Rebecca Onion

Joined: Feb 21, 2014

Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate's history blog, The Vault.

Show & Tell: A Campaign Torch Helmet

Ancient Greek Curse Tablet

Show & Tell: A Needlepoint Map Sampler

Show & Tell: A Mermaid Helmet

Show & Tell: Rococo Microscope

Made for an aristocratic amateur scientist who might have used it to explore his collection of natural specimens.

From the Collections of The Henry Ford. Gift of Glenn D. Miller.

Show & Tell: Ford Model T Ignition Key

Starting a car used to take technical smarts and physical strength.

Show & Tell: Wanted Posters from 19th Century Nova Scotia

A scrapbook that gives us a snapshot of the way the international pursuit of criminals functioned during the Victorian era.

George Arents Collection, The New York Public Library // Public domain

Show & Tell: 1920s Cigarette Cards Depicting Flappers Dressed as Butterflies

Artists of the 1920s found the flapper-butterfly analogy too bewitching to resist.

Show & Tell: A 19th Century Chatelaine

This beautiful ornament told the world that a woman took her domestic responsibilities seriously.

© Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven

Show & Tell: Visconti Tarot Cards

Created by a paranoid duke, these cards were used for entertainment, not mystical divination.

Inuit Snow Goggles

A creative, and decorative, solution for preventing snow blindness.

Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress // Public domain

Show & Tell: Powder Horn Map

Men once etched diary entries, rhymes, and souvenir maps on the horns used to carry their gunpowder.

Houghton Library, Harvard University // Public Domain

Show & Tell: An Antique Love Token From a Broken Heart

Intricate, decorated "puzzle purses" were a feature of late 18th and early 19th century American courtship.

Show & Tell: 17th-Century Falcon's Hood

An ornate—but very necessary—item for a sport enmeshed in Britain's social hierarchy.

Show & Tell: The Lamp That Saved Coal Miners' Lives

Coal was at the heart of early 19th-century England’s industrial progress, but until this lamp came along there was no safe way to see inside the mines.

Artifacts from the Atari Tomb

In 1983, a struggling Atari dumped truckloads of goods in a New Mexico landfill. The dump was long considered an urban legend, until archeologists excavated in 2014 and found hundreds of games, manuals, cartridges and more. Now, the artifacts are in sever