Quantcast
Channel: Atlas Obscura: Articles
Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live

How New York City Became the Oyster Capital of the World

0
0

For a few brief generations, at least.

article-image

One million: That’s roughly the number of oysters New Yorkers ate, every day, in the mollusks’ 19th-century heyday. That’s a rather mind-boggling amount of bivalves, but the numbers add up once you delve into New York’s long and fruitful history with this particular shellfish.

Archaeologists have discovered New York harbor-area middens—ancient shell piles—dating back to 6950 B.C. Oysters thrived for millennia in the brackish waters around New York Harbor, keeping the estuary clean thanks to their natural filtration abilities, and serving as a favored food for the Lenape people who once lived there. When Henry Hudson arrived in 1609, there were some 350 square miles of oyster reefs in the waters around what is today the New York metro area, containing nearly half of the world’s oyster population. European settlers wasted no time in turning this natural resource into a powerful industry.

By the 18th century, immigrants to what was then known as New Amsterdam referred to Ellis and Liberty islands as “Little Oyster Island” and “Great Oyster Island,” respectively. The Dutch named the waterfront Pearl Street for a midden, later paving it with discarded oyster shells (though they were disappointed to discover that New York oysters don’t actually produce pearls). New Yorkers started eating oysters en masse and shipping the delicacy to cities across the U.S. As the culinary historian Mark Kurlansky writes in his 2006 book The Big Oyster, “The combination of having reputably the best oysters in the world in what had become inarguably the greatest port in the world made New York City, for an entire century, the world’s oyster capital.”

Oysters were everywhere in 19th-century New York. Oyster cellars advertised oysters “in every style,” (raw, fried, packed into pies and stews) and ranged from higher-end establishments to workaday pit stops offering all-you-can eat bivalves for six cents a pop. Cellar proprietors advertised their businesses by tying red muslin balloons over wire and illuminating them with candlelight, with one cellar reportedly even doubling as a post office for the Bowery village.

If the cellars weren’t to your liking, you could skip them entirely and just buy oysters off carts on the street, along with hot corn and peanuts. Oysters were so ubiquitous that Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch, in their book Gastropolis: Food and New York City, claim that even “the very poorest New Yorkers had no other substance than oysters and bread.” As for the millions of shells New Yorkers produced during these years of heavy oyster consumption? They were used to pave roads, crushed into mortar paste to fuel the building boom (Trinity Church, for example, was built with oyster shell-mortar paste), or burned for lime (a practice which was eventually outlawed due to its unfortunate, acrid smell).

article-image

New Yorkers needed something to wash down all of those oysters, too. Enter beer, which has an equally rich history in the city. The oldest-known brewery in the U.S. opened in New Amsterdam in 1633. But the beer scene really took off a few centuries later, in the mid-19th century, with the arrival of German immigrants who introduced a new style of beer called lager, which soon accounted for four-fifths of local beer production.

It didn’t take long for New Yorkers to start combining their love of oysters with their love of beer; the mollusk became a common snack at taverns and saloons across town. There are records of one 1850s-era oyster barge that served as a speakeasy for oystermen, who offloaded their wares at the rear of the barge, where they were quickly processed and sold fresh to wholesale customers lining the piers. Local legend has it that the second floor was home to a bathtub and a brothel for oystermen. That barge was later turned into a restaurant called, creatively, the Old Barge (advertising “choice beer, wines and liquors, hot meals”), and eventually a rowdy dive bar before being bought and refurbished by two Brooklyn restaurateurs in 2015.

Unfortunately, for as much as New Yorkers loved eating and selling oysters, they didn’t go about it so sustainably. A combination of overharvesting, the expansion of the city’s shoreline with industrial materials, and a serious lack of waste management contributed to the depletion of the region’s once-abundant oyster beds. By 1927, the last of the New York City oyster beds were officially closed for business. New York City’s oysters had become too contaminated to eat.

The passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 helped somewhat, but New York still has a ways to go before urban oysters are safe to eat again. In 2014, a citizen science project called Billion Oyster Project launched with a long-term goal of adding one billion live oysters back to New York Harbor to repair its ecosystem by 2035. Given that a single oyster can filter 30 to 50 gallons of water a day, and the city’s waterways are far from pristine, this is a worthwhile goal.

