Web Reads: Will liberals be merciful?

Liberal victory? One liberal declares the culture wars over, pronounces liberals the winners, and advises them to be gentle on the losers: “So I’d like to call on liberals to suppress any desire for vengeance in the wake of our Culture War victory. The harder task—rebuilding—has just begun, and we need the whole country on board.”

Photo history. “Detroit Now & Then: A Changing Cityscape” is a website that uses photographs of the Motor City to reveal how it has changed over the past 100 years. With a swipe you can switch from one era to the other, using overlaid photos, to see how facades have changed, buildings have disappeared, and what riots left behind. One photo of the affluent Brush Park neighborhood captures decay. Here’s another photo that depicts a 1942 race riot in that same neighborhood.

Map history. The New York Public Library is making available more than 20,000 high-resolution digitized maps that you can view and download for free. Here’s how the library describes the collection: “1,100 maps of the Mid-Atlantic United States and cities from the 16th to 19th centuries, mostly drawn from the Lawrence H. Slaughter Collection; a detailed collection of more than 700 topographic maps of the Austro-Hungarian empire created between 1877 and 1914; a collection of 2,800 maps from state, county and city atlases (mostly New York and New Jersey); a huge collection of more than 10,300 maps from property, zoning, topographic, but mostly fire insurance atlases of New York City dating from 1852 to 1922; and an incredibly diverse collection of more than 1,000 maps of New York City, its boroughs and neighborhoods, dating from 1660 to 1922, which detail transportation, vice, real estate development, urban renewal, industrial development and pollution, [and] political geography among many, many other things.”

Education debate. Common Core proponents swiftly reacted to a 39-minute anti-Common Core online documentary produced by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). This link takes you to the documentary and a run-down of the reaction.