed to have been killed fighting against 19th-century British colonizers is important.

Source: Skeletons on the Shelves: Museums’ Slow Return of Indigenous Remains