Slightly farther afield, in Long Island Sound, edible oysters flourish, particularly briny varieties such as Bluepoints (which abound in the waters surrounding Blue Point, a small town on Long Island’s South Shore) and Peconic Golds. The oyster oasis in this part of the state is also close to Blue Point Brewing Company in Patchogue, named for the oyster variety and the island upon which they were first discovered.

article-image

For lovers of oyster and beer, Patchogue makes for a perfect jaunt, just a short (less than two hours) Long Island Rail Road trip away. New Yorkers indulging in a summer Friday can even get a head start at Penn Station: you can bring a Blue Point beer aboard the LIRR (pro-tip: Rose’s Pizza on the Long Island Rail Road level offers Blue Point beers in cups of sizes up to 32 ounces). And starting this Labor Day, be on the lookout for Blue Point's Good Reef beer to help support the Billion Oyster Project.

Recent efforts demonstrate that there’s still hope that New York City can reclaim its well-earned reputation as the oyster capital of the world. Until then, city dwellers hungry for fresh oysters and cold beer can visit Patchogue.


The Illegal Ramen Vendors of Postwar Tokyo

0
0

Black markets and American wheat imports popularized ramen.

article-image

When Japan surrendered in the Second World War, the country was in a state of ruin. Bombers from the United States had either destroyed or damaged over two million buildings, causing hordes of hungry Japanese citizens to be increasingly reliant on black markets for food. Within these sprawling urban black markets, ramen emerged as a critical part of Japanese cuisine.

Ramen was first introduced to Japan by Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century, according to Japan Quarterly, and originally consisted of noodles in broth topped with Chinese-style roast pork. In December 1945, Japan recorded its worst rice harvest in 42 years. Combined with the loss of agriculture from its wartime colonies in China and Taiwan, it drastically reduced rice production—which is how a bowl of wheat noodles gained prominence in Japan’s rice-based culture.

Following Japan’s defeat in the war, the American military occupied the country from 1945 to 1952. Faced with this food shortage, the Americans started to import massive amounts of wheat into Japan. From 1948 to 1951, bread consumption in Japan increased from 262,121 tons to 611,784 tons. But wheat also found its way into ramen, which most Japanese ate at black market food vendors. Black markets had existed in Japan throughout the war. However, they became increasingly essential during the last years of the war and throughout this period of occupation. With the government food distribution system running about 20 days behind schedule, many people depended on black markets for survival.

article-image

By October 1945, an estimated 45,000 black market stalls existed in Tokyo. The city was also home to the most famous black market in Japan, Ameyokocho. Located underneath an active train line in the center of the city, it was packed with open-air stalls selling everything from candy to ramen and clothing. In this bustling environment, vendors announced their presence with the distinctive sound of charumera flutes and sold ramen from a yatai, a wheeled food cart filled with drawers containing noodles, pork slices and garnishes, alongside pots of boiling soup and water. Prices were also low due to the abundance of American wheat and lard.

At the time, it remained illegal to buy or sell restaurant foods during this period of occupation. This was due to the Americans maintaining Japan’s wartime ban on outdoor food vending, which had been implemented by the Japanese government to control rationing. So flour for ramen was secretly diverted from flour milling companies into the black markets, where nearly 90 percent of street stalls were under the control of the yakuza, who extorted the vendors for protection money. Thousands of ramen vendors were arrested during the occupation.

article-image

But by 1950, the government started to loosen its restrictions on food vending and removed controls on the exchange of wheat flour, which further boosted the number of ramen vendors. Corporations even rented out yatai starter kits for vendors, complete with noodles, toppings, bowls, and chopsticks.

Unlike the countless variations that exist today, ramen during this period was simple. According to Jonathan Garcia, a ramen class instructor at Osakana in Brooklyn, New York, ramen during this time was a shoyu (soy sauce) based soup, made from a combination of pork, chicken, and niboshi (dried sardines). The seasoning was mixed into the pot of soup, and vendors would replenish it throughout the day. These days, ramen is seasoned individually by bowl with shoyu or other ingredients before being combined with soup.

Foods rich in fat and strong flavors became known as “stamina food,” according to Professor George Solt, author of The Untold History of Ramen. Ramen was very different than the milder, seaweed-based noodle soups of traditional Japanese cuisine. Okumura Ayao, a Japanese food writer and professor of traditional Japanese food culture at Kobe Yamate University, once expressed his shock at trying ramen for the first time in 1953, imagining “himself growing bigger and stronger from eating this concoction.”

article-image

The Americans also aggressively advertised the nutritional superiority of wheat and animal protein, endowing ramen with a nutritious reputation and a welcome change for a population weary of rationing. And in a failing economy, running a ramen yatai was one of the few opportunities where small business entrepreneurship was still possible. Gradually, ramen became associated with urban life, eaten by the working class huddled around a yatai in a bombed-out city.

