Author: Ms. R.

With an area of 34 square miles, the Caribbean island of St. Maarten / St. Martin has the unique distinction of being the smallest inhabited island that is split between two countries. The northern portion is Saint-Martin, an overseas collectivity of France, while the southern portion is Sint Maarten, a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The border that runs through the middle of the island is open and has been since 1648, when the European powers signed the Treaty of……

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On the backroads of Georgia in Northeastern Jasper County lies the small town of Shady Dale. If you blink you could miss it. On the tiny town’s Main street, you will find an old building that was once the bank in the 1900s. The Bank of Shady Dale began operating in 1907 with a start-up of $25,000, and ceased operations and liquidated all assets in 1921.  The building has also been used as the town’s post office and library,……

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On September 8, 1785, Thomas Baldwin saw something nobody had ever seen before: the English city of Chester and its surroundings from above. And then he did something nobody had ever done before: He produced maps of what he saw—the very first aerial maps in history. They’re included in Airopaidia, a curious book that devotes hundreds of pages to Baldwin’s one and only balloon trip. People have been flying planes for 117 years. But the history of human flight……

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The first curved wooden bridge in Canada still stands near Kiskatinaw Provincial Park. It was built in 1942-1943 by the U.S. Public Roads Administration during the construction of the Alaska-Canada Highway. Due to a large change in grade between the span the bridge covers, the bridge needed to curve nearly 90 degrees.   Kiskatinaw Bridge is a curved, timber-truss structure with high banks that extends 162 meters (534 feet). Because of weight limits that prevented some of the larger trucks that regularly used……

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In the square near Panaji Head Post Office, there are a lot of old Portuguese Era buildings. Also known as Tobacco Square in the Bairro do Sao Tome, the location of the area was historically extremely significant and many important buildings came up here. One such building is the Casa da Moeda which means House of Coins. This building functioned as the Mint of Goa from 1834-1841.  During that era, the then Portuguese Viceroy of Goa, Dom Manuel de……

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In the late 19th and well into the 20th centuries, reclamation (the construction of water storage and distribution structures to irrigate farmland) was the subject of a great deal of enthusiasm among a segment of population in the U.S. West. Motivations ranged from notions of “making the desert bloom” to pragmatic ideas of fostering economic development to promoters seeking to add value to lands they had acquired. Francis G. Newlands, at the time a Congressman from Nevada, was one……

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Yes, Paris is the City of Light, and a city that actually, really delivers on all the cliches. But it’s also a big, bustling, intimidating metropolis with all the good and bad, overhyped and the forgotten, the classic and the cutting edge that comes with this. And as with any big, bustling, intimidating metropolis, it helps to have a guide. Rather than put together yet another Paris best list, we’ve assembled some of the restaurants, stalls, bakeries, markets, producers,……

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Rutherford B. Hayes was born in the city of Delaware, Ohio, where his birthplace is now the site of a British Petroleum gas station. Though the 19th U.S. President is not terribly well-remembered or celebrated in his home country, his legacy is celebrated in another part of the world, which may be surprising: Paraguay. The Villa Hayes Municipal Museum celebrates his foundational role in the country’s history. It is impossible to reflect on Paraguay’s history without acknowledging the Paraguayan War, also……

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