Late 18th-century Georgian Britain had such fascinating trends. An age of Enlightenment, it brought forth people who were in love with science and anything that sounded “science-y”, even when the actual science was missing. And, no surprise, interest peaked when said pseudo-science trend dealt with sex. This brings me to one James Graham (1745-1794), a […]
Sexologist James Graham’s Celestial Bed Read More »
Here’s the world’s smallest primer for a really fascinating topic in anthropology: ritual. We’ll take the “Healy Howl” tradition from Georgetown University as our case study application. Here’s a picture of a cemetery near Healy Hall, where the ritual howl happens every year on Halloween. At Georgetown on October 31, the 1973 movie “The Exorcist,”
The Healy Howl and the Significance of Ritual Read More »
We all know the man on the right — that’s Albert Einstein, the most famous scientist of the 20th century. But to his left is another important scientist, Kurt Gödel, a mathematician so brilliant that Einstein said that he used to come to the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton just “to have the privilege
Kurt Godel and Time Travel Read More »
At Shippensburg University, undergraduates have many opportunities to do original historical research projects supervised by faculty who are experts in their fields. Here you can see Jared Diehl and Anna Crawford’s poster presentation for the annual 2023 Academic Day, which commences the semester. Anna and Jared worked this summer to uncover whatever sources they could
This is a shagbark hickory tree from New Jersey, and the likes of this species used to be far more common to America’s eastern forests than they are today. The same holds true for pignut hickory, black oak, and white oak trees (as well as beech, pine, hemlock and larch). And these all have some
How Indigenous American Burning Practices Shaped the Eastern Forests Read More »
This is a picture that ought to make us shudder even as we are grateful: it is a Mark39 thermonuclear bomb that came terrifyingly close to detonating on January 24, 1961, when a military aircraft broke up near Goldsboro North Carolina. It was holding a 24-megaton hydrogen bomb, which crashed into a swamp — three
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This is Enos Hitchcock, (1745-1803) a clergyman whose life intersected the U.S. Revolutionary War and who was an ardent champion for the role of religion in the public sphere. He was concerned — *concerned*, I tell you, about the Direction of the Youth in his time. One of his works had the extraordinarily long title
Enos Hitchcock, Who Believed the Youth Are Corrupted by Bad Reading Materials Read More »
This is Doris Fleischman, leaving on a ship for France with her adoring husband in 1925. What made this journey unusual wasn’t the destination — nor was it Fleischman’s business abroad (she was a journalist and interviewed many famous people in her career). Rather, it was that her last name didn’t match her husband’s: Fleischman
Doris Fleischman, the Lucy Stoners, and the Ability to Keep One’s Name Read More »
Crabtree Falls, located near the George Washington National Forest in Virginia, is a place of stunning beauty. I got to visit this 1,200-foot waterfall yesterday after a rainstorm and my pictures do not do it justice. With five major cascades, it is one of the tallest waterfalls east of the Mississippi River, with the longest
Crabtree Falls, Virginia Read More »
“Those of us who are about to die salute you,” runs the caption on the banner of this macabre illustration. The skeleton in the foreground sits upon a grave, its arm bent with hand upon skull in a pensive gesture. This image was the cover for the Twelfth Annual Report of the Thirteen Club, whise
The Thirteen Club, Fighting Superstition in Turn-of-the-20th-Century U.S. Read More »
Catoctin Mountain Park — situated right next to Cunningham Falls State Park, is in north-central Maryland and is run by the US National Park Service. Its 5,120 acres overlook the Monocacy Valley. Back in 1935, the area was put under the CCC to be fostered as a public recreational area. Cunningham Falls State Park has
Catoctin Mountain Park and Cunningham Falls Read More »
It was ’round about this time of the year — near the Fourth of July — nearly eight decades ago that a rancher from New Mexico called W.W. Brazel brought a bunch of mysterious-looking debris he had found on his property to the local sheriff, who was situated about 80 miles southeast in the small
The Roswell Incident Read More »
Tobyhanna State Park was formed out of state lands that had been on a large artillery range that preceded Tobyhanna Army Depot. It has 5,540 acres of land surrounding Lake Tobyhanna, which is named after an American Indian term meaning “a stream whose banks are fringed with alder.” Today I saw a lot of birch
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The Range Trail is a winding path that traverses across swampy and rocky forest in the Tobyhanna State Park, established in 1949. As you can see from the third slide, the area was used by the U.S. military as a live-artillery training ground during both World Wars. I didn’t see any shell remains on my
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Here are some photos of Gouldsboro State Park, established in 1958. The human-made lake you see here, as well as the park it was named after, get their nomenclature from Jay Gould (1836-1892), a rich industrialist from New York who at one point owned ten percent of all the rail tracks in the United States.
Gouldsboro State Park Read More »
The town of Salem, Massachusetts, began as a settlement called “Naumkaeg,” but the Puritan settlers who arrived in 1626 renamed it after the Hebrew word for “peace,” which is of course ironic considering the legacy of witch-killings for which it is most famous. This exquisite example of an early New Englandtombstone comes from the Charter
Salem Massachusetts Tombstone Read More »
“Snake Oil” earned the connotation of being a huckster’s fake medical treatment in the early 20th century thanks largely to the efforts of one Clarke Stanley, whose infamous product is featured here. However, the actual origins of snake oil as a medicinal product have a different and more legitimate background in Chinese traditional medicine. Clarke
Origins of Snake Oil Read More »
