Top all-time · #10214
George Dillard
Personal blog · worldhistory.substack.comhistoryculture
George Dillard writes Looking Through the Past, a personal blog at worldhistory.substack.com about history and culture. Since 2023, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 102 times, most often “Riches from the Mouth of Hell: The dark legacy of Potosi”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Illuminating forgotten corners of history and using them to think about the present.
Most-linked posts?
- Riches from the Mouth of Hell: The dark legacy of Potosi2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-02-02
What Hacker News says?
I clicked again on the link I posted to make sure it’s correct ( https://worldhistory.substack.com/p/plastic-before-plastic ) and it brought me directly to the blog post without needing to scroll through anything else. Wondering where the link you clicked on dumped you into?
Comment linking /p/plastic-before-plastic
on “Plastic Before Plastic: How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century”Submitted “There are people who can see and others who cannot even look” as a story · 262 points
HN discussionSubmitted How ancient people saw themselves as a story · 252 points
HN discussionSubmitted How a Forgotten Battle Created a More Peaceful World as a story · 160 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Myth of Bananaland as a story · 153 points
HN discussionSubmitted Timekeeping Before Clocks as a story · 140 points
HN discussionSubmitted What were the earliest laws like? as a story · 131 points
HN discussionSubmitted Plastic Before Plastic: How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century as a story · 113 points
HN discussionSubmitted Seeing Through the Spartan Mirage as a story · 103 points
HN discussionSubmitted The world of 1930s public health posters as a story · 78 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to Enter a City Like a King as a story · 73 points
HN discussionSubmitted Men's Weird Collections Inspired the Modern Museum: Cabinets of Curiosities as a story · 45 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Ancient Art of Color as a story · 35 points
HN discussionSubmitted Time for a Change: The long, contentious history of time shifts as a story · 32 points
HN discussionSubmitted July, 1914 as a story · 28 points
HN discussionSubmitted The King's Quarry: How Louis XVI Went from Hunter to Hunted as a story · 25 points
HN discussionSubmitted Imagining the Dinosaurs: How art, science combined to bring a lost world to life as a story · 16 points
HN discussionSubmitted Battling the Blaze: Artifacts from the history of firefighting as a story · 14 points
HN discussionSubmitted Prester John, Letter from Nowhere: Medieval Europeans Search for a Mythical King as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Cosmic Propaganda: The Soviet Space program in stamps as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Echoes of Rage: Our new age of violence looks a lot like the Gilded Age as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Corruption Looks Like as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Ottoman Mirror as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Pear Pressure as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Phrenology's Bumpy Path as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Middle of Nowhere, the Center of Empire as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted From Eden to El Dorado: The Orinoco River's long history of attracting outsiders as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The King of Games: Alfonso X's Libro de Juegos as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Gregor MacGregor's Paper Kingdom: Inside one of the 19th century's biggest scams as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Borderless Ambition as a story · 3 points
HN discussion