So it’s still Women’s History Month, and since I adore history and science, I wanted to do this entry about the American astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, whose contributions to our knowledge about the physical makeup of the universe were relatively unknown for much of the 20th century.Here you see Cecilia Payne’s portrait by artist Patricia Watwood, […]
Astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Read More »
Oh, Biblical archaeologists: you had me at the name the “Cave of Horror”.Last week (March, 2021) Israel announced new findings from a series of archaeolologial digs conducted around a series of caves in the Dead Sea area. In a race against the potential looters also excavating the region, a number of fantastic discoveries were made:
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One of the most interesting secret societies are the Rosicrucians, an allegedly ancient sect of initiates endowed with wisdom so advanced that members have had to keep their knowledge and community hidden.But, they have a settlement in Bucks County, Pennsylvania — with actual pyramids! — and if it wasn’t on private property, I’d definitely go
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Why I had never heard of Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875) before this week seems crazy to me: he is one of the most fascinating people in American history. So that you, dear readers, also cease to abide in similar ignorance, might I introduce this man?.Randolph was descended on his father’s side from the white Virginia
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Here you see an image from around 1800 of one Chloe Russell, the purported author of _The Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book_. Only a handful of copies exist today, but they provide a tantalizing glimpse into the tastes of some Americans for the occult, and an association of black Americans having access to magical
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This painting by Caspar David Friedrich called _Two Men Contemplating the Moon( (1819-20) was an inspiration for playwrite Samuel Beckett’s _Waiting for Godot_, often cited as a top contender for the most important play from the 20th century. Although it was written in French in 1948/9, Beckett himself translated the play into English, where it
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Some moments in history seem dramatically more pivotal than others. Take the episode in 1971 in a town meeting in Durham, North Carolina, for example. A “charrette”, or series of community gatherings, had been organized around the issue of the deeply segregated schools. The goal was to find common ground amidst severe racial tensions. The
The Racial Collaboration of Ann Atwater and C.P. Ellis Read More »
You are looking at the most expensive Easter egg ever made: the famed “Winter” Fabergé egg created by Alma Pihl, the only woman designer of the iconic Russian jeweled eggs.Alma (slide two) was brought into the Fabergé workshop because her father had been its leading jeweler. Since 1885, the company of Peter Carl Fabergé had
Alma Pihl’s “Winter” Faberge Egg Design Read More »
Mount Holly Marsh Preserve is made up of 900 acres of bog lands around the base of South Mountain in south-central Pennsylvania. Today it is managed by the Nature Conservancy and the Holly Gap Committee — thanks to these groups, this important wilderness area was purchased in 1992. Today hikers and fishers can enjoy many
South-Central Pennsylvania’s Mount Holly Marsh Preserve Read More »
I don’t want to run any sort of lens filter through this image — it would mar the beauty of one of the most famous works by the surrealist artist Marc Chagall (1887-1985). This is “The Window of Peace and Happiness”, an enormous 15’x12′ stained glass window the artist did for the United Nations headquarters
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In 1985, scientist, Katalin Karikó left her native Hungary for the United States with her husband and two-year old daughter. The University of Szeged, where she had earned her degree and was working as a postdoctorate fellow, had run out of funding. So the family — who had to sew cash into their daughter’s stuffed
Are you on team Brutalism or not? Brutalism is an architectural movement from the post-WWII era that features exposed concrete (from the French “béton brut” which got translated “brutalism”). Made popular worldwide in the 1960s, it has tended to inspire either awed admiration or deep-felt repulsion among viewers. And this building here, the Boston City
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This eastern-facing plateau at the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area in West Virginia is part of the Allegheny Front, a ridge-line of mountains that make up the eastern Continental Divide. To the west, water flows into the Mississippi River. To the east, it flows into Chesapeake Bay — and it almost looks like you can see
Allegheny Front at the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area Read More »
The Dolly Sods Wilderness Area in West Virginia is almost 72 square kilometers of protected lands. The ecology is unique — much of the area is between 2,000 and 4,000-foot elevation, and is filled with high-altitude marshy bogs, red spruce forests, and windswept boulders. But it did not look like this 100 years ago.In the
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It fits that the grave of Carl Bosch in Heidelberg is overgrown with the competing green textures of the jumble of plants collecting at his tombstone. Plants were something Bosch understood more than most people — and that, combined with his engineering skills, got him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1931. A just reward,
Carl Bosch and the Haber-Bosch Fertilization Process Read More »
You are looking at vistas along the Long Pond Trail, an isolated and somewhat arduous trek through some of the loveliest mountainous paths that make up the Green Ridge State Forest in western Maryland. Like so much of the Atlantic seaboard states, the forests of the Green Ridge were all but eliminated around the late
Long Pond Trail Vistas in Maryland Read More »
This image looks very old, but it was taken in 1984 — it is a picture of a sacred pillar in the religious shrine, or “terreiro,” called the Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká. It is the oldest shrine in Brazil of the syncretic religion Candomblé. And if you’ve never heard of Candomblé, that’s not very
Terreiro – The Oldest Religious Shrine in Brazil Read More »
Maybe because this was my first post-COVID museum, or maybe because I have a thing for eccentric homes built by ultra-rich early 20th-century Americans, but I have only superlatives to say about Fonthill Castle in rural Doylestown Pennsylvania.Henry Chapman Mercer, an independently wealthy archaeologist and tile manufacturer, had this palace made between 1908-1912. Influenced by
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And from whence does this Ancient Roman-style barrel vaulted ceiling appear, you might be asking? Not from Italy, but rather from the imagination of the talented and bizarre brain of the American aristocrat Henry Champman Mercer, who had it built in 1914 to house his vast collection of tools and artifacts from before the Industrial
Henry Mercer Museum and Artifacts Read More »
Princeton University is one of the world’s greatest — wandering around this campus, I felt humbled thinking about the intellectual giants that made this place their home over the last century: Toni Morrison, Albert Einstein, Woodrow Wilson . . . The list is long.Princeton began in 1746 as the College of New Jersey and didn’t
Princeton University Read More »
