Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_8206,size=350,right]Born around 1815, James Thomas Gant was one of twelve children born to free parents on a plantation a few miles northeast of the Washington DC-line.1 As a free black man who lived through nearly the entire nineteenth century, he would see the Civil War, the destruction of slavery, the rise and fall of an all-too-brief period of
Description: 435 high resolution book plates of gorgeous illustrations from Audubon's The Birds of America are now available for free download! [via Hyperallergic]And after you're done with the plates, check out peacock feathers under a high magnification lens, by artist Waldo Nell. [via Wired]University students are working to save the remaining copies of a black-owned newspaper, The
Description: [caption id="attachment_2376" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="blurredvision, by Flickr user Paul Denton Cocker."][/caption] According to the National Eye Institute, more than 3 million Americans are blind or have vision so poor that everyday tasks become extremely difficult. Interestingly, according to a recent article by Pam Belluck in The New York Times, a new