Author: Ms. R.

Wisconsin’s Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa made history when tribal members Curtis and Linda Basina launched Copper Crow Distillery in 2018. The husband-and-wife team became the first Native Americans to make distilled spirits on a reservation in nearly 200 years.  To do it, they first had to overcome racist federal laws. The U.S. government passed statutes banning the production and sale of alcoholic beverages on Native American lands in 1834. While most were repealed, making liquor remained……

Read More

On September 20, the sun began to rise at the South Pole. It took 30 hours for the sun’s disk to clear the horizon, and weeks later, it is still climbing toward noon. And for the first time in a decade, Robert Schwarz, a.k.a. The Iceman, was not there to see it. “When the sun started coming up, I always thought it was too bad,” Schwarz says. “It means winter at the South Pole is ending.” Antarctic weather is……

Read More

One of the best ways to admire Bologna is by looking up. Visitors will find towers hidden between palaces, amazing architectural designs, and faces.  Palazzo Salina Amorini Bolognini in Piazza Santo Stefano is an exquisite example of Bolognese Renaissance taste. The first stone was set in 1517, but for different reasons, edification was interrupted several times during the centuries. The final version was completed in 1884. The entire facade of the palace is covered in capricci busts composed of……

Read More

Several months ago, Atlas Obscura invited you to come along with us as we journeyed—digitally—across all 50 U.S. states (and Washington, D.C.) in pursuit of the unsung wonders scattered across the country. That was July. The COVID-19 pandemic was raging, and we hoped that a virtual journey would sate readers’ hunger for travel while many of us were hunkered down at home. We crossed our fingers that by the time the project wrapped, we’d all be able to safely……

Read More

The little valley of the Côa River in northern Portugal is home to an amazing collection of Paleolithic rock art. Thousands of figures of horses, bovines, and other animals, along with human and abstract figures were created beginning perhaps 22,000 years ago. The tradition continued throughout the Stone Age and into the Bronze Age. One particularly imaginative engraving is quite fascinating. It’s not the biggest or the most complicated design, nor the most complete or detailed in the valley. At……

Read More

Prior to 1914, Valour Road was known as Pine Street. The street was lined with small family homes in what was then the far western suburbs of Winnipeg. When World War I erupted, many of the young men from the area went off to fight.  On April 24, 1915, 30-year-old Frederick Hall spent the night rescuing wounded soldiers from no-man’s-land territory during the war. As he attempted to rescue another soldier under heavy fire, Hall was shot and killed. ……

Read More

Following the end of World War II until 1952, Japan was occupied by the United States. Japan’s southernmost prefecture of Okinawa, however, continued to be under U.S. military control until 1972. Due to this situation, cars drove on the right in Okinawa in contrast to the main islands of Japan, even after its return to Japan. It was not until July 30, 1978, that Okinawa finally switched back to driving on the left. For many citizens of Okinawa this……

Read More

Tucked in a nondescript corner of a beautiful cemetery in South Minneapolis, lies the final resting place of one of the most significant Democratic politicians of the mid-20th-century. Hubert Horatio Humphrey was a politician from Minnesota who served as Mayor of Minneapolis, Senator from Minnesota, and Vice President of the United States under Lyndon B. Johnson. He ran for president on multiple occasions, garnering the nomination of the Democratic Party in 1968, although he would be defeated by Richard……

Read More

Stan is very big, very old, and very popular. Roughly 65 million years young, Stan long ago retired from trampling, stalking, and gnawing across a steamy landscape of palms and gingkoes, and tussling with family. Like many other retirees, Stan now lives a life of quiet leisure. Stan hasn’t been lounging on the lido deck of a cruise ship, but rather soaking it in from a prime, street-facing perch at Christie’s auction house in New York City. In September……

Read More

At 3:00 a.m. on September 30th, Ryan Carney, a paleontologist and epidemiologist at the University of South Florida, was in a celebratory mood. It was the 159th anniversary of the first paper published on feathers from Archaeopteryx, a Jurassic-era dinosaur. When paleontologists first unearthed an Archaeopteryx in 1861, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was just two years old. The fossil ended up pushing forward evolutionary theory at the time, showing that a bird-like dinosaur was flitting about millions……

Read More