Go Down the Rabbit Hole of Chicago History with CriticalPast
By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 24, 2011 9:00PM
The Internet age has been marked unprecedented access to mind boggling amounts of information. That access may used in service of the good, like tracking the influence of money in politics via opensecrets.org or slicing up census data in productive and enlightening ways. Or it can be used to answer immediately (via wikipedia) a trivia question that would never have bothered you if you hadn't just spent 20 minutes clicking on "related videos" in youtube. With great power comes great responsibility... and incredible timewasting potential.
Stumbling upon the CriticalPast website and typing "Chicago" in the search bar led us on an hour long excursion through Chicago history. The not-quite year-old online archive of video and still image boasts more than 57,000 royalty-free historic footage, but unlike a lot of stock video sites, CriticalPast lets you stream any clip (and offers immediate downloads in multiple formats for those looking to license the footage) and most importantly an above average search engine of a well-organized and tagged collection. Lots of professionally-shot images which would take a nontrivial amount work to find in the pre-Internet era are right at your fingertips, with plenty of newsreels (many without sound, alas), and lots of it from before World War II.
Just like anything else online, the urge to educate can quickly be swallowed by the desire to distract.
You may begin with the best of intentions, viewing President Kennedy at the formal dedication of O'Hare or the purported first film of Chicago from air, or the aftermath of the 1968 riots, but it won't take long before you're clicking on the stuff you really want to see, like we John Dillinger's dead body.
We personally began by queuing up Dr. Enrico Fermi conducting experiments at site of the very first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago and somehow ended up watching the Packers eke out a narrow victory over a team of college(!) football all-stars at soldier field. Nobody says you have to watch the WPA building nursery schools, parks and playgrounds in Chicago to justify watching this woman undressing while attempting to balance on a spinning log in the water at the Chicago Coliseum. It's all history, and it's all fascinating.
The only complaint we have about the site is the inability to embed videos. Nevertheless, it makes a startling amount of our history available to even the laziest among us. Long before Knut the polar bear, there was Sinbad the baby gorilla getting a checkup and a bath at the Lincoln Park Zoo. These old news clips were the shared diversions of the masses in days before television and before Youtube, and they're right there at your fingertips at CriticalPast.