Season 2 of the Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast Returns

The Field Guide returns with a new season, and with it, a new way of seeing.

Season 2 opens with an episode that serves as both companion and counterpart to my new book, Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night: History Hidden in Darkness. The two are connected by theme and intention, the book explores darkness through history, art, and memory, while the episode invites you to hear that history as a living conversation.

The episode stands on its own. You do not need to have read the book to follow it. Instead, it’s an entry point into the same constellation of ideas that shaped Field Guide to the Night: how darkness has shaped the stories we tell and the worlds we build.

This premiere moves through personal memory and cultural inheritance. It explores how our ancestors looked to the stars for order, how cities learned to live without light during blackouts, and how our relationship to night has shifted from instinctive fear to technological control. The night once held both danger and discovery, an time for reflection and the unseen work that daylight forbids.

Today, the spaces between streetlights are thinner. We have filled the dark with screens and noise, yet the impulse remains—to look outward, to wonder what lives just beyond the visible. Field Guide to the Night was written to recover that sense of continuity, to remind us that the night sky above us is the same one seen by those who came before.

The podcast expands that vision through. Together, episode 7 and the book form a map of how darkness has shaped belief, invention, and imagination.

Season 2 continues what Restoration Obscura has always aimed to do: to recover the layers of meaning that remain hidden in plain sight. Darkness, after all, is where we first learned to see.

Darkness was our first fear, and our first teacher.It was the canvas against which imagination took shape, the space where memory and invention learned to share a language.We once built fires to keep it back, then telescopes to study its depths.Both acts were the same gesture: a desire to understand what we could not see.

That search continues here.Welcome back to the Field Guide.

Now Available: Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night by John BulmerStep into the dark.

In this immersive history, John Bulmer traces how night has shaped human experience, from the first skywatchers marking the heavens, to cities plunged into wartime blackouts, to the shadow networks of Cold War surveillance. Field Guide to the Night explores darkness as both a physical reality and a cultural force, showing how the absence of light has altered memory, shaped belief, and guided survival.

Part cultural history, part personal journey, the book invites readers to look past today’s artificial glow and rediscover what remains alive in the shadows.

Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the NightPaperback $14.99 | Kindle $9.99368 pages | ISBN 979-8218702731Published June 1, 2025 by Restoration Obscura PressAvailable worldwide on Amazon

About Restoration Obscura

Restoration Obscura is where overlooked history gets another chance to be seen, heard, and understood. Through long-form storytelling, archival research, and photographic restoration, we recover the chapters that slipped through the official record, the ones left in basements, fading in family albums, or sealed behind locked doors.

The name nods to the camera obscura, the early optical device that projected an image into a darkened chamber. Our work turns that metaphor inside out: drawing forgotten histories from the shadows and bringing them back into the light.

This project examines what textbooks leave behind: Cold War secrets, lost towns, vanished neighborhoods, wartime experiments, strange ruins, and the lives woven into them. Each article, image, and episode rebuilds fragments of the past and holds them to the light, one story at a time.

If you believe memory is worth preserving, if you’ve ever paused at the ruins of an old mill, or held a faded photograph and wondered about the world it came from, this space is for you.

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The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast streams on all major platforms.

Every photo has a story. And every story connects us.

© 2025 John Bulmer Media & Restoration Obscura. All rights reserved. Educational use only.

Restoration Obscura Provenance Statement

Restoration Obscura draws on a range of materials, including public archives, institutional holdings, and privately preserved collections. Many images and documents have uncertain or incomplete provenance; when possible, sources are identified and credited. While we work to preserve and interpret these materials with care, not all rights of ownership reside with Restoration Obscura.

Permissions Statement

Restoration Obscura may not hold copyright for all images featured in its archives or publications. For uses beyond educational or non-commercial purposes, please contact the institution, archive, or original source credited with the material.

Obscura Codex Entry 220.A man from Taborton told me his grandfather used to haul stone for the state during the Depression. One winter, they were ordered to dump a full load into a sinkhole near Blue Factory Hollow. No paperwork, no explanation, just a foreman with a state truck and a clipboard. When spring came, the hole had vanished beneath new growth. The family could never find the spot again.

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