Ramen is arguably Japan’s most popular food today, with Tokyo alone containing around 5,000 ramen shops. But the past combination of economic necessity, American wheat, and Chinese culinary influence propelled ramen into the mainstream, and in turn, forever changed the way Japan ate.

A Map of Fires Burning All Across the Globe

0
0

From above the Earth, it's possible to see how much is aflame.

article-image

As NASA satellites orbit the Earth, they’re collecting information about the planet below. In the thermal infrared band, the satellites’ instruments can detect bits of the earth that are heating up, including active fires.

Al over North and South America, wildfires are burning bright. California’s Ranch Fire is the largest in the state’s history; the Pacific Northwest is blanketed in smoke blown down from fires in British Colombia. Last year, Chile’s wildfires broke records.

In a new map of the world’s wildfires, released by NASA Worldview, the red patches depict active fires. That bright band in Africa represents agricultural fires, set deliberately to help renew the land. In Brazil, the red dots are a mix of wildfires and fires set to clear crops. In North America, the fires weren’t set deliberately, but they’re influenced by human activity—how we manage the forests, how our contributions to climate change have made summers drier, raising the risk of fires growing and spreading.

It can start to seem like the entire world is on fire: There's a lot of red on that map. Outside of Berlin, three German villages were evacuated as a fire closed in; Oregon rushed to put out a canyon fire; hurricane winds in Hawaii started a brush fire. This summer there were even fires north of the Arctic Circle, a rare occurrence. And this may be the situation going forward, as arid parts of the world dry out and raise the risk that a small flame—a campfire, a lightning strike—can spark a giant blaze.

How Two Thieves Stole Thousands of Prints From University Libraries

0
0

They almost got away with it.

article-image

In the summer of 1980, Robert Kindred was a 35-year-old high school dropout with no plans of going to college. Despite that, scattered in the backseat of his newly leased Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham were half a dozen guides to American college and university locations, each representing a region of the United States. He also had a single volume covering the entire country in his briefcase. A former Boy Scout, he liked to be prepared.

No major American crime requires as much travelling as that of stealing rare books from libraries, a fact Kindred knew from experience. Thanks to wealthy Americans, poor Europeans, two hot wars, and one cold one, the fruits of 500 years of printing came to be scattered across the United States in the second half of the 20th century. And almost all of it could be found on the shelves of some college or university library.

article-image

Of course, by the late 1970s, the most precious books and manuscripts in American collections had been put behind locked doors, libraries having learned that lesson the hard way. So Kindred, an antique print dealer, was not in the market for big ticket items, such as a Gutenberg Bible or Shakespeare First Folio. He was interested in the low hanging fruit of the rare book field: 19th-century scientific illustrations. In publications like Ibis and Ferns of North America and Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, the greatest natural history artists of the 19th century—including J.G. Keulemans and Joseph Wolf—had done their best work, contributing hand-colored lithographs and engravings of the world's flora and fauna for the sake of science. Even after more than a century between the pages, the illustrations were as bright and vivid as the day they were created.

Kindred knew these books and journals were nearly impossible to find for sale, and prohibitively expensive even when they could be found. So for the sake of his business he turned to the open shelves of academic libraries. The irony is that the easy access granted him by libraries that summer was heir to the spirit of scientific inquiry in which these magnificent prints were created in the first place.

article-image


In addition to the college guides, Robert Kindred had a second important reference source in his car: a road atlas. On its largest map, he had circled a series of towns starting just south of Dallas, where he had a storefront. Linked by the Interstate Highway System, the circles went across the south, up the East Coast, and back through the Midwest. It looked like an oblong chain of pearls, clasped in north Texas.

The first circle on that map was College Station, home to Texas A&M University. The Evans Library there housed a world-class collection of 19th-century prints—but not for very much longer. Kindred and his partner Richard Green spent half a day and a handful of razors there, destroying one publication after another for the sake of their illustrations. In one afternoon they destroyed what had taken decades to gather and a century to create. The only thing left behind were the ghostly impressions on the pieces of tissue paper put between pages to preserve the illustrations—and the razors the two men dropped on the floor, dulled from use. The rest went into the hot trunk of the Cadillac, which they then pointed toward Houston, and Rice University.

