Going bonkers trying to remember the title of a favorite children's book that I read growing up in the late 1960s. The story takes place in NYC and the main characters are 2 children, a boy and a girl. The children stand in the first car of a subway train and as the train moves faster and faster through a Bowery tunnel, the children travel back in time to NY when it was New Amsterdam. They meet Peter Stuyvesant and other characters in Manhattan when it was a Dutch colony. Sound familiar to anyone?
posted by suzeQ on Sep 20, 2009 - 1 answer

Help with my homework filter!! I want to compile a list of time travelers from literature, television and cinema. I am looking for a couple specific attributes. [more inside]
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur on Mar 9, 2009 - 35 answers

What are some good short stories in which time passes extremely quickly? [more inside]
posted by whir on Sep 1, 2008 - 12 answers

How is the meaning of art and artefacts being altered by the methods we use to: Experience, Define and Preserve them... In other words, in what ways have technologies been used to experience, re-define and/or preserve art and artifacts? [more inside]
posted by 0bvious on Feb 5, 2008 - 12 answers

I am interested in the mimetic and narrative capacities of artefacts, how cultural remnants transmit information through time and how meaning is translated once an artefact is re-appropriated or examined from a new perspective. I have several avenues of study at the moment (a list in extended explanation), but would like some more ideas. Areas of critical theory, linguistics, evolutionary psychology and poetics are all relevant. [more inside]
posted by 0bvious on Jan 27, 2008 - 12 answers

I'm on the hunt for sites and/or blogs about big ideas... Who wants to join me? [more inside]
posted by 0bvious on Jul 9, 2006 - 17 answers

Have perceptions of time changed in the last few hundred years? Did people used to speak more casually about periods of time? I'm reading Jane Eyre, and Charlotte Bronte uses "ten minutes" in an odd way. I suspect she means (by today's standards) 30 seconds. Is this sloppy writing, cultural difference or what? [more inside]
posted by grumblebee on Mar 28, 2005 - 20 answers