Author: Ms. R.

Charleston is a city known for its rich history, southern cooking, and picturesque waterfront views. As such, it’s no surprise that visitors are often enchanted to find a line of beautiful pastel painted houses on the main strip downtown. They are a part of none other than the aptly named Rainbow Row. Rainbow Row’s origins stretch back to the 1920s when Susan Pringle Frost, a prominent local historic preservationist, took the buildings under her wing as they’d fallen into……

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A platform in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans overlooks 400 acres of a cypress tree “ghost swamp,” a once thriving natural habitat dense with protective cypress trees up until the 1960s. Today, the area is mostly open water, with only a few sparse trunks struggling up from the waterline. In a neighborhood so damaged by Hurricane Katrina, this park serves as a sobering monument to the impact of human destruction on natural habitats. It was the construction……

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When German forces began withdrawing from the Balkans toward the end of World War II, the exiled leaders of the occupied countries started making plans for post-occupation governance. The status of Greece was especially complicated. On September 26, 1944, the “Caserta Agreement” was signed by the Greek government-in-exile and resistance forces, the National Republican Greek League (EDES), and National Liberation Front (NLF). This agreement stated that all Greek resistance forces would be placed under the control of the British……

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Carved entirely in a natural cave by hermits during the 5th-century, the cave was enlarged, fortified, and used by Benedictine monks as an abbey. The troglodyte construction is located on top of a limestone hill where a castle was built, which centuries later was demolished leaving the old monastery exposed. The chapel, rooms, cells, cisterns, abbatial thrones, were all carved out of the rocks. On the upper terrace, visitors are treated to an open-air necropolis and an awesome view……

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Dominica is a hotbed of the weird and wonderful things that nature has to offer. One of the most striking examples is this mineral-rich sea that fizzes like a vat of champagne due to volcanic gasses bubbling up from thermal springs on the seabed. While most tourists will experience this spectacular phenomenon—not to mention the plethora of colourful coral and sea life that it nourishes—by snorkelling or diving off at Champagne Reef, locals tend to head a little further south,……

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The wooden building looked like something out of a child’s drawing: a squat rectangle topped by a pitched roof, with a darkened window on either side of the central door. It stood at the edge of a forest clearing, fringed by towering hardwood trees. Herbert Brucker clutched a .45-caliber Colt automatic pistol in his hand as he entered the building one day in the fall of 1943. The tall, lean 21-year-old had two magazines—12 bullets. Behind him, just out……

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John S. Mosby, also known as the “Gray Ghost,” was a first-class rabble-rouser who commanded the 43rd Virginia Cavalry Battalion of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War.  His unit was a partisan ranger unit known as Mosby’s Raiders (also Mosby’s Rangers and Mosby’s Men), and they were infamous for lightning-fast raids on Union targets and their uncanny ability to elude capture as they repeatedly disrupted Union supply lines and communications. In 1863, a southern spy named Laura……

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