At Rice their destruction was even worse. That school’s collection of 19th-century scientific illustration was more robust, for one, and the stacks more secluded. From Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London alone they cut out 1,300 prints. But quite beyond their favorites, the Rice collection was so impressive Kindred managed to find dozens of publications he had never seen before. Once he took them, no one at Rice would ever see them again.

article-image

After only two days, Kindred and Green had several thousand prints in their possession—enough inventory for several years, if Kindred wanted to turn back to Dallas. But their plan was to be on the road for several weeks, and open a new store in Washington, D.C. Plus, Kindred had already made those circles on the map. So the next day, the two men headed east, toward New Orleans, and Loyola University.

In fits and starts, the pair eventually made it to the nation’s capital. They lingered there for several days, while Kindred looked for a new storefront location, hitting the illustration collections of several local libraries along the way, most notably the University of Maryland, where the pair’s focus took a turn toward the strength of the collection, 19th-century news periodicals such as Harper’s Weekly and Illustrated London News. These were a nice change from natural history, offering a host of other types of illustrations, from ballerinas to baseball to battles of the Civil War. Then they pointed their big car west, toward what they thought was home, but was actually the end of their crime spree.

article-image

The third reference source Kindred kept with him was the Union List of Serials, a monumental work detailing the periodical holdings of more than a thousand U.S. libraries. It was the Union List that was most indispensable for the trip, as it was responsible for which towns got circled on his map. Kindred would look up his favorite publications and make a list of which universities owned them. If a certain university had enough of his favorites that it warranted a stop, he found its location in a college guide, called the library to find out its summer hours, and then circled it on the map. And that’s how the two men, weathered by weeks of travel and with a trunk full of stolen prints, decided to spend several days at the end of June in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.

They would have stopped at the twin cities anyway—Kindred was from nearby, and had family in the area—but they would not have lingered. The prairie of east central Illinois has little scenic appeal in high summer, unless you’re into humidity and vistas of cash crops. But according to the Union List of Serials, the enormous University of Illinois library had nearly everything Kindred desired and a great deal more. What it did not have, however, was open stacks.

article-image

So instead of loitering in the library all day, cutting at their leisure as they had done everywhere else, Kindred and Green devised a different plan. Departing from a theretofore successful criminal formula would seem to most thieves to be a bad idea, especially if they were driving a car bursting with evidence of their prior success. But the theft of rare books from libraries has traditionally been so easy that it instills in even the least talented thief the idea that he is a criminal mastermind. So Kindred thought his plan was flawless. He broke in late at night, found a spot in the stacks with the largest concentration of books with prints, picked out his favorites, and then lowered them by rope out a window to Green below.

Unfortunately for him, the books he wanted were enormous, and located on the eighth floor. So gathering them in groups of four and lowering them down the side of the building was more heavy industry than cat burglary. Still, they made the plan work the first night and obtained some $10,000 in books. They were halfway through their second night when bad luck, for the first time in their trip, reared its head.

Once every five nights a university employee came to the large, deserted library in the middle of campus to check the air conditioning unit. Kindred had one packet of four books on the ground and another halfway down the side of the building when that employee swung his car into the parking lot, unaware he was about to put to an end the greatest theft spree of its kind in American history.

article-image

Kindred’s capture, and his subsequent prosecution, led to the creation of one more reference source, this one unique: a catalog of the stolen items he kept in the car trunk. Two librarians from the University of Illinois spent the rest of the summer of 1980 in a cramped room in the campus police station trying to make sense of the thousands of loose prints piled and packed in bags and boxes. Before web browsers and online catalogs—and without even access to a telephone to call other libraries—the two men mostly used their bibliographic instincts and a few reference sources to reverse engineer Kindred’s trip and identify the owners of some of the pieces.

Alas, all of their work amounted to nearly nothing. It aided the return of some of the prints to their rightful owners, but the state’s attorney did not use it at all. Kindred pleaded guilty to a single charge in Champaign County, and was sentenced to probation. Green was not prosecuted in Illinois at all, and neither man was prosecuted by any other state, including Texas, where they did the most damage.

