#2 The Most Dangerous Animal In The World. Exhibition In The Bronx Zoo, 1960s
#3 Senegalese Soldier Who Lost Both His Arms Writes A Letter With His New Prosthetic Limbs. At Vocational Rehabilitation School For Amputees, Paris 1918
To give you an overview of the subreddit, it introduces itself as a platform that covers a variety of aspects in history: famous figures and events, art, archaeology, overviews of museum inventory, architecture, technology, as well as biology, science fiction, covering old magazine and comic book excerpts, screenshots and the like.
It is important to note that, just like history is bloody, some of the posts are deemed not safe for work (or even not safe for life), but it’s an unavoidable part of history that ought to be learned from.
The subreddit is run by just one person, u/myrmekochoria, with whom Bored Panda got in touch for an interview, who makes sure a steady stream of interesting facts, tidbits and other forms of historical enlightenment reaches a community of over 37,700 people.
#4 Nurse From The "Red Cross" Writing Down Last Words Of Mortally Wounded Soldier, 1917
#5 Activists Picketing Outside Of A Segregated Swimming Pool, Ohio 1960s
#6 Viktor Yushchenko Before And After His Poisoning By Vladimir Putin In 2004. He And His Family Believe The Assassination Attempt Was Ordered By Moscow When He Attempted To Steer Ukraine To Closer Integration With Europe
Myrmekochoria recalls hearing from a friend about old-time diarists like Samuel Pepys and the like. They can’t recall the exact name, but there was one who never missed a single day without writing something in his diary. But unlike many contemporaries, instead of focusing on world events, he noted the everyday grind and epiphanies of an unimportant person in this cruel world, a la In Search of Lost Time, but without any hope of care from others.
“It was like a statement of a single person against the uncaring world. But I tried to do it as an intellectual footprint of the mind through time—not a personal drama,” elaborated the creator of the subreddit. “I do not work in any intellectual circles or related jobs, so this is how I keep up my interest, instead of becoming a mindless consumer of sorts.”
“Also, my teacher once told me that these kinds of diaries help with inspiration and provide rabbit holes that lead into books and help broaden one’s own intellectual horizon. I have been creating this sort of content for a long while, even before Reddit on another Polish website, but people there were not that nice, and the content was not really tailored for them. On Reddit, it found its niche.”
#9 Queen Genepil The Last Queen Consort Of Mongolia. Killed During Stalinist Purges In 1938
#10 An East German Guard Throws A Ball Back To A Child Playing On The West German Side Of The Berlin Wall. 1962
I bet you’re wondering why Dragon Utopia? Well, in the beginning of it all, Myrmekochoria explained that they used to channel two types of content: old art-themed posts called Starszezwoje, or Elder Scrolls (“hopefully, no lawsuit pending,” joked OP), and Smoczautopia, or Dragon Utopia, which was aimed at sharing objects from museums, letters from Mesopotamia, armor, weapons, that sort of thing.
“The name of the subreddit always comes up in conversations. It is a reference to a game called Heroes of Might and Magic III. There is a building called Dragon Utopia, and after fighting with a powerful dragon you are rewarded with powerful artifacts. In concept, this subreddit was destined to be dedicated to old artifacts and objects from online museums. But there is already a great subreddit for that, so I switched directions and merged the two types of content into one. The name remained.”
#12 Japanese Nurse Dressed In Black During The Russo-Japanese War, 1905
#14 President George W. Bush Is Interrupted By Chief Of Staff Andrew Card While Reading To Schoolchildren In Sarasota, Florida, On September 11th, 2001
As mentioned above, the creator of r/DragonUtopia is extremely diligent in posting content on the daily (with a slight hiatus as of this article, but no worries!)—it would often average at 10 posts a day, each with a visual and a short explanation of what folks can see.
“The posts depend on what I’m reading currently or am in the mood of. I usually post around 10 post a day and there is sometimes (not always) an overarching theme hidden behind them like: cruelty of humans, beauty of art, indifference of war and of the biological world, suffering of humans and maybe the possibility of empathy and the feeling of their despair as yours through photographs, child labor, progress of science changing life for the better,” elaborated OP.
#15 Salvador Dalí Poster For Us Army In Campaign Against Venereal Diseases, 1942
“There are so many great resources now on the Internet. There are plenty of national archives (like the Library of Congress, Narodwe Archiwum Cyfrowe (National Digital Archives in Poland), and a bunch of others—nearly every country now has digitized archives.”
“These feature hundreds of thousands of photos in high-res for free, authored by famous photographers like Lewis Hine, Jack Delano, John Vachon, Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Theodor Horydczak, Arthur Rothstein, Arthur S. Siegel, Andreas Feininger, and Gordon Park. I’ve previously mentioned them in length because they document reality as a 19th-century French novelist would do.”
“Also, there are plenty of great blogs and other people doing the same thing on social media, but for the most part, I try to give the content some kind of personal touch, if that is possible.”
