Author: Ms. R.

For those of us of a certain era, Cape Canaveral evokes thundering, historic liftoffs of rockets into space. The Apollo 11 mission that landed the first men on the moon, in 1969. The dawn of the space-shuttle age with the launch of Columbia, in 1981. And the subsequent end of that era, in 2011, when NASA retired the shuttle program and started sending astronauts to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in the former Soviet Union, for rides aboard Soyuz spacecraft. If……

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A winding trail in Italy‘s Aurunci Mountains leads to a in a cave just under the Redentore peak, located at 1,160 meters (3,800 feet) above sea level. Inside the cave is Eremo di San Michele Arcangelo, beautiful hermitage that dates back to the ninth century. The Aurunci Mountains are dry and bare on the side that faces the Mediterranean. On a clear day, when they are not covered in mist, one can see the Pontine Islands and the Island of Ischia……

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Located in what is now South Kazakhstan, Sauran may have been originally settled as early as the seventh century. By the 10th century it was a flourishing metropolis, described by the medieval geographer Al-Maqdisi as a “large city surrounded by seven walls.” Archeologists were puzzled when they failed to find the seven walls in these ruins, until they found another nearby site and realized that the city moved sometime in the 12th or 13th century. No one knows why the city was moved. Some……

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A symbol used to represent something powerful or influential—a person, a sports team, a religion—also makes itself vulnerable to destruction. It isn’t easy to, say, destroy a country, but you can destroy a symbol of that country fairly easily, and there’s no symbol more identified with a nation, and thus more commonly destroyed in protest, than a national flag. In the United States, the Supreme Court has been clear and consistent in the opinion that the desecration of the……

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It is hard to imagine Singapore before its modern founding by Stamford Raffles of the East India Company in 1819, even with full knowledge of its earlier history. This cluster of keramats, Muslim saintly shrines infused with the religious practices of the Malay world, provides an intriguing window into Singapore’s pre-British history. Thought to be built around the 16th century (though there are opinions against this), the oldest grave reportedly dates to 1721, and burials continued up to early in the……

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Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” dot the streets and sidewalks of cities across Czechia, their brassy sheen occasionally catching the light and piquing the curiosity of a passing pedestrian. The small plaques commemorating victims of the Holocaust are inscribed with the names of those killed, holding them forever in the public’s consciousness. In the eastern district of Brno, however, you’ll have to head down a winding, pedestrian street to find the unassuming spot on the sidewalk where two stolpersteine sit,……

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Perched in a high, gilded niche in the Lady Chapel of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a 30-inch-tall wooden statue of the Virgin Mary. She is called La Conquistadora, Our Lady of Conquering Love. The religious icon is believed to be the oldest continuously worshipped Virgin Mary likeness in the United States.   The statue is hand-carved from willow and European olive wood. Tree-ring dating performed by the University of Arizona dates her……

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Next to historic Knoxville Raceway is the only museum in existence dedicated to the history of one of racing’s most unique, raw, and undiscovered sectors: sprint cars.  Non-winged sprint cars first came around in the 1930s and 1940s and were the predecessor of today’s Indycar. Today, most sprint cars have wings on top to add downward pressure to give the car more traction, which makes the cars faster and easier to control. Imagine the races without them.  The National……

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The tufted, velvety green surface looks like a chenille pillow. Upon closer inspection, there are flecks of bright color embedded among the rows of green. The colorful bit are tourist boats leisurely meandering through waterways created by the neat rows of trees at Luyang Lake Wetlands Park in Yangzhou, in the Jiangsu province of China, one of many artificial “water forests” that now dot the country. This bird’s eye view obscures the towering scale of the pond cypress, bald……

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