History
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The old West Bradford cemetery, which is carved out of our land, is peopled by the Worthleys, Hacketts, Kidders, and Sleepers who first settled this part of Vermont. Some were long lived, some passed through this thoroughfare of woe only briefly. There are o-so-many of those sad stone lozenges at the foot of a grave…
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How are we new-millenium readers supposed to grasp the social significance of nineteenth-century horsedrawn vehicles when even characters in nineteenth-century novels can be easily baffled? True enough that Miss Alice Vavasor and Lady Glencora are both very young ladies, and true also that they've lived marvelously protected lives, but still — such appalling ignorance: " [Alice Vavasor] saw…
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Before there were dikes there were terpen. I was disgracefully ignorant of terpen until I read Robert Van de Noort's North Sea Archaeologies: A Maritime Biography, 10,000 BC to AD 1500 (Oxford, 2011). Van de Noort devotes many pages to terpen, which are artificial islands constructed between 500 BC and 1000 AD in parts of…
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I doubt that I know any more about strigils than your average man in the street. I had read about them for years, of course, but I had never seen one with my own eyes until yesterday, when I took myself down to the Pompeii exhibit in Denver. There they were, kind of stuck away…
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I've been reading about the early colonization of New York city, a subject that I've not approached since my days in elementary school in the 1950s, where, in retrospect, it seemed that we went over the ground quite regularly — Henry Hudson, the purchase of Manhattan Island, New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, and the English acquisition…
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In 1904, at the age of 20, my grandmother Sonia Chafetz Uzilewski (later Green) disembarked at Ellis Island. Because of her age, and because she lived within an immigrant community, she never acquired much English, and as a result my conversations with her were strictly utilitarian. I was curious about the old country (White Russia,…
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Eric Sanderson's Mannahatta (New York: Abrams, 2009) reconstructs Manhattan as it would have appeared to Henry Hudson when he sailed the Half-Moon into the harbor in 1609. The glory of the book lies in its illustrations. Here's a conjectural reconstruction of old Manhattan island: And here's a clever juxtaposition of ancient and modern: In 1609,…
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If the profoundly Christian seventeenth-century founders of our country had a single favorite Biblical passage, it might be the one in which the Lord (speaking through His minor prophet Amos) severely condemned the empty vanity of holidays. "I hate," said the Lord, "I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn…
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While in the Bay Area, I visited SF's Museum of Asian Art, where this grotesque, beautiful piece of maximum conspicuous consumption was on display. It's a silver Landau made for the Maharaja of Bhavnagar around the turn of the last century. Needless to say, I was utterly appalled by the waste and extravagance though dazzled…
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Neolithic Malta presents an exemplum and a warning. The island received its first human inhabitants, who probably arrived from Sicily, some time around 5000 BC. After about 3600 BC, trade and other links with the outside world waned. Over the next thousand years or so, the people of Mlata built seventeen monumental stone temples unlike any elsewhere in the Mediterranean. These are the…