In the far north-eastern part of China, the beautiful but deeply inhospitable Flaming Mountains lie. Travellers going across the Silk Road in ancient history avoided this area, skirting south to parts of the desert that contained waterholes and vegetation. The Turpan Oasis was one of these (see second photo), and it was in this region […]
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The myth of Persephone has deep origins — It was old even in the Golden Age of 5th-c BCE Athens. The daughter of Demeter, Persephone was abducted by the God of the underworld as a forced bride. The grieving mother happened to be a fertility Goddess, and refused to allow the crops or any plants
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In the background you are hearing the 15th-century English Christmas “Boar’s-Head Carol,” and looking at a closeup of a boar hunt from the month of December in the lavishly illustrated _Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry_ (circa 1440). In my home state of Pennsylvania, deer rifle season is heralded by hunters as an important
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Although this photo doesn’t do the view justice, it does show the railroad tracks (if you squint, in the lower right foreground) that made the portmanteau village of Pen Mar possible. Now a virtual ghost town straddling the Pennsylvania and Maryland border and adjacent to the Appalachian Trail, Pen Mar got its start in 1877
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You are looking at Pinchot Lake, the defining geographical feature of the Gifford Pinchot State Park. A short drive south from the Harrisburg state capital, this recreational area is named after America’s famed environmental conservationist. Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946) worked with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and female conservationist Mira Lloyd Dock to promote the
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On a lovely January morning, I walked the LeTorte trail, which runs along the eponymous nature preserve. LeTorte’s name comes from an early 18th-century French-Swiss explorer who built cabins in the area after receiving the land from William Penn. James and his wife Ann fought with the American Indians (probably Shawnee) in 1720, but
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Today while hiking, my friend Erin and I happily encountered a group of folks doing trail maintainace as part of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club. This association has very long roots in the region, dating to 1927 when a group of people began with the goals to help build a section of the 2,100-mile A.T.
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A Roman (1st or 2nd c CE) and 12th-century examples of foliage faces that became known as “the Green Man.” For centuries, these carvings existed, adorning buildings, as a man’s face surrounded by leaves, or spewing greenery, or having hair that morphed into plants. But it wasn’t until folklorist Lady Raglan wrote an article that
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In the southeastern part of Pennsylvania, a range of mountains that make up part of the Tuscarora State Forest (see second photo) run in a crescent shape from the nine o’clock to the twelve o’clock position. And running from south to north on the western side of these mountains is route 522, which goes across
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In the north-central region of Maryland, the Catoctin Park has some of the oldest layers of the earth’s exposed mountains. The Appalachians rose out of a collision between plates in North America and Africa 200 million years ago, and parts of the convergence appear here, where the quartzite rocks you see are part of a
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Scientists are enabling us to save lives and hopefully prevent disaster in this COVID-19 pandemic — and coming up with big solutions to health problems is one of the main reasons their profession is so valuable. But for me there is another equally praiseworthy aspect: their contributions to unveiling the forces that shape our universe.
The First-Lady of Physics – Chien-Shiung Wu Read More »
This Ancient Roman wall painting shows an opulent domicile, and adorned a bedroom of a first-century BCE aristocrat. The plants in the scenery show a love of the natural world common in elite decor. We know that Romans of means took great thought in how they situated their estate homes, considering matters like which way
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In the Medieval and Early Modern periods, natural science blended with occult studies, and this is why the modern subject of chemistry arose out of the ancient practice of alchemy. This intermixing of the mysterious and the concrete can be illustrated by the concept of a Diana’s Tree.Diana was the Ancient Roman Goddess of the
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This Medieval map shows the northern and southern hemispheres, with the constellations drawn to represent the stars’ positions. Although it is likely ordinary Europeans could point out different patterns in the sky, you had to have elite training to be able to pass yourself off as a real star-gazer: it was totally normal for people
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This beautiful site is the rocky island of Skellig Michael off the coast of western Ireland. It is a lonely and barren place now, as it was in the Early Middle Ages, when sometime between 500-700 CE hermits built a monastery there. These Christian monks wanted to spend their lives with as much solitude as
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This image of the famous ancient Chinese philosopher Laozi (aka Lao Tzu) dates to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), and shows the semi-legendary Lao Tzu as an old man, peacefully riding atop a bull. It is a fitting image for one of the most famous figures in the history of Doaism/Taoism, which emphasizes cultivating an ability
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The Darlington Hiking Trail in south-central Pennsylvania runs over a seven-mile trajectory going east-west from the Susquehanna River to the Appalachian Trail, where the path turns into the Tuscarora Trail. The Darlington path actually predates the Appalachian Trail, having its origins from 1908, when people who began the Pennsylvania Alpine Club (such as the famed
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The area comprising Pine Grove Furnace, near where this photo was taken, was practically clearcut in the 19th century as the lucrative iron works industry increased its influence. Many of the waterways were also harnessed in service to the area’s iron forges. In 1912 and 1913, the South Mountain Mining & Iron Company sold thousands
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In this time of necessary lockdown, we pine for our horizons to be wider than they are now. Well might we receive the tale of Jeanne Baret (1740-1807), a woman with more chutzpah, curiosity, and mad resourcefulness than most of us can ever possess.Born a poor peasant in southern France, Jeanne finagled her way onto
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These images are from the northern terminus of the Tuscarora Trail, a 252-mile path from south-central Pennsylvania to the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. In the 1960s, the security of the Appalachian Trail was jeopardized by commercial land owners. Future-minded members of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy began work on the Tuscarora Trail as a potential
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