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I suspect that most of us have a sense of the history we don’t really know. We grow and move beyond simple, chauvinistic attitudes about what happened in the past, elementary school lessons seen through an American lens. Henry Ford invented the automobile, or something.

We know that can’t be true, and of course it’s not. But we can still be surprised by how deeply the past runs through today.

The basics of photography, for example, can be traced to antiquity, and serious technological advancements in the field were made in the 16th century. The first attempts to capture images (shadow...