From the category archives:

Travel and Adventure

Cyriacus, Renaissance Man

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By Marina Belozerskaya
When we use the phrase “a Renaissance man” we typically think of someone of cultivated tastes, diverse cultural interests, and multiple talents. Cyriacus of Ancona was a true Renaissance man, but in a very different way. A self-made merchant and traveler, he became a diplomat and spy, hobnobbing with kings, emperors, [...]

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The Paris you don’t know

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By Andrew Hussey
The big idea behind Paris: The Secret History is to tell the story of Paris from the point of view of what the French historian Louis Chevalier calls the ‘dangerous classes’.  By this, Chevalier means drinkers, vagabonds, anarchists, prostitutes, drug addicts, sexual outsiders – all those who are outside ‘official’ histories of the [...]

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East of the Sun

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By Julia Clegson

My research for East of the Sun began when I was five years old and met a remarkable woman called Mrs. Smith Pearse.  She was in her sixties and had just returned from twenty years of living in India.

Superficially, she was a classic Memsahib- the literal translation means wife of the Sahib, the [...]

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Henry Hudson’s Lost Voyage

By Peter C. Mancall

On April 17, 1610, the English sea captain Henry Hudson maneuvered his small ship called Discovery out of St. Katherine’s dock in London toward the Northwest Passage, the water route Europeans believed connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. On board were twenty-two men and two boys, one of whom was Hudson’s seventeen-year [...]

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Was There a Scientific Revolution?

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History has often been marked contrasts, “before’s,” and “after’s.” BC/AD, Medieval/Renaissance, pre-industrial/post-industrial, post-9/11…
The 17th and 18th centuries are linked, of course, to a big break: the Scientific Revolution. Big S, big R. Of course, some Very Big changes–big V, big B–took place in the early-modern era. Copernicus’s heliocentrism (image above) for [...]

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Holy Foreskin!

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By David Farley
When I first heard about the Holy Foreskin, I thought—like a lot of people—it was a joke, either the title of a foreskin fetish magazine or something straight from the mind of a perverted Batman fan.
I’d majored in history—focusing on the medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe—and I had a particular interest [...]

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Literary Travels

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By Shannon McKenna Schmidt and Joni Rendon
A century before we traveled to Brontë Country in northern England, Virginia Woolf embarked on her own literary pilgrimage to the heather-strewn Yorkshire Moors, once home to literary sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne. In a newspaper essay, Woolf noted that her excitement upon approaching “had in it an element [...]

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