The British Library holds this 1744 book of nursery rhymes, Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, which was sold in London and is the oldest surviving published collection in the genre. Some of the rhymes inTommy Thumb's are still familiar; others, like the wonderful "Piss a Bed," have dropped out of circulation. 

The petitions below come from a recently concluded exhibition, "The Fallen Woman," at London's Foundling Museum. In the pair of 19^th-century documents, two unmarried mothers, Damaris Phillips and Anne Giddings, ask the Foundling Hospital to take their illegitimate children into its care. Both petitions were rejected. 

This woodblock print map of Japan's Mt. Fuji, which can be folded to represent the mountain's iconic conical shape, was produced by an unknown publisher sometime around 1848. Writing about the map in the new book Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps, Miyazaki Fumiko speculates that the item may have been printed and sold by oshi, traveling performers and acolytes from Yoshida, one starting point for pilgrimages up the mountain.

In May 2012, science-fiction writer and blogger John Scalzi published a post titled "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is." "I've been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word 'privilege,' to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon," Scalzi wrote. His solution: an extended metaphor drawn from role-playing games.

Published in a 1936 Atlas of American Agriculture, put together by the United States Department of Agriculture, these 1916 maps of the average dates of first killing frosts in fall and last killing frosts in spring were initially intended to help farmers plan their planting schedules. Now, the maps offer a rough gauge showing how much these dates have shifted over a century. 

For more than one hundred years after the founding of America’s first medical school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1765, faculty members personally peddled tickets to their classes in order to fill lecture halls. So if a prospective surgeon, like Samuel Gartley, whose name appears on this delightfully morbid ticket featuring dancing skeletons, wanted to study anatomy under W. S. Jacobs at U Penn, c. 1800, he would seek out Jacobs and buy a ticket to attend his “dissection class.”

Four years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Los Angeles Examiner published this full-page map by artist Howard Burke, outlining a potential Japanese strategy for attacking the West Coast and "demolishing" its cities. The map is online as part of the Cornell University Library's Persuasive Cartography digital collection. 

One of the many Uncle Tom's Cabin–themed bits of culture that made their way onto the market after the book's publication in March 1852, this card game, sold that same year in Providence, Rhode Island, shows how the audience that read Harriet Beecher Stowe's superpopular book adapted its fictional world for its own purposes. 

In a new book, Melancholy Accidents: Three Centuries of Stray Bullets and Bad Luck, Peter Manseau collects American newspaper notices of tragedies involving firearms from 1739 to 1916. The book's title comes from the terms newspapers often used to tag news of mishaps, listing these gun accidents alongside "drownings, horse tramplings, or steamship explosions," Manseau writes. 

The British Library has recently digitized part of a multiauthored play, "The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore," written between about 1596 and 1604. Three pages of this draft of the play are apparently written by William Shakespeare, and they represent the only available sample of his handwriting in a play script.