Rebecca Onion
Joined: Feb 21, 2014
Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate's history blog, The Vault.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Show & Tell: Powder Horn Map
Men once etched diary entries, rhymes, and souvenir maps on the horns used to carry their gunpowder.
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