Travel and Adventure

Secrets of a Roman Sewer

by CarolineLawrence May 15, 2013

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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A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by PamelaToler April 18, 2013

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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Pompeii Myth-Buster

by CarolineLawrence February 15, 2013

by Caroline Lawrence Pompeii buffs beware! If you go on a tour with Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill your world will be rocked as surely as the Pompeians were rocked on several occasions leading up to that fateful day in 79 CE when Vesuvius erupted. Wallace-Hadrill is director of the Herculaneum Conservation Project and author of Herculaneum: Past [...]

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Does my bottom look big …? Bizarre Roman Beauty

by CarolineLawrence November 15, 2012

by Caroline Lawrence Magnusne culus meus in hac videtur? ‘Does my bottom look big in this?’ A first century Roman woman would have asked this question hoping for the answer maximē! (You bet!) Ideals of female beauty have always varied throughout the centuries, from the well-padded women of Rubens’ time to the androgynous flappers of [...]

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A Botanist, a Butcher and a Body: Encountering an Eighteenth-Century Vrykolakas

by Lisa Smith October 30, 2012

By Lisa Smith, W&M Contributor From 1700-1702, French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort journeyed through the Greek islands and Constantinople. The following tale is his account of a Greek revenant (vrykolakas) on the island of Mykonos (A Voyage into the Levant, vol. 1, 1718). The story begins with the unsolved murder of a local “ill-natur’d and [...]

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Bonanza denied by pickax and jackass

by CarolineLawrence October 15, 2012

By Caroline Lawrence (W&M Contributor) In 1849 two good-looking, well-educated brothers from Pennsylvania joined the surge of young men travelling westward to “make their pile” in California gold. Allen and Hosea Grosh endured hunger, cold, toothache, scurvy, rheumatism and so much dysentery that they had to learn to spell the word diarrhea for their letters home. [...]

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Love Potion Number IX

by CarolineLawrence September 15, 2012

by Caroline Lawrence In the steamy hot room of the Roman baths, a muscular gladiator sighs as a slave scrapes the sweat, oil and dirt from his skin. The slave uses a strigil, a curved metal tool that performs the same task as the modern loofah. The strigil – or stlengis (στλεγγίς) as it’s called [...]

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Stagecoach Madness

by CarolineLawrence August 15, 2012

by Caroline Lawrence “I can remember no night of horror equal to my first night’s travel on the Overland Route,” wrote a stagecoach traveler in the 1860s. This poor man had to resort to wearing a donut-shaped air cushion around his neck to stop his skull cracking against the sides of a violently swaying coach. [...]

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Who buys used postcards anyhow?

by Lisa Smith March 14, 2012

By Lisa Smith, W&M Contributor The ‘archival jolt’ happened in the strangest of places, a Brighton fleamarket. Idly rummaging through the detritus of people’s lives in search of treasure, I found a large box filled with used postcards, and I wondered who on earth would purchase such a useless thing. Of course, the snoop in me [...]

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The Secret History of The Great Bed of Ware

by BethDunn February 13, 2012

By Beth Dunn Lovers have been carving their initials into tree trunks and fenceposts since time immemorial. It seems like if you’re in love, you’re a fool if you don’t carry a pocket knife at all times, just so that you can proclaim your passion to the world. Maybe this is why the biggest bed in [...]

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Impotence in the Archives: or, a Research Trip Failed

by Lisa Smith January 23, 2012

By Lisa Smith, W&M Contributor A year ago I went to Paris on a week-long research trip. My goal was to look at eighteenth-century impotence trials, part of the Série Z at the Archives Nationales. I planned to compare them with English impotence trials that I had already examined. There were the standard research problems, [...]

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A Tree of Knowledge Branches Out

by Brook Wilensky-Lanford December 14, 2011

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford (Wonders & Marvels Contributor) Back in 2006, someone told me about a new book called Mapping Paradise, an illustrated history of the cartography of Eden by Alessandro Scafi. Too broke to purchase it, I took notes discreetly in a Manhattan Barnes and Noble. The notes looked like an extended haiku by T.S. [...]

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Who “Owns” a Story?

by tracybarrett November 20, 2011

By Tracy Barrett, W & M Contributor I occasionally get questions from readers of my historical fiction asking why I deviated from the real story of the Minotaur or the Odyssey. By “the real story,” what they mean is a familiar telling. But the version that my questioners think is the authentic tale is just [...]

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Before they were themselves

by BethDunn November 14, 2011

In the summer of 1817, two men hiking in the Scottish countryside ducked out of a rainstorm by huddling close together beneath a nearby thicket. One of the men pulled his thick tartan cape over the head and shoulders of the other, protecting them both from the wind and the wet until the storm had [...]

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The Prince of Evolution

by Marc Merlin November 10, 2011

By Lee Alan Dugatkin (Atlanta Science Tavern Guest Blogger) “… [He is] that beautiful white Christ which seems to be coming out of Russia… [one] of the most perfect lives I have come across in my own experience.” - Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde was not the sort of man prone to effusive compliments. Who could possibly [...]

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