Site of the Week #4

Site of the Week of 5/28/07, Ed Wesly

Maybe I should change my career and become a history teacher, as most of my picks have had something to do with days gone by. But this site is about days gone by that didn’t go by. What the heck are you talking about you might ask? This is a site that looks at the future as seem from the past, fulfilling the Social Studies Standard, explain the contributions of individuals and groups who are featured in biographies, legends, folklore and traditions. And by folklore I mean characters that are twentieth century inventions, like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, etc.

The site’s URL is http://www.fabiofeminofantascience.org/ . It is an amazing compilation of retro-future; the future as seen in the past. Yes, the fantasy strips of Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Mars Attacks, etc. are all here, plus proposals for things that were never built by the great 20th Century designers like Norman Bel Geddes, Buckminster Fuller, Raymond Loewy, etc. The site’s owner has gone overboard in uploading high quality scans of original material on this site.

The study of the past can come alive if we look at what they thought would come to pass in an era that they wouldn’t necessarily live through but what we are experiencing now in our lifetimes. They were way off on computers, although there are a lot of forecasts on thinking machines. Space flight was one of their big fantasies, and although we have seen it happen, it is not the commonplace occurrence that the ancients would have liked to see. But there are plenty of paintings by the likes of Chesley Bonestell and Frank Paul, which are great astronomical views.

So if you are a Social Studies teacher and maybe even a Science teacher, or just interested in the history of technology, this is a great site to explore. And it’s pretty big, so you can spend a lot of time there. There is a problem, and that is the site is in Italian, but the pictures are pretty much self-explanatory.