So much of the preserved natural beauty of the U.S. can be traced back to the FDR Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, and this remote jewel of state park is another example. The Greenbrier State Forest is over 5,000 acres in southeastern West Virginia. Straddling lands to either side of Kate’s Mountain (so named for a
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Ephedra (technically Ephredra sinica) or ma-huang, is a shrub with small scaly leaves that comes from northeastern China, Russia, and Mongolia, and is especially interesting in the history of medicine. Recipes using ephredra have been used for thousands of years in Classical Chinese medicine. Frequently the plant has been a key ingredient in treating asthma
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I’ve done loads of posts on human cannibalism, which might bring about some self-disgust for our species. Would it cheer you up to know, then, that it’s not just us moderns who’ve a legacy of eating each other?. Turns out, humans have a very long history of self-consumption, stemming back a million years to the
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You are looking at a Colonial American recipe for abortion. Published in 1748, it was not the only at-home herbal abortifacient of the time, but it was one of the most well read. And given the publisher, that makes sense — it was Ben Franklin. Eager to adapt a British guidebook that had set out
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Winterthur is a jewel of an estate located in northern Delaware; it is the ancestral home of the du Pont family, one of the wealthiest in American history. Although its museum and library are famous for their collection of Americana, it was the gardens that Henry Francis du Pont most cared about on that property.
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See the Vulcan “live long and prosper” sign on this tombstone from 1819? It really is, and this isn’t like the History Channel’s claims that aliens built the pyramids. But Spock, rather, borrowed from an actual human custom originating in Jewish tradition. Leonard Nimoy’s hand signal is half of a sacred gesture made by the
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Ah, the poor doomed philosopher Giordano Bruno. Whereas Galileo had been allowed to live after recanting his astronomical views that ran counter to Roman Catholic teachings, Bruno — himself a Dominican friar — was executed by the Church in 1600. His death and his willingness to buck the Catholic Church’s stranglehold on acceptable views about
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This is George H.W. Bush, U.S. president from 1989-1993, and in 1995 he publically revoked his membership from the N.R.A., stating that the group “deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor; and it offends my concept of service to my country. I resign as a lifetime member of the N.R.A.”. Context is relevant
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Wanna be a smidge happier? Learn about an extremely rare illness discovered in 1882 by the French neurologist Dr. Jules Cotard — if you can read this post, you almost certainly don’t have it. And for that, you will be gladdened. At his hospital at the Pitié-Salpêtrière University in Paris, the doctor saw a patient
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Take a guess as to what this Medieval illustration is a drawing of: upside-down fallopian tubes? Sea-creatures? Mirror-image diagrams of some planetary motion? The answer is below, but before you look — ask yourself how you are arriving at your guesses. The process of investigative inquiry to figure out the nature of reality is something
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So, I was looking up some information about the 13th-century thinker Roger Bacon the other day (as one does), and I came across a popular legend associated with the scholar in the Early Modern Period. It was a story about a magical automaton made of brass in the shape of a man’s head that could
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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
This collage shows different angles of one of Washington DC’s lesser-known architectural wonders. The Heurich House, aka the “Brewmaster’s Castle,” is located in DC’s trendy Dupont Circle neighborhood. Built between 1892-1894 for the German immigrant Christian Heurich and his wife Mathilde, the Heurich House is a terrific example of Richardsonian Romanesque, one of my favorite
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The lovely architecture of Washington DC abounds in neoclassical design, echoing Ancient Greek and Roman styles that were popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Many of these buildings, as well as the avenues and roads that connect them, were largely from the imagination of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a French volunteer for the
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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
This surrealist painting by Mariusz Lewandowski, called “demiurgos unmoved mover” shows a haloed figure standing outside of a frame which contains a scene of a vast sky and water tumbling over the lip of the picture — maybe the figure is just watching the image, or maybe they are actually tipping it. Either way, the
This grizzly painting of two polar bears rending apart the remains of human corpses with a shipwreck in the background is the subject of a fascinating urban legend. Called _Man Proposes, God Disposes_, it was painted by artist Edwin Landseer in 1864 to depict the tragic failure of Englishman Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition 19
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I know a joke isn’t funny after you explain it, but at least after reading this you might find phlogiston humorous (and also, I just made a pun). Phlogiston isn’t real, but Early Modern scientists thought it was. They used it as a way to explain the ash or calx (for metals) residue after something
This is a mouflon, a type of mostly wild sheep that is a likely ancestor of all the domesticated sheep on earth today. Even if most of our clothing isn’t made of wool and most of our food isn’t lamb, human life wouldn’t be the same without this animal. Sheep and goats were the first
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This is a fanciful rendition of the Spanish _conquistador_ Hernán Cortés (d. 1547), dressed as an Ancient Roman centurion. The imagery is unusual for a number of reasons: first, Cortés was the main player that brought about the destruction of the Aztec Empire, which happened over a thousand years past Ancient Rome’s heyday. The artist
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