A Giant Speaker in Taiwan Is About to Switch on Again

0
0

Beishan Broadcast Station, which once blasted propaganda across the ocean, has found another purpose.

article-image

Beishan Broadcast Station, on the island of Kinmen in Taiwan, was once the loudest thing around. Built in the late 1960s as a military weapon, the 30-foot-tall concrete block is honeycombed with 48 large holes, each home to a separate speaker. When it's turned up full blast, the sounds the station makes can be heard up to 15 miles away. Indeed, that was the point: Until it was taken off duty in the 1970s, the mega-megaphone was used to holler anticommunist messages across the Taiwan Strait, from Kinmen into China.

This weekend, it will serve a different purpose. As Artnet reports, a group of artists has decided to reactivate Beishan Broadcast Station for a sound art performance. Led by the Taiwanese artist and curator Ada Kai-Ting Yang and the French artist Augustin Maurs, the performance, called "Sonic Territories," will "investigate aspects of sonic propaganda" while "exploring imagined territories and soundscapes," its website says.

China and Taiwan have long had a contentious relationship, as both sides claim sovereignty over the nation. In the 1950s, this contention repeatedly erupted into violence, much of which took place in and around Kinmen, which became a massive military installation.

article-image

After the first Taiwan Strait Crisis, during which China bombed Kinmen, ended in 1955, troops on the island erected several propaganda speakers. In 1967, Taiwan built the Beishan station, and started regularly broadcasting messages meant to demoralize the other side and bolster their own. According to some sources, one popular message was, "Our steamed buns are bigger than your pillows!"

People on both sides of the water found this method of dissemination difficult to live with. “From what I understand, it was really loud—for some disturbingly loud,” Maurs told Artnet. “They are not necessarily good memories for the people of [Kinmen]." Kinmen stopped using the speakers for such things sometime in the 1970s, opting instead to occasionally play the songs of the Taiwanese pop star Teresa Teng, at moderate volume, for the benefit of tourists.

"Sonic Territories" will take place on Sunday, August 26, 2018 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the start of the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, which began on August 23, 1958, and involved China once again shelling the island. Besides Maurs and Yang, it will also feature work by the feminist performance artist Hsia-Fei Chang, the sound art pioneer Fujui Wang, and the Kinmen County Choir. This time, Mars told Artnet, the station will not be turned all the way up.

Zofia Rydet Spent the Last Decades of Her Life Trying to Photograph Every House in Poland

0
0

Inside an archive of more than 20,000 documentary images.

In the summer of 1978, at the age of 67, the Polish photographer Zofia Rydet embarked on the biggest project of her career. It would take her to more than 100 towns and villages across Poland and result in a staggering number of photographs (officially there are 20,000, though in one letter Rydet mentions a figure of 30,000). She called it The Sociological Record. It was an attempt to document, in photographs, every house in Poland.

Rydet was well-established by the time she began the Record. Although she did not start working seriously as a photographer until she was in her 40s, she made up for lost time. She entered her first competition in 1951; in 1961, she opened her first solo exhibition for her series of portraits of children, titled Little Man (Mały człowiek), which was then published as a photo book in 1965. Another project, Time of Passing (Czas przemijania) focused on the elderly. She taught photography, and participated in exhibitions internationally. In 1976, Rydet received an excellence award from the International Federation of Photographic Art.

Many photographers might, at this point, be content with their achievements, or be less enthusiastic to embark on a major project. Not Rydet.

article-image

The first spark of the idea for the Record came when Rydet saw some office cubicles at a car factory in Jelcz, a town near Wrocław. "Although they were identical, they differed a great deal, because the people working there decorated them with what they liked to look at," Rydet said in an interview in 1990. "The things I saw! Beautiful girls and holy icons. Jazz stars and photos of children. Hunting trophies and rosaries. Each person marked his space with his personality. And that's how it began."

For the most part, the images in the Record are portraits of people inside their own homes. The subjects stare into the camera, surrounded by their belongings, and are photographed with a wide-angle lens. Rydet chose this method, she once said, as it “was to be a simple, objective, authentic record of the existing reality, taken from a detached perspective.” (She evocatively called the project a way of "embalming time.")

But despite such efforts to remain detached, Rydet became unexpectedly absorbed in what she was creating. “Walking all day through villages and towns, entering homes and meeting such varied people, I forgot I was lugging around a heavy camera, that my back hurt, that it was hard for me to walk all day. Those meetings with people, which always felt new and interesting, gave me strength," she later recalled.

article-image

She employed a methodology to her approach. In villages, she would knock on the door, introduce herself, and compliment the owner on an item. Once they agreed to the photograph, she would position them against the most interesting wall. But in cities, she would only enter and photograph the homes when the owners had invited her, finding the process in urban settings to be more complicated and labor-intensive.

