In my home state of Pennsylvania, now is the season of the Mountain Laurel blooms. This shrub (Latin name “Kalmia latifolia”) grows indigenously all along the eastern seaboard from southern Maine to northern Florida, and was used by Native Americans — the wood was good for carving into digging utensils, earning the plant the moniker […]
I don’t play videogames like Assassin’s Creed, but I am extremely grateful to them for drumming up enthusiasm for history and even getting concepts about the Middle Ages into popular culture. So this post is not intended to diss Assassin’s Creed! (Which has a very engaging plot and awesome graphics IMHO). But, historians will be
Today I got a chance to hike Old Rag Mountain in the Shenandoah National Park, and everything about it was phenomenal: yellow butterflies so heavy they wobbled in their paths, mountain laurel and tulip poplar in bloom, full streams feeding the spring life. The Old Rag Trail is most famous for the rock scrambles up
Are you from the US and fancy a trip to Europe — but don’t quite have the funding? Just north of Philadelphia is a small district called Bryn Athyn, which has . . . A Medieval mansion and cathedral. Or, almost. Glencairn Museum falls into the category of “unique homes of the wealthiest business tycoons
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Today my daughter and I got to visit VAMPA, a paranormal museum in Doylestown PA! The very recently constructed museum was a sensory adventure. Starting with the garage-sale garden exterior, which sprawled with iron gazebos, plastic near-life sized dinosaurs (only some of which were broken), and lots of pseudo-Greek statuary, visitors wind their way to
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Pine Grove Furnace is at the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains near my home in south-central Pennsylvania, and is a beautiful wooded area that feels remote — as of this spring in 2024, it doesn’t even get cell phone reception — yet, it’s only a 20-minute drive from my suburban dwelling. In fact, there
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Yesterday, Shippensburg’s special collections librarian James Sterner gave a presentation about the history of book printing in Early Modern Europe. The university recently recieved a collection of rare books, including a 1609 copy of an English translation of Josephus’s _History of the Wars_.James Sterner used this copy to discuss the process of printing at this
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The Luray Caverns in northern Virginia are one of the most touristed cave systems in the world, drawing about a half a million people a year. They are adorned with striking rock formations of stalagmites, stalactites, and columns, all made from white calcium carbonate, red-toned iron oxide, and grey magnesium oxide. These permeate the limestone
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As per my usual holiday tradition, I wrote an historically themed Christmas carol! This one is to the tune of “I Saw Three Ships”, and it’s called “I saw three hominids”. I had been lacking a tune about prehistory! I saw three hominids come inNeanderthal, Den’snovianGenus Homo all are kinHurray for evolution I spoke with
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McAfee Knob is one of the most iconic vistas along the Appalachian Trail. Its elevation is only about 3,200 feet, which is typical for these ancient, weathered mountains. The stunning views provided by the overlook include the Roanoke Valley below and North Mountain. Only 100 years earlier, a lot of the land had been cleared
Tinker Cliffs are the third “Crown Jewel” of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains (along with Dragon’s Tooth and McAfee Knob). The Appalachian Trail cuts closer to the edge than the other two sites, affording breathtaking views and prompting careful attention to the narrow path. For about half a mile, the stones surface prominently from the forest
The Laurel Highlands Hiking Trail is a 70 mile stretch of forested lands begining in Ohiopyle and heading generally northeast almost to Johnstown. Begun in the 1970’s, it is an example of the invaluable natural patrimony of the state of Pennsylvania.
My daughter Gabby and I got lucky enough to visit France this summer, and found this jewel of a Gothic cathedral — Saint-Etienne Cathedral of Bourges — to be stunning. Work started on it in the last years of the 12th century and mostly finished in 1230, making Saint-Etienne highly unusual in its architecture. The
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The Medieval city of Bourges in France is known for its many half-timber framed houses. The layout of the town’s streets is circular, with the cathedral at the epicenter. Typical of these wooden structures is that they get wider on top, so that they make use of more space even as the ground floors have
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See the tiny flat rock out in the distance, supported by two vertical slabs? They made up part of a dolmen in Ardeche, France. These particular dolmens were structures created 3,000 years ago by neolithic peoples. They are megalithic tombs (meaning pre-historic and made of rock) and were originally much larger — their purpose was
The Chauvet Caves in Ardeche, France, contain some of the oldest artwork made by Homo sapiens. 36,000 years ago, during one of the last ice ages, the people who adorned Chauvet did so with extreme sophistication. They really thought about how viewers would perceive their paintings in light of the curvature of the cave walls
The region of Ardeche in south-eastern France has a long history of exporting its produce. The Chestnut trees that grow here amazed me, because they are practically non-existent in the U.S.. Here I am standing next to a famous Chestnut tree over 300 years old — the trunk was massive. Grapes for wine (second picture)
Notre-Dame in Thines, France, is a jewel of a Romanesque church that I will definitely incorporate in my Medieval class this coming fall. It sits high up the hillside of Thines. Cars can’t go into many of the town’s tiny streets, so we walked along a dirt trail for about a kilometer to see it.
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In Province, France, some amazing ruins from Ancient Rome provide testimony to the wealth and engineering skills the empire’s elites commanded. The Pont-du-Gard still exists as part of the once-enormous aqueduct that brought water 50 kilometers away into the town of Nîmes. Built around 50 CE, it had to have an extremely low gradient to
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From 1309-1370, the central office of the papacy was not Rome, but the French city of Avignon. Petrarch bitingly referred to this situation as “the Babylonian captivity” of the papacy because he thought it was such a displacement. Although the Catholic Church was extremely powerful by this point of the Middle Ages, the King of
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