Merry Christmas! Krampus traditions linking a perhaps pre-Christian hairy goat-demon with Santa got revived in Eastern European countries by the early 1900s. Krampus played the bad cop to Santa’s good guy, beating bad children with birch switches and dragging them down to hell with chains. Some traditions are best left in the past. . . .
This is a drawing of the prehistoric species Plesiosaurus, discovered by the paleontologist Mary Anning in 1823. Anning was a working-class, uneducated person who became…
The stately Classical background of Paris’ Panthéon has been the perfect location to house the invention of 19th-century physicist Léon Foucault: a massive pendulum made…