As the project developed, patterns began to emerge. She noticed that Polish people's most precious items tended to go on top of the television—often a portrait of Pope John Paul II. And as she traveled between villages, slowly accumulating images for her ambitious project, Rydet was inspired to take sub-sets of photos: roads with interesting village names, the interiors of buses, signboards. In 1988 she said, “I keep having new ideas, and I have to take the pictures right away, it’s an addiction, like vodka for an alcoholic.”

Throughout the next two decades, she extended the project to include houses in other countries, including France, the U.S., and Lithuania. Reflecting on the project in 1990, Rydet said:

I know that some people think I am delusional or conniving when I tell people that they are beautiful. But I really do see something interesting and beautiful in everyone, I am charmed by something in each individual that is worth salvaging—particularly those wonderful human tales that I hear during those visits. Each person is a separate story; some are fascinating, some instructive, sometimes they are deeply touching.

article-image

In 2011, the stewards of Rydet's archives formed the Zofia Rydet Foundation with the goal of digitizing her vast body of work. Four years later, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw held an exhibition of the Record, displaying those images in the groupings that Rydet had specified during the project, such as women on doorsteps, windows, or still lifes.

In an interview in 1990, Rydet considered the role of photography in her later life. “Photography gives me the chance to stop time and overcome the specter of death,” she said. “The simplest, most ordinary documentary picture becomes a great truth about human fate, and this is my constant struggle with death, with the passing of time." Seven years later, on August 24, 1997, Rydet died in Gliwice.

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from Rydet’s Record, which are also available to view on the Foundation's searchable, bilingual database.

article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image

Revisiting a 1958 Map of Space Mysteries

0
0

What have we learned about the cosmos over the past 60 years?

A year after Sputnik launched into space, in 1957, speculation was sizzling. Surely, humans would be up there before too long, which in turn would finally put us in a position to answer our many, many questions about the universe.

In 1958, the American Oil Company (AMOCO) released a pictorial map outlining some of the most bedeviling space-related puzzles of the age, and predicting what might happen when space explorers were able to get a closer look.

Some of these questions were tied up pretty quickly. A decade after the map’s cartographer, Rudy de Reyna, mused about whether humans would orbit or land on the Moon, we did both. The Apollo 8 crew flew within 69 miles of the Moon’s rutted surface on Christmas Eve, 1968. (A Soviet craft had orbited within 1,240 miles the previous year, but it wasn’t crewed. Instead, it carried tortoises, flies, mealworms, and bacteria; a mannequin was strapped in, too, as a low-maintenance proxy for a human passenger.) The following year, on the Apollo 11 mission, Neil Armstrong became the first person to bound across the lunar landscape.

Asked and answered.

But the rest of the questions on de Reyna's map aren’t so neatly resolved. Sixty years later, Atlas Obscura checked in with space experts to weigh in on which have been cracked, and what continues to confound. Use the zoom tool below to take a closer look.

article-image

Mystery of the Expanding Universe

1958 Question: “Was our universe born in a mighty explosion some three to eight billion years ago?”

2018 Answer: There was probably a bang—but it likely happened much earlier.

To gauge the age of the universe as a whole, scientists have often started with the age of the stuff inside it—specifically, early stars gathered in dense arrangements known as globular clusters. "Just like archaeologists use fossils to reconstruct the history of the Earth, astronomers use globular clusters to reconstruct the history of the galaxy," as Andrea Kunder, a professor of physics at St. Martin’s University, explained to Space.com last year. Globular clusters can help establish one threshold—the youngest the universe could be—but they don’t necessarily help us crack that upper limit.

The team behind NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which began in 2001 with the aim of filling in more details about the universe’s earliest days, analyzed measurements of cosmic microwave background radiation (that is, the Big Bang’s afterglow), plus data about composition and the rate at which the universe is expanding. Their best guess: The universe was probably born around 13.77 billion years ago.

article-image

Mystery Clouds of the Galaxies

1958 Question: "What’s going on in the space between stars?"

2018 Answer: Quite a lot.

By the 1950s, scientists had realized that space wasn’t a mostly empty frontier punctuated by the occasional planet. “They had mapped out the distribution of atomic gas throughout the Milky Way,” but focused mostly on atomic gases, says Mark Heyer, an astronomer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies galactic gases.

