“Worked up to desperation, he applied the wires of the battery and put the apparatus in motion, whilst a demonic laugh of derision appeared to ring in his ears, and the surrounding mummies seemed starting from their places and dancing in unearthly merriment . . . .” These are the first words in English to […]
Jane Loudon’s “The Mummy” Read More »
Many, many places have I loved in London, but Highgate Cemetery has a special place in my heart. Construction began on this Victorian burial ground in 1839, when the city had long outgrown real estate for the dead. Only the very wealthy afforded tombs and mausoleums there. Tourists today can seek out the graves of
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Located in downtown Philadelphia’s iconic South Street, Philly’s Magic Gardens is an artistic spectacle. It’s a dazzling outdoor-and-indoor labyrinth crammed from top to bottom and all around with the mosaics of local artist Isaiah Zagar. If you walk around South Street, you will no doubt see other mosaics by Zagar, who has made it his
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Humorous, whimsical, profound, and thought-provoking — these are some of the major reactions to viewers exploring the 42 acre Seward Johnson “Grounds for Sculpture.” Seward Johnson founded the open-air museum in 1992 as a way to promote contemporary sculpture to the general public. Seward, part of the Johnson & Johnson family, never cottoned onto the
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Today I got to tour the Barnes Museum, which houses an amazing collection of art with particular highlights of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Modernist works. The paintings reside in a relatively recent (2012) building in Philadelphia. The museum’s decor is spacious and allows for a great deal of outside lighting and comfortable seating in a glass-and-cement
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Last on a series of posts on Victorian Egyptomania. One of the ways Victorians enjoyed themselves a good mummy was from the mummy unwrapping parties that became popular, beginning in 1821 when a man named Giovanni Belzoni did a highly publicized event near Piccadilly Circus that attracted over 2000 people. The fad took off from
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In the most remote parts of central Pennsylvania there are a string of state game lands that go by the name of “St Anthony’s Wilderness”. And on a mountain ridge, accessible only by hiking in, are the ruins of a small coal-mining community around the village known as Yellow Springs. An identifying sign along the
Dore Gustave’s “Garden of Eden” Engraving Read More »
Here’s a reconstruction of the oldest European mummy, called Ötzi, named for a region where he was found in the Alps back in 1991. His body had been preserved by his glacial environment for 5,300 years, and has been extensively studied by scientists who have put together a fascinating picture of the Iceman and his
This is “Arctium lappa,” aka burdock. Originally from Eurasia, it is now an invasive species in North America — this beautiful specimen was flowering yesterday in the Shenandoah National Park, and July and August are typical months when the spiny bulbs blossom in lavender and purple. Although burdock root has long been used in cuisines
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There are many 19th-century paintings like this — where there are seemingly hundreds of minute figures, and you have to concentrate on the small patches of action in order to understand at all what is going on, instead of getting an impression of the whole and then spending time appreciating the details. This one is
Here you see the ruins of a base-end “fire station” that was created shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor when the U.S. entered the Second World War. Scouting stations like this one, which is on the Muir Woods lookout point (see second picture) were built along the northern California coastline to watch out for
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In 1888, all of Britain was captivated by a string of goulish murders of indigent women in London’s East End slums. The perpetrator was of course Jack the Ripper, Britain’s most famous serial killer. What went on in the Whitechapel District of London that year has captivated the imaginations of millions of people since.It is
Happy Halloween, yunz’ all! In honor of the day, I thought it appropriate to do a post about the Bloody Mary apparition, which terrified many pubescent girls in the United States in the 1970s and ’80s.Trying to see if you could summon Bloody Mary was a genuine folk tradition. Because it was spread by word
We all know that our society creates ideas about gender, and that what we consider masculine or feminine today are transitive concepts. So it goes with how culture has treated babies’ and children’s clothing. This picture of a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt taken in 1884 is a case in point: he is wearing a white
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Some cultural icons reflect cutting-edge trends, and others cause them to be. This is a photo of the legendary Patti Smith, and she falls into the second category.The list of “firsts” Smith represented is lengthy. As music critic Nick Dohney writes, “She’s called the godmother of punk. _Horses_, her iconic first album, came out in
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There are so very many eccentric and grand homes built by early 20th-century millionaires, and they draw me like honey draws a fly. The exquisite pictures here all feature just one structure in the palace complex called the Quinta da Regalreira built by Antonio Augusto Carvalho Monteiro dating to 1904 — it is the “Initiation
Pittsburgh’s unusual geography — with three rivers that conflate at different spots amidst steep hillsides — made it difficult for pedestrians to traverse. Starting in the 1870s, German immigrants started building funicular railcars to make getting around easier. Today only two of these remain, and the one featured here is the Duquesne Incline. Built
Pictured here is a circular plaque, commemorating the location of Fort Duquesne in 1774. Today not even ruins remain, but the location is memorable, lying at the tip of a spit of land called “the Point,” right at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers in downtown Pittsburgh. As can be surmised from
“The pishtacos would kidnap people and change them into tallow to sell them for soap,” reads this ghastly modern cartoon. Legends about the pishtacos as boogeymen have been around the Andean cultures of Peru and Bolivia since the 1600s. Traditionally depicted as a white man with a beard and blue or green eyes, the pishtaco
This is Jonas Salk, inventor of the first polio vaccine, ending the childhood disease that had killed or crippled so many Americans — especially children — in the mid-20th century. But Salk was important for other reasons. His approach to designing the vaccine was innovative, using a denatured version of the virus rather than
