About 20 years ago, my grandparents gave me a set of old family journals from 1871-1952. Mixed in with all sheep, pig, apple, and pork accounts are surprisingly interesting narratives of daily life in upstate New York in the late 1800s. This week, my great-great-grandfather goes to Rochester for a second mortgage, and comes away feeling a bit… swindled.
One of the side effects of having wildfires reach within a dozen miles of your home is that it tends to focus your mind on completing…
Recently I’ve realized that the only thing worse for my mental health than Political Twitter is Coronavirus Twitter. To cheer myself up, I’ve started reading post-apocalyptic dystopian novels. I haven’t read that many yet, but I have read enough to notice that the just-in-time food supply rarely survives the first few chapters. That made me wonder… what if my best strategy for surviving an apocalypse is not merely to stockpile food, but to learn how to grow it?
Earlier this summer, we happened across a line of vintage cars parked on a street next to a town festival in Northern California. Naturally, I took pictures. Here’s a selection of vintage Ford motor cars from that show.
One of the few books I’ve read that deals with what happens in a WWII concentration camp after liberation, Vesper Stamper’s beautifully illustrated book, What the Night Sings, is essential reading for our times.
Regular readers know that I’ve been looking for a copy of Roland T. Bird’s 1944 essay, “Did Brontosaurus ever walk on land?” since 2011, when I had to rely on J.A. Wilson’s second-hand account of it while researching the answer to the pressing question: “Could sauropods swim?” A few weeks ago, I discovered that I could acquire Roland T. Bird’s memoir, Bones for Barnum Brown: Adventures of a Dinosaur Hunter, through the Northern California Interlibrary Loan Service. So of course I did.
Located on the southeast Georgia coast between Savannah and Jacksonville, St. Simons Island is a small seaside resort town with year-round residents, hard-packed sandy beaches, miles of bike trails, a rich and complicated history with deep ties to the U.S. Navy, and a unique crop of public art.
One of the wonderful things about having both Netflix and a child is that you get to introduce her to all of your favorite childhood movies in the comfort of your own living room. This week’s movie was the 1937 edition of Snow White, and as usual, my daughter had questions about it. “This Snow White was filmed in 1937? Did they even have TVs back then?”
Public art is everywhere, and this is the season for getting out and viewing it. I’ve spent the past few days reading a book set in South Dakota, which made me pretty curious to see what public art in South Dakota looks like. With that, let’s pay a visit to Dinosaur Park in Rapid City.
Earlier this year, The Ten-Year-Old’s fifth grade class spent 18 hours learning what it meant to be sailors in 1906 as part of the Age of Sails program at the San Francisco Maritime National Park. Ever since then, she’s been reading everything she can get her hands on about life on the sea between the mid-1800s and early 1900s. After learning that the entire crew of the Franklin Expedition of 1845 died in one of that century’s greatest tragedies, the Ten-Year-Old naturally wanted to know why.
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