Then, in 1970, scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories detected carbon monoxide molecules in space and gained new insight into the places where, as Chemical Engineering News put it at the time, “thin chemical soups are giving birth to new stars.” When the astronomers observed these clouds of molecular gas, Heyer says, “they could see… that’s the reservoir from which new stars are formed.”

“The physics of molecular clouds is really the physics of star formation,” Heyer adds, and bigger, more-sensitive telescopes are giving astronomers an ever-closer look. Multi-telescope arrays and hulking, single-disc instruments in Chile, for instance, allow scientists to peer at small features such as discs around newborn stars, or survey thousands of positions in the sky at once. “You can start making big maps or surveys of the galaxy much more efficiently,” Heyer says.

The map describes “seething” clouds of gas, and they are indeed swirling spots. Inside, particles move many times faster than the speed of sound. The churning motion affects star formation, “which then drives the evolution of galaxies—how they might appear in a billion years, or 10 billion years,” Heyer says.

But what’s driving all that churning? Supersonic turbulence dissipates over several million years—which sounds like a while until you remember that these clouds have a lifespan of up to 30 million years. Some energy source is keeping things moving. It could be a combination of radiation, rotation, and more, but the precise mechanism, Heyer says, “is still a big unanswered question.”

article-image

Mystery of the Sunspots

1958 Question: "Why do sunspots have an 11-year cycle?"

2018 Answer: They relate to the Sun’s magnetic field—but questions remain.

The Sun’s magnetic poles tend to flip roughly every 11 years, for a 22-year cycle. Dark, splotchy sunspots tend to crop up in response to intense magnetic activity, and are a barometer of sorts for just how feisty a given cycle is. They tend to freckle our star just before a cycle rolls over. Lately, though, things have been calmer than usual, and it’s not entirely clear why. Plus, our bright neighbor can be unpredictable, as Alexei Pevtsov, an astronomer at the National Solar Observatory in Boulder, recently told Scientific American: “There’s an element of randomness.”

article-image

Mystery of Interplanetary Expeditions

1958 Question: "What created the canals on Mars? Is there life hidden under the dense clouds of Venus?"

2018 Answer: It’s complicated.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as humans were digging a lot of canals on Earth, some astronomers insisted that they observed similar features on Mars—right down to mules hauling boats around the planet’s waterways. Later research, including images captured aboard Mariner 4, in 1965, disputed the presence of these arteries, and eventually dismissed them. Early observers may have been confused by an optical illusion, misled by smears of dust, or simply seeing what they hoped to find.

article-image

As for Venus, before astronomers got a close-up look at that planet, imaginations ran wild. Scientists and comic-book artists alike surmised that there could be vast deserts, oceans, or rainforests underneath the planet’s thick cloud cover. Then, in 1962, a few years after the AMOCO map was created, the space probe Mariner 2 flew 21,607 miles from Venus and collected measurements indicating that the clouds were cool and the ground was scorching. Today, we know that the planet has pressure akin to our oceans’ deepest depths, and temperatures that would reduce metals to puddles.

But, for decades, some scientists have suggested that lifeforms could have eked out an existence on the planet during a long period of past habitability, and that bacteria could still be living somewhere in the clouds. Carl Sagan first proposed this idea in 1967. Last April, researchers led by Sanjay Limaye, of University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center, suggested in Astrobiology that Venus may once have been covered with water, long-since evaporated, and that microbes from that vanished body might be able to survive as “splotches” high up in the clouds, similar to how some microorganisms on Earth flourish in highly acidic environments by consuming carbon dioxide. “To really know, we need to go there and sample the clouds,” co-author Rakesh Mogul, a professor of biological chemistry at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, told Popular Mechanics. “Venus could be an exciting new chapter in astrobiology exploration.”

Mystery of Gravity

1958 Question: "Why do things fall down, not up, and will that be different in space?"

2018 Answer: Meet "microgravity."

Certainly, scientists knew a lot about gravity by the 1950s. As the map’s authors point out, there was a trove of information from Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. We had a good handle on how things worked on Earth, at least. Gravity is pulling on you in all directions, at all times. It’s not really a matter of “down” or “up,” but of mass. More-massive objects have a stronger gravitational pull, which is why—even though you’re exerting a gravitational force, too—you’ll lose out to Earth every time.

But what happens in space? Astronauts would soon figure it out. In 1972, one mission team even tested these theories out on the moon, dropping a hammer and a falcon feather onto the lunar surface. Space is not a gravity-free zone: According to NASA, a small amount of gravity exists across space, though it’s weaker over greater distances. Gravity is also key to orbits.

