The author suggests that between the Ottoman conquest of the Mamluke Sultanate in the early 1500s and Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in the 1790s that Arabic culture was effectively dead.

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Yes. Is there really a need to sensationalize the event?

IIRC correctly they also found an abundance of plants used by the inhabitants, most notably Petroselinum crispum, Salvia officinalis, Salvia rosmarinus, and Thymus vulgaris.

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300 German soldiers were killed. Not exactly 'waiting them out.'

Mila 18 by Herman Wouk is great historical fiction about the uprising.

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Do you feel that way about school teaching Maus or Number the Stars since they're historical fiction depictions of the Holocaust?

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The spirit of resistence, though, is dead

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That's super cool! I've digitized film as a hobby and for friends/family/small businesses, but not on that scale. I'm sure you love seeing all that old stuff come back to life in modern accessible formats too!

I (wrongly) assumed Poland wouldn't have as hardcore copyright laws as the US does, but yup, that's the case. That definitely makes sense though. You have to stay above board on who holds the rights even if it seems a little ridiculous at times.

It is extremely niche to researchers and historians. I know no museum is holding out with the hope that someone is going to come specifically for some random scanned images. People, even experts in the field, really don't care enough most of the time. Most archivists definitely would prefer to just throw it out (in an organized fashion of course haha) and let bygones be bygones.

Still, I've seen some places stay pretty overzealous on gatekeeping their archives. Random story, I worked for a university and their library had an enormously convoluted process to access their old, university specific, and mostly public domain photo archive. The people managing it are all in their 60s and 70s and would not budge that the super niche 120 year old photos MUST be protected. I worked in marketing and figured out which librarian to contact to have the lists of photo ID's sent over to me in high res when we needed some archival content. The rest of my coworkers just went to the index site, downloaded the low res preview with the watermark, and edited or cropped the watermark out. I couldn't convince them to just take the time to email the right person and get it in full quality, haha.

Can anybody recommend a book that covers Arabic literature in the Levant during the Ottoman Empire? The anthology I found in the local library washed its hands of Ottoman Arabic literature completely.

While studying WWII in high school, there was a made-for-tv movie about the uprising which was the first time I had heard anything about it. I'm not sure who is all in it, but I know Hank Azaria is, and I know that it was really informative. I definitely recommend looking for it if anyone is interested.

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I work in digitization at a major institution, specifically on film scanning (among other things). The position of literally everyone who works in this area (including curators especially) is that we should make everything freely available online. Like you say, data doesn't exist unless it's accessible. We feel great pride in making things freely available to the world.

The reason why in every case where we can't make something public is the copyright holder. Polish copyright law on photographs is similar to the US and elsewhere - retroactively applied to 70 years after the photographer's death (the copyright law previously would have put these in the public domain already, but the new law retroactively put these back in copyright).

The institution may own the negatives, but not the copyright - this is standard. So any use requires permission from the copyright holder. Many copyright holders (which often is the estate of the photographer who is no longer alive) are happy to have the images be digitized and available for the public to see, but others emphatically are not for a variety of reasons.

I have no particular knowledge of the situation here. It could very well be that it's the museum itself being stingy and wanting people to come see them in person. But it's not like institutions digitize things for you to see online because they don't want you to come in person. The number of people who are going to go to this museum specifically to see these images is extremely small - mainly niche researchers and historians. So I'm just speculating that it's likely or at least very possible the copyright holder (the son of the photographer it sounds like) is enforcing restrictions on it, because that is extremely common.

Addition to your apt observation, not correction :) Thank you for bringing up this often-forgotten topic.

Do you not see the word “most” in my reply?

After WW2 those decisions were made by the Soviet Union not the Polish “government.”

Just seems like asking for “they’re making us watch this fake movie because there aren’t any real ones”. Then that’ll lead people to finding Anne Frank’s sister on Good Morning Britain saying that the Soviet photos are fake. Then who knows?

I KNOW it was not. I had family there that often discussed the subject. Sure there were racists like in any other country, but significantly smaller percentage that anywhere else in Europe. There is a reason why Polish names figure prominently here .