Author: Ms. R.

Stories and sightings of ghostly and demonic black dogs are woven through the folklore and mythology of the British Isles. Perhaps the most ancient and well known of these entities is the Black Shuck.  Tales of the Black Shuck, or simply Shuck, haunt rural East Anglia, the coast and countryside of the counties of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Cambridgeshire. Descriptions of the creature’s nature and appearance vary across time and space. What remains consistent, however, are the descriptions of……

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Mackinac Island—a little freckle between Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas—is a great place to savor homemade fudge, slurp seafood chowder, or ride bikes along paths that hug the water. It’s not an ideal spot for archaeological artifacts to bed down. “Mackinac is a piece of limestone with a little soil on it,” says Lynn Evans, curator of archaeology at Mackinac State Historic Parks. “Not great for preservation.” But many artifacts have managed to linger. The island is home to……

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Everything can be found in Berlin, from medieval churches to the remains of World War II. The city is also famous for having its art and archaeological museums, including the art space me (“moving energies”) Collectors Room, located feet from the now-closed Clärchens Ballhaus. But apart from wonderful exhibitions and a really cozy café, the top floor of the space hides one of the most stunning wunderkammers one can find.  This collection is unusual for its variety—around 300 objects from the Renaissance and Baroque periods—with a special taste for memento mori antiques.  Such cabinets of curiosities started to appear in the 16th century, as collections of singular objects from……

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A funeral is, among many highly emotional things, an opportunity to consecrate someone’s life as historical fact, and to commit that truth to the public record. But what happens once those records—and the memories of those who witnessed those rites—are themselves lost within history? A new initiative by the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) is attempting to address that problem. In May 2020, the DLG introduced a free digital archive of some 3,348 programs from funerals of Black Americans……

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Looking out on a clear, breezy day, and you’ll see them: white sails bellying against blue skies, wooden hulls cutting through choppy waters. Every year, between October and March, elegant sailboats ply the waters of the Fal estuary in Cornwall, on the United Kingdom’s southwest coast. But these boats aren’t out on the waves for pleasure. They’re harvesting oysters. Ever since 1876, mechanical dredging on the Fal has been banned. Dredging, which involves towing a metal cage along the……

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Gestingthorpe is a quintessential English village. Like much of the rural north of Essex, Gestingthorpe is surrounded by fields and farmland and a history that goes back to Roman occupation. These defining features are clearly represented on the village signs. It is the image at the top corner of these signs, however—of a hunched figure battling through an Antarctic blizzard—that really stands out. In the final decades of the 19th century, the Oates, one of England’s oldest families, moved……

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Venice has a lot of churches—hundreds—and most of them are very old, but according to tradition, the oldest of them all is the Church of San Giacomo di Rialto. Located just next to the famous Rialto Bridge, this church is said to have been consecrated on March 25, 421, on the very date of the legendary founding of Venice. Documents dating back to the 14th century attribute the building of the church to a carpenter, helped by people from……

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The Matyó Museum, housed in the former Crown Hotel, offers great insight into the folk art and way of life of the Matyó people. The collection includes embroidery from different time periods, as well as home furnishings and household items. The exhibition points out how the variations of folk costumes reflect the wearer’s age and marital status. Matyó people are a small ethnic group from northern Hungary who are renowned for their exquisitely embroidered folk costumes. Although lavishly embroidered……

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