Stranger Magic

by PamelaToler May 18, 2013
Stranger Magic

by Pamela Toler I’m fascinated by the Arabian Nights. By the stories themselves and the way they fit together into their complicated frame story. By their transformation from Arabic street tales to a established position in the Western canon. By their echoes in Western culture, from the Romantic poets to Disney. So I was delighted [...]

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Secrets of a Roman Sewer

by CarolineLawrence May 15, 2013
Secrets of a Roman Sewer

by Caroline Lawrence Recently I attended a fascinating lecture by Professor Mark Robinson of Oxford University on the subject of Roman organic waste. Excavating the Ancient Sewers of Herculaneum was part of the British Museum’s fabulous ongoing exhibition Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum. For a fuller account, please read my History Girls blog post. [...]

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The famous surgeons of St Bartholomew’s Hospital

by Lucy Inglis May 13, 2013
The famous surgeons of St Bartholomew's Hospital

St Bartholomew’s hospital has provided care for up to four hundred City patients since its founding in 1123 but it was during the eighteenth century the hospital moved from a treatment model based on medieval nursing to that of an active working hospital with many different types of medicine and medical science going on within [...]

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Fun with pigs

by Helen King May 10, 2013
Fun with pigs

By Helen King   Finally, I understand what it is about dissection… Regular readers will know that, among other things, I’m a visiting professor at a medical school. As a recently-founded medical school, this one does not teach through human dissection. Instead, students learn their anatomy through books, computer simulations, models, and ‘surface anatomy’. The [...]

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The Jeffers Petroglyphs: Historical Treasure in an Unexpected Place

by JackEl-Hai May 9, 2013
The Jeffers Petroglyphs: Historical Treasure in an Unexpected Place

by Jack El-Hai, Wonders & Marvels contributor The Upper Midwest of the U.S. is not well known for its archaeological treasures, and it’s easy to see why. The region has utterly transformed over the past 200 years through the loss of 99 percent of its tall grass prairie, the felling of most of its original [...]

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Drunk on Horse Milk: Fermented Koumiss

by AdrienneMayor May 6, 2013
Drunk on Horse Milk: Fermented Koumiss

by Adrienne Mayor (Wonder & Marvels contributor) Amazons, those fabled women warriors of the steppes, were working mothers too busy to breastfeed. According to the ancient Greeks, they nourished their infants with mare’s milk. Since Homer, nomadic tribes from the Black Sea to Mongolia were known as “mare-milking Scythians.” That notion was exotic enough, but [...]

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Masturbation and the Dangerous Woman

by Lisa Smith April 30, 2013
Masturbation and the Dangerous Woman

By Lisa Smith, W&M Contributor Remember all those playground stories about masturbation causing hairy palms and blindness? Those tales go way back. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much ink was spilled on the devastation that masturbation would cause. Men’s frequent self-pleasuring would destroy the fibres of their penis, and the masturbator would become effeminate, [...]

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To Brand or Not to Brand

by tracybarrett April 20, 2013
To Brand or Not to Brand

by Tracy Barrett (W&M contributor) My writing career has been somewhat anomalous, not because I came to it lateish (in my thirties—younger than a lot of authors), and not because I continued to work full-time and raise a family for the first twenty years of it—most women and many men who write have combined writing [...]

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A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by PamelaToler April 18, 2013
A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

By Pamela Toler Sometimes a book grabs you by the throat and won’t let you put it down. I recently experienced that with Steve Kemper’s A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles Through Islamic Africa. I got so wrapped up in the story that I broke my long-standing rule about traveling with hardcover books because I [...]

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Ivory Bangle Lady

by CarolineLawrence April 15, 2013
Ivory Bangle Lady

Sometimes I miss Rome so much I think I might die. They found her body in York. Her bones show she died young, aged around 19. She was probably beautiful, for her skull is symmetrical and her teeth were good. Isotopes (trace elements) in her molars prove she came from a hot country, almost certainly [...]

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A Blaze of Loyalty – Lucy Inglis

by Lucy Inglis April 14, 2013
A Blaze of Loyalty - Lucy Inglis

  Britain’s only remaining illuminations (in the true sense) are in Blackpool, where they are associated with trams, tableaux and tackiness. But where did Blackpool, first lit up in 1879, get the idea for such a display? Georgian London of course. The London illuminations of the 18th century are a small and almost forgotten element [...]

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Life and Death, Pompeii and Herculaneum

by Helen King April 10, 2013

by Helen King   It’s all about the fear… when you never get to eat your daily bread. I made it to Day 1 of the much-awaited British Museum exhibition on these two Roman cities – not because of careful planning but because, when I went online to book, that was simply the first day when slots [...]

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Charles Dawes: Vice President, Nobel Winner and Musical Hit Maker

by JackEl-Hai April 9, 2013
Charles Dawes: Vice President, Nobel Winner and Musical Hit Maker

by Jack El-Hai, Wonders & Marvels contributor Barry Manilow, Van Morrison, the Four Tops, Cass Elliot, Isaac Hayes, Bing Crosby and Nat “King” Cole all owe a lot to a now obscure United States vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner named Charles Dawes. Those musical artists, as well as dozens of others, recorded a [...]

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Imagine a world without the arts

by stephaniecowell April 6, 2013
Imagine a world without the arts

by Stephanie Cowell “The world will be saved by beauty,” Dostoevsky once said. I try to remember that when I find the life of a professional writer difficult. Before writing I was a classical singer and for a brief time an actress and I have spent many hours (likely weeks if you add up a [...]

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Ancient Amazons as Sailors?

by AdrienneMayor April 6, 2013
Ancient Amazons as Sailors?

by Adrienne Mayor (Wonders and Marvels contributor) The Amazon strides along, dressed in a tunic and leather boots, carrying her crescent shield and trusty battle-axe. At first glance the image on the ancient coin looks like a typical ancient Amazon, those mythical warrior women modeled on nomadic archers of Scythia, the immense territory stretching from [...]

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