Jaime Moore wanted to do something special for her daughter’s fifth birthday photo, but when she looked online, all she could find were princess tutorials.

“Now don’t get me wrong,” she says on her site, “I LOVE Disney Princesses… But it got me thinking, they’re just characters, a writers tale of a princess (most before 1998)…an unrealistic fantasy for most girls,” except, she admits, for Kate Middleton. “My daughter wasn’t born into royalty, but she was born into a country where she can now vote, become a doctor, a pilot, an astronaut, or even President if she wants and that’s what REALLY matters.” So she and her daughter decided to do a series of photos with five historical women who fought to get Jamie, Emma, and a lot of other women the rights and opportunities they enjoy today. And those pictures? They’re great.

The Museum of Childhood recently published a picture of this hundreds of year old unfinished embroidery sampler that’s very unusual. Embroidery at the time was seen as a good pastime for a young lady, not just because it taught skills like sewing and mending but because it required “patience and concentration, and it kept women at home, focussed on a virtuous domesticity.” Samplers usually depicted domestic, lady-appropriate scenes, so not as to upset the delicate sensibilities of any passersby. This sampler, as you might have noticed, is instead a very scientifically minded model of the Solar System, roughly as it was known at the time, and thinks that this may have been the work of a science minded young woman itching for a way to interact with a field denied to her. For example, they note that the sampler is decades out of date with the planets as they were known in 1811. “That might explain why the sampler wasn’t finished. Who, in 1811, would want to spend weeks or months working on a picture of the Solar System that didn’t include the newest, most exciting planets?”

Certainly not a nerd. We’re kind of sticklers for accuracy, you know. You can read the whole post, which goes on to talk about the science of the time, women of the time, and women in science of the time.

True Story: The last time I saw the tail end of A League of Their Own, I had to look away so that I didn’t cry (becausethere’snocryinginbaseball). True details: I was running. On a treadmill. At the gym. And the television was on mute. One of the last times I was actually unable to not cry even by great force of will at a movie screening, it was a combination of watching The Muppets and knowing that Jim Henson‘s wife and daughter were in attendance.

So, from this evidence, I postulate that if there was anything guaranteed to make me cry buckets of salt tears, it would have been watching A League of Their Own with Lavonne “Pepper” Paire-Davis, who died this weekend at the age of 88.

In my last post, I argued that there’s no excuse for excluding women from historically-inspired fantasy constructs — even if it means sacrificing “historical accuracy,” which is done away with in one way or another in all fantasy works anyway.

After reading through the post’s many thought-provoking comments, I realized I hadn’t emphasized something I should have: that historically-inspired stories with female protagonists certainly need not exist only in the realm of fantasy.

With shows like The Tudors, Rome, Deadwood, The Borgias, Spartacus, etc., the past decade or so has seen the rise of a heretofore rare phenomenon: the historical TV series that is based around real historical figures. I love this trend. These shows let you see a bygone time and culture, while allowing for the deep character development you don’t always get in similarly-set films.

But like most genres, there are not nearly enough female-centered ones. So I came up with some women in history whose lives, I thought, would adapt well to the format, along with some fantasy casting choices for each.

The recently released promo pics from the upcoming BBC drama The White Queen, which tells the story of the War of the Roses from the perspective of the females involved, have really, really made me want to watch the show. Granted, it was announced a few months ago and I’m only hearing about it now, so my excitement comes less from a sense of “Hey, these are cool promo stills” than “OMG, a British history epic from a female perspective! Give it!”

Omaha, Nebraska third grader Stella Ehrhart is my new hero. Since the second day of second grade, Stella, age eight, has gone to school dressed as a different person—sometimes fictional, mostly historical—almost every day. Her first costume was Laura Ingalls Wilder; since then she’s channeled Joan Baez, Queen Elizabeth, Billie Holiday, Georgia O’Keefe, Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and more for her daily outfits.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day 2012, a day dedicated to women in STEM fields, in honor of Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer. Lovelace’s life, particularly her childhood and the clashes between her parents, would be a fitting origin for any modern Prometheus, and so I love looking at the way cartoonists have depicted it.

The mission of If Star Wars Was Real.com is to painstakingly document photographic evidence that Star Wars was, in fact, real, a historical happenstance forgotten or ignored by most historians. Should you come across any evidence of the existence of Star Wars, they ask you to please submit it to them.

(If Star Wars Was Real.com via TDWGeek.)

The lady is familiar, but not the facial expression. For years art historians have pondered the origins of the Isleworth Mona Lisa. Is it a copy, painted shortly after da Vinci finished his mysterious masterpiece, or an early draft of the famous portrait, painted ten years previously?

The debate begins anew, with the unveiling of the painting to the public eye for the first time in forty years.

Mark Twain lived in a time long before Instagram, before Youtube, even before the true acknowledgment of film as both an artform and as a commercial possibility. He probably liked it this way, but for us used to the modern era it means we are sadly dereft of the pleasures of watching the famous author move around his estate in that crotchety way we can all imagine. Usually. There is, however, this: What is said to be the only existing motion picture of Twain, taken by Thomas Edison himself.

(via Flavorwire)