“Stop! Here is the empire of death” reads the entrance to the catacombs of Paris. And if you don’t want to see photos of some of the six million bodies buried here, don’t scroll on through these images. Touring the catacombs has to be one of my favorite experiences in Paris. I have never seen […]
The most visited necropolis in the world is the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. It brings 3.5 million visitors a year, and it is a wonder. The layout is maze-like, with bodies upon bodies memorialized in stone sepulchres. There are paths to find various memorials and graves, but they wind around, turn corners, and go uphill. Père-Lachaise was
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The Museé de l’Orangerie was established in 1852 and specializes in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Claude Monet’s massive murals _Water Lilies_ reside there. I loved Paul Cézanne’s _Dans le parc de Chateau-Noir_, and Marie Laurencin’s works (a rare women artist for the museum) — _Femmes au chien_ is the one shown here.
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I love that as I get ready to write up my syllabi for this coming fall semester, perhaps a wee bit wistful of my fabulous summer coming to an end, I am reading about a time in the early 20th century when teaching college students was a lot more stressful. And that’s where the great
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Behold the Cairo Toe, the earliest surviving prosthesis ever made. About 3,000 years ago in an Ancient Egyptian chamber lying west of Luxor, Egypt, a high-status woman was buried, and accompanying her remains was an artificial big toe made of leather and wood to fill in for a missing digit. The site was at Sheikh
The discipline of forensic anthropology was pushed forward dramatically in the 1930s with a crime in the UK called the “Jigsaw Murders”. The title here is gruesomely fitting. In September 1935 in Lancaster, England, the charismatic wife of a popular medical doctor — named Isabella Ruxton — and her housemaid, Mary Rogerson, had gone missing.
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This cast of a Mesopotamian ruler dating from 2300-2000 BCE is a fine example of the artistic skill of some of the world’s earliest metallurgists. Usually we think of the Bronze Age, when people first started metalworking, as marked by the mixture of copper with tin — a classic combination which produced a pliable, hard,
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One of my favorite artistic expressions is Surrealism — I love the dreamy nature of the subject material and the blend of realism with irrationality. This painting by Ernst Max from 1937, called _The Barbarians_, is an unusual representation of the genre. But even the ways _The Barbarians_ differs from typical Surrealist art tell something
This is Hertha Ayerton, a British Engineer whose discoveries unveiled mysteries about the behavior of electricity and helped develop technology to protect soldiers in the trenches of the First World War from poisonous gasses. Sarah Phoebe Banks was born in 1854 to a family of eight children, her father dying when she was just eight.
Although my posts for the next few weeks are mostly going to be repeats as the website gets built, I couldn’t help but write up this story about willow tree bark and aspirin. Dear reader, you, like me, may have been under the impression that for millennia, people in different parts of the world relied
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Tucked away in an incongruous green space close to a busy thoroughfare in Mechanicsburg Pennsylvania is Lincoln Cemetery, the final internment for tens upon tens of African Americans, buried here at a time when racial segregation was still legal in this country. Although the earliest tombstone dates to 1862, there is speculation that there were
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Shippensburg University hosted a speaker event on the Israel-Palestine crisis in Gaza. Four specialists gave short presentations from their areas of expertise: Dr. Mireille Rebeiz from Dickinson College spoke about international law and human rights; the three other scholars are from Shippensburg University. Dr. David Weaver addressed the military strategy of Hamas and IDF (Israel
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At first glance, these small statuettes seem to have little in common with each other. The one on the left is an Ancient Roman copy of Poseidon from the first or second century, originally made by the Greek artist Lysippos in the 3rd century BCE. The one on the right is a sandstone carving of
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Last Sunday, I got to see a terrific exhibit on early Buddhist art at the New York Metropolitan Museum. Called “Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India 200 BCE-400 CE”, the artworks show, among other things, how pre-Buddhist nature deities and imagery were absorbed by the new religion. In this sculpture — part of
Early Buddhist Art Naga Mucalinda Protecting the Buddha Read More »
The Temple of Dendur is a must-see in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Hundreds of tourists check out this Ancient Roman-era Egyptian building every day, where it stands in an enormous glass-walled room, surrounded by a huge moat of water evocative of the Nile River from whence it originally came. The
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Here are scenes from the High Line of New York City, considered one of Manhattan’s most popular attractions. It isn’t that old: a group called Friends of the High Line formed in 1999 to create the public park, and they attracted enough wealthy donors to create and open it by 2009. The High Line is
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Just to the west of Las Cruces New Mexico, along the I10, is this ginormous statue of a roadrunner. It is built out of completely found materials — stuff like shoes, cell phones, old wire, crutches, headlights, and old toys. Artist Olin Calk created the recycled bird in 1993 to examine “consumption, recycling, and just
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The Franklin Mountains have seen human activity since at least 12,000 years ago, but their name came from a much more recent source, when a rancher named Benjamin Franklin Coons settled in El Paso in 1849 — he was such a heavyweight in the region that locals used to call the city “Franklin” in the
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Here are photos of a sculpture and the cultural museum outside the Mescalero Apache Tribe on the Mescalero reservation near Tularosa, New Mexico. Ulysses S. Grant formally created the Mescalero reservation, comprising almost half a million acres in 1873, and today three sub-tribes of Apaches live there. The Lipan Apache at the reservation arrived in
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The Robledo Mountains lie to the north of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and to the east of the Rio Grande continental rift. Much of the exposed rock is from about 280 million years ago (Paleozoic), and the geological footprint is obvious and amazing. You can see a slot canyon in most of these pictures, when
