Author: Ms. R.

In the center of the lovely Kellinghusen Park stands an intriguing monument of a Eurasian lynx, a species native to the forests of Germany. The wide eyed lynx seems to be noticing the approaching visitor for the first time and with ears pointing sideways and body tense is poised as if ready to bound off into the trees.  The terracotta sculpture is entitled simply Luchs (the German word for “lynx”) and was created by artist Kurt Bauer in the early 1950s…….

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In the center of the lovely Kellinghusen Park stands an intriguing monument of a Eurasian lynx, a species native to the forests of Germany. The wide eyed lynx seems to be noticing the approaching visitor for the first time and with ears pointing sideways and body tense is poised as if ready to bound off into the trees.  The terracotta sculpture is entitled simply Luchs (the German word for “lynx”) and was created by artist Kurt Bauer in the early 1950s…….

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Walking around New Orleans, you might have the feeling that you can’t get enough of the city’s gas lights. This, then, is the place for you. The Bevolo Gas & Electric Lights Museum and Showroom, offers a glimpse into the history of gas lamps and offers a unique opportunity to see artisans at work. Bevolo Gas & Electric Lights has been making hand-made lanterns in the heart of the French Quarter since 1945, and today is the largest manufacturer of……

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This statue of King Leonidas was commissioned by the City of Brunswick to celebrate the Memorandum of Understanding between Sparta and Brunswick. The statue, which cost $30,000, has been the subject of local controversy as it made many residents question why a king of ancient Greece was being unveiled in the neighborhood.  There was a large influx of Greek people during the 1950s and 1960s, of which a large portion came from the Laconian region (including the capital Sparta)…….

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A sculpture of a gigantic goggle-eyed hare is portrayed as having fallen hard upon and smashed open a wooden box from which spills a horde of numerous tiny and demonic-looking rabbits. Look closely and you will see that crushed beneath this heavyweight hare lies a person, whose lifeless hand can be seen outstretched from beneath the animal’s colossal bulk. Known as Der Hase, this is a monument to Renaissance-era painter and printer Albrecht Dürer, who was born and lived……

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In Portland, Maine’s Eastern Cemetery, tall grasses tilt in the breeze among the winged death’s heads. Across the gently undulating landscape, granite and slate tablets inscribed with names and dates, weeping willows and decorative urns mark the final resting place of some 4,000, most interred between 1668 and 1930. Intricate designs and mismatched letters, some sharp and bold, others faded nearly to illegibility, tell the stories of the past in beautiful, hand-carved relief. Just down the road at the……

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Who doesn’t want to ride in a life-sized Thomas the Tank engine? That’s one of the items in the collection at the Illinois Railway Museum, located 50 miles northwest of Chicago in Union, Illinois. The museum was founded in 1953 by ten men who each contributed $100 to purchase Indiana Railroad 65, a recently retired interurban car that was on the verge of being scrapped. Since then, it has grown into the largest railway museum in the United States,……

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“Cromatico” is a visualization of the chromatic (“well-tempered”) musical scale, which has dominated Western music for nearly 300 years. It consists of 12 concrete chambers, all of which together represent notes of the piano for one octave. The visual view also represents the black and white keys of a piano. Like a piano, each key on the monument, or the chamber inside the structure, has its own pitch. For each sound, the corresponding note on the ceiling of the……

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Guthrie is almost a ghost town— an old opera house that acts as an event hall for rent, a few homes, and empty storefronts with train nostalgia sprinkled around is all that remains. However, one home happens to be the birthplace of Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Warren. Warren’s first published novel was about local tobacco farmers’ war against big tobacco companies. At the location are historical markers about this story on the main street near the house. All the……

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In 2013, graphics editor Josh Katz created what would become that year’s most-visited New York Times story: a linguistic quiz for Americans. “I was studying statistics, and I’ve always found linguistics interesting,” he says. “So it seemed like a dataset that would be interesting to apply some statistical methods to.” That quiz, with uncanny accuracy, can guess where an American is from based on a series of dialect questions by matching answers to the results of a survey. Some……

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Depending on whom you ask, the Salem Witch Trials were the result of fear, confusion, psychological trauma, or possibly even a hallucinogenic fungus. But as the fervor was just beginning, the village reverend blamed another culprit: cake. The origins of the tragic trials lay within Reverend Samuel Parris’s own home. In January 1692, his daughter, Betty, and his niece, Abigail Williams, claimed to be suffering from fits and feelings of being attacked by an invisible force. Thinking it the……

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