Browse Items (5126 total)

Photograph of several students at a typing class at Minidoka Relocation Center, Idaho. Each student is typing from a text resting next to the typewriter.

Photograph of students Hannah Hayano, Margaret Hiuga, and Hisako Takehara conducting a Girls League Representatives Hi-Y meeting in a Heart Mountain High School classroom, Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Wyoming.

This diagram illustrates Thomas Burnet's theory that the lack of sufficient surface water to account for Noah's flood could be explained if the Earth were hollow.

This diagram illustrates how the sun illuminates the Earth in Samuel Rowbotham's model of a flat Earth. The book that contains this drawing was published in 1881, well after the vast majority of Western civilization dismissed the notion. Rowbotham…

This illustration shows a member of a race of people called the Panotti. They were initially described by Pliny the Elder in his Historia Naturalis as living in the islands off Scythia.

This page features two etchings illustrating worms supposedly extracted from a person's nose. The example on the bottom of the page is noteworthy for its depiction of a smiling, horned organism that can invade human nasal passages.

In 1708 a London magazine, The Monthly Miscellany, published a letter signed by Admiral Bartholomew de Fonte. He claimed to have crossed North American from the Pacific to Hudson Bay through the legendary northwest passage. Joseph-Nicholas de l'Isle…

This plaque dedicated to J. Harlen Bretz for his work in explaining the topography of Eastern Washington is located outside the Dry Falls Visitor Center.

This map was in The Grand Coulee by Bretz to illustrate his belief that the coulees in the region were created by a cataclysmic flood, as opposed to gradual processes, such as glaciation or wind erosion. The pink areas on the map illustrate a series…

This photograph of the Dry Falls system in Washington State illustrates the sort of gouging that Bretz felt could only be caused by a catastrophic flood.

This map taken from a 1925 brochure illustrates the series of tunnels and dams designed to channel water from the Pend Oreille River to the Columbia Basin. By maintaining a path that moved water downhill, the Gravity Plan proposed to irrigate the…

This cartoon presents the story of the Grand Coulee Dam from conception to the eventual decision by the United States Congress to fund construction of the dam. This narrative emphasizes the role of advocates of the Gravity Plan, like Governor Ernest…

This photograph from the Spokane Chronicle features members of the Colmbia River Development League, including James O'Sullivan, Rufus Woods, and Senator C. C. Dill. The Columbia River Development League formed in support of a dam built at Grand…

This page from an article titled "Red Hot Coulees" and inlcudes a photograph of J. Harlen Bretz leading a field trip to explain his theory to a group of geologists and journalists. The article was printed in the September 1928 issue of Intermountain…

This portrait of Osmar Waller was taken when Waller was Vice-President of Washington State College. Waller taught mathematics and civil engineering at WSC and was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Waller was also a proponent of the Gravity…

This is the title page from William Whitson's Theory of the Earth. In it, he attempts to explain the deluge described in the book of Noah as the result of a comet passing near Earth.

This chart from William Derham's Astro-theology displays a model of the geocentric universe, including the orbit of the planets, the stars, and the "coclum empyreum," which was essentially heaven. In this model, as in all geocentric models, Earth is…

This chart printed in a Dutch book on astronomy depicts a geocentric universe, with the Earth at its center and the planets, sun, and stars orbiting around the Earth. In this chart, Mercury and Venus orbit around the sun, which would help explain…

This title page is from a pamphlet published in 1671 that describes how to create an elixir that promises long life and claims to have a "restoring nature even at the point of death...effectively removing away the seeds of all diseases."

This is a road map of Washington State with Osmar Waller's notations on a canal system intended to irrigate the Columbia Basin using water from the Pend Oreille River. The route of the canal system, called the Gravity Plan, is drawn in blue crayon.…

This brochure details a tour provided by the Columbia Basin Irrigation League for members of the Congressional Committee on Reclamation and Irrigation. It features a train ride and meals along the path of the Gravity Plan, which was a proposed system…

This satellite photograph from 1973 shows the braided pathways of the Channeled Scablands. While aerial photography helped illustrate Bretz's theory that a giant flood formed the Scablands, satellite images such as this provided a broader overhead…

In this volume, George Wilson describes how to mix a vast assortment of substances to cure a number of maladies. For example, he describes an elixir made with 6 pounds of ground human skull that cures "Madness, Convulsions, and Hysterick Fits." The…

In this volume, Samuel Rowbotham, writing under the pen name Parallax, attempts to prove his flat earth theory. He argues that all things we attribute to the Earth's curvature is an optical illusion that can be described by "parallaxes," which has to…

In this depiction of Noah's Ark from 1681, several pairs of animals are shown boarding Noah's Ark, including a pair of unicorns near the front of the line.

This engraving of a llama from Henry Brewer and Elias Herckeman’s A Voyage to the Kingdom of Chili [sic] in America shows a rather accurate rendering of a llama, save for the monstrous claws on the llama's front feet.

This is an engraving of penguin seen near the Cape of Good Hope and appears in a 1634 volume by Sir Thomas Herbert.

This parasite has the face of a horse, the left-foot of a human, and the right foot of a bird. It was drawn by a Hanovarian artist in 1697.

In this engraving of several microbes, one of the microbes was depicted with what looks like a human face on its surface. This image comes from the early days of microscopy and the human face is likely a figment of the scientist's imagination.