The term “zero gravity” is admittedly a misnomer. NASA uses the term “microgravity” instead, to refer to the weightlessness that crews experience in orbit. But that only happens because they’re moving. “If there was a super tall tower reaching into space, they wouldn't float around,” the physicist Rhett Allain wrote for Wired earlier this year. “The ‘weightless’ environment is caused by the orbital motion of the people inside a spacecraft or space station.”

Gravity does exist outside a spacecraft. So, if you happen to find yourself on the Moon, which is much less massive than our planet and roughly a quarter of its size, prance around and enjoy higher-flying leaps!

article-image

Mystery of Satellite Territory

1958 Question: "Why aren’t meteoroids smashing into more of the stuff we've sent up into space?"

2018 Answer: There aren’t that many of them, in the grand scheme of space.

By the end of the 1950s, two man-made satellites had been launched into Earth's orbit (the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, and the U.S. dispatched Explorer 1 the following year). The AMOCO map's authors wondered why they weren’t constantly getting dinged by dust and meteoroids. After all, to lay observers looking skyward from Earth, it often appears that there are zillions of things streaking around. These days, of course, there are many more satellites orbiting Earth. As of April 2018, the Union of Concerned Scientists was tracking 1,886 of them. So why aren't they constantly getting smacked with stuff?

Satellite tracker Marco Langbroek explains that meteoroids aren’t too threatening because, across space, the density of this dust is pretty low, even at the peak of a major meteor shower.

Consider the Perseids, one of the most dazzling meteor showers of the year. During this shower, only one meteoroid passes through a one-kilometer square plane of atmosphere every 32 hours, Langbroek explains. Outside of those periods, that number is much lower, he adds—more like one meteoroid per square kilometer every 10 or 15 days. We only see streams of meteors on any given night because we can survey millions of square kilometers of atmosphere. “Satellites by contrast, have a small surface and hence are very small sample areas,” says Langbroek.

Think of it in terms of driving your car through a desert. Say there’s not a whole lot flying around—maybe a single mosquito per square kilometer every 10 days. “The chance that you will squash a mosquito on your windshield, while not zero, is then nevertheless very low, even if you drive there for years at a time,” Langbroek says.

article-image

Even if a meteoroid does make impact, many of them are very small, and satellites are designed to withstand those. That means that collateral is rare, even when collisions do occur. “Even during the very strong peaks of the Leonid meteor shower during the late 1990s, when the parent comet was passing Earth, and Earth passed through relatively very dense particle trails with visible hourly rates of meteors briefly reaching thousands per hour, there were no fatal impacts on satellites,” Langbroek says.

The bigger threats to satellites are dust-ups with other satellites and collisions with space junk, those decommissioned satellites, fragments of rockets, and other hefty cast-offs that are clogging up low-Earth orbit. “With a growing number of launches, and growing number of debris-generating events in space (e.g. exploding old rocket stages), the risk will increase,” Langbroek notes. That’s a recipe for a bit of a bumper-car scenario.

Mystery of Magnetism

1958 Question: "Why does a compass needle point in different directions throughout the day?"

2018 Answer: Something's wrong with your compass.

Magnets inside a compass compel the needle to respond to Earth’s magnetic field. The tools will point you in the direction of magnetic north—roughly in the direction of the geographic North Pole, but not quite square on it.

For years, magnetic north fell on Ellesmere Island, part of the Arctic archipelago in Northern Canada. Recently, researchers have suggested that magnetic north is slowly migrating, and some of them have wondered whether we’re in for a flip. Polar reversals have happened throughout Earth’s long life—usually over the course of thousands of years, though sometimes apparently much faster. In any event, the switcheroo isn't happening over a single day. If your compass is spinning wildly, it may be drawn to magnetic materials nearby—or it could just be busted.

article-image

Mystery of the Northern Lights

1958 Question: "What causes the 'auroral fireworks?'"

2018 Answer: Particles on the move.

The AMOCO map’s authors reported that bands of green, blue, and yellow—and, sometimes, rose and amethyst—wave in the sky over Earth’s North and South Poles “a day or two after a ‘storm’ on the Sun,” almost as if “the Sun had spit out” a “stream” of them.

That’s partly true. The colorful bands of the Northern Lights are related to the plasma particles that blast off from the Sun’s surface through solar flares and beeline toward Earth’s magