Author: Ms. R.

The Academic Quarter is a long-standing tradition in academia. Originally, it was created because church bells were the only means of keeping time. It was understood that students had 15 minutes to get to class after the clock chimed a certain hour. Today, it’s still maintained in many universities to give students some time to park and find their classrooms. A tradition like that requires a monument. In Lund, a plaque claims to mark the meridian that is exactly……

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In Japan, the shirohebi (white snake) has been considered sacred since antiquity, long before the emergence of a hard rock band with a similar name. White snakes are believed to be messengers of Benzaiten (Saraswati in Hinduism), bringers of fortune, or water deities, depending on the region. The whiteness of such snakes, of course, comes from albinism, a relatively rare occurrence in nature. But not so in Iwakuni, a city at the southern end of Japan’s Honshū island. There, albino Japanese……

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Originally preceded by a wooden bridge, the Pons Aemilius was the first of many stone bridges constructed in Rome. It was designed between 179 BC and 151 BC. The bridge connected the central part of the city to the neighborhood of Trastevere, just south of Tiber Island. Initially, only the pylons were made out of bricks. However, in 142 BC the original wooden arches were replaced by stone. The bridge was repaired several times over the centuries, most notably……

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Glen Rose is a small town on the northern edge of the Texas Hill Country known to fossil hunters far and wide. But what most miss when visiting the area’s fossilized dinosaur tracks is the surprisingly beautiful and photogenic ruins of a gas station constructed from petrified wood. According to Dennis Moore, a historian and former mayor tempore of the town, the station acted as a speakeasy during Prohibition. Referred to as the Ed Young station in honor of its……

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Alongside a preserved section of the historic Route 66 sits an abandoned, fenced off red brick building. Constructed in 1903, the building is what’s left of the Truxton Canyon Training School, a school that belonged to the Office of Indian Affairs and was designed to sever Native American children’s’ connections to their culture. Children lived in boarding rooms at the school, kept away from their families, and were spoken to exclusively in English. In addition to classes in reading,……

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At 10,000 feet above sea level, Leadville, Colorado is one of America’s highest towns. Just off the city’s main commercial street sits the Temple Israel Museum. The building was designed by George E. King and constructed by Robert Murdock in 1884 to serve the town’s growing Jewish community. As the mining industry in the region declined, the Jewish population dwindled and the house of worship fell into disuse and disrepair. Over the years, the building served a variety of purposes……

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The sight of Jane Austen’s three-legged, walnut writing table in Chawton, England, sometimes moves visitors to tears. It’s easy to picture her in the brick house where she penned Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and more—arm draped over the table, hand racing across the page. The same is true in the city of Bath, where Austen lived from 1801 to 1806. There’s something “transporting” about seeing what Austen may have seen, or retracing the paths she may……

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