History
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The (website) "My Shtetl — Jewish Towns of Ukraine" gathers information about Starokonstantinov — "Old Constantine" — the town from which, in 1895, my courageous grandparents emigrated to America. The site is in Russian but it can be mechanical translated into awkward but intelligible English. Some of my friends of European extraction have been able…
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It's humiliating for me to confess that until a few weeks ago I had never heard of the Piacenza Liver, which is a life-size bronze Etruscan replica of the liver of a sheep, and unquestionably European civilization's most heralded metal liver. How could I not have known? The PL was unearthed in 1877 and dates…
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In the course of my lifetime, the telephone has gone from relatively rare to ubiquitous, from wall to pocket, and from rotary dial to cell. From no intelligence whatsoever to smart and then to very smart. Revolutionary changes. When I was growing up in Flatbush, our family was prosperous enough to have a telephone (not…
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Ukraine has been invaded and whole cities have been obliterated by the Putin dictatorship. It's tragic. Once again, I'm overwhelmingly grateful that my grandparents chose to pack up and leave the blighted Ukraine. It's a decision that has looked better and better with each passing year. My father's family came from a Ukrainian "shtetl" called…
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I've been reading about the origin of spinning and weaving — specifically E. J. W. Barber's Prehistoric Textiles (Princeton, 1991), a comprehensive and exhausting survey of everything that was known about the subject thirty years ago. I'm dazzled — in part by the author, who turns the story into an adventure, but even more so…
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This standing stone might look like an ordinary piece of granite, but it has a rich history. If you look very closely, you can almost see the two deep holes that have been drilled into it. Though it's now merely a garden ornament, decorating a perennial border, it was once a working fence post. Hinges…
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I read all 599 pages of Neil Price's just-published Children of Ash and Elm, a detailed history of the Vikings, and I'm mighty proud of myself for persevering. It's a long book bristling with details and data. The author, an archeologist, has made his own original contributions to Viking research. To produce this synthesis, he…
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A "col" is the lowest point of a ridge between two peaks; a "barmkin" or "barnekin" is a walled courtyard; a "carr" is a fen or wetland overgrown with trees; a "bauchling" (mostly Scots) is a reproaching or taunting in order to dare an adversary to fight; a "bastle" is a fortified farmhouse; a "cantref" (plural…
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I've just read Tim Birkhead's biography of The Wonderful Mr Willoughby, The First True Ornithologist (London, 2018). Birkhead's thesis is that Francis Willoughby was not merely a bird watcher, but an innovative, diligent, and imaginative scientist, the founder of a new area of knowledge. Ornithology when Willoughby (1635 –1672) started to look at birds was…
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Many years ago, sometime during the previous millennium, I was taken to an African game park — elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, and lions (the hippos were AWOL). It was astonishing to see these huge beasts. I didn't realize at the time that it was semi-miraculous that these creatures had survived to our day, even in a…