Archive of technology, entertainment and everyday life
The available sources foreground Karl Benz’s 1886 patent, while also describing parallel developments and distinct industrial trajectories. Telling this history means distinguishing between a patent, a vehicle, an engine and a company.
Open storyDistribution connected production with cinemas and audiences. Posters, pressbooks, film magazines and business archives make that work possible to study, while the available sources also set clear limits on what can be claimed.
Open storyPeugeot’s story did not begin with a car. The available evidence places its origins in a workshop making coffee mills and other utensils, before it moved into bicycles and, eventually, motor vehicles. That journey invites us to distinguish a brand’s continuity from the changing products it actually made.
Open storyPremiering in New York in 1940, Fantasia brought animated segments together with classical music and a pioneering sound presentation. Its history also shows that later versions did not always preserve image and sound intact.
Open storyAn introduction to distribution as the link between production and exhibition, and to what the available sources tell us about the consolidation of Spain’s film sector from the early twentieth century to the quota debate of 1928.
Open storyTurin’s MAUTO and the museum dedicated to Juan Manuel Fangio offer two documented examples of how cars, engines and other objects become public narratives. A careful reading of their collections also shows what can be stated—and what remains beyond the available evidence.
Open storyFilm history is also shaped between a completed film and its arrival in cinemas. Drawing on sources about Spanish distribution, this article explores distributors’ role, the early twentieth-century context of expansion, debate over the presence of domestic films, and the value of archives preserving traces of this activity.
Open storyThe collections and institutional history of the National Museum of Decorative Arts allow decoration to be examined as a matter of production, education, consumption and design, rather than merely a repertoire of exceptional objects.
Open storyA reading of automotive preservation as a cultural practice: vehicles, engines, chassis and manuals, together with their social contexts, explain far more than technical evolution.
Open storySpanish public collections show that the history of photography does not depend solely on cameras or authors: it is also sustained by negatives, slides, albums, postcards, catalogues and descriptive systems. This survey compares five institutions and their documented holdings.
Open storyTurin’s Museo Nazionale dell’Automobile opened to the public in 1939 with a collection of 181 objects. Its origins show how the automobile became not only a technical object, but also a record of design, mobility and social change.
Open storyToys do more than evoke an individual childhood: they make it possible to study crafts, materials, educational models, consumption and everyday life. Drawing on documented collections and exhibitions in Spain and Colombia, this analysis examines what changes when an object of play is preserved and interpreted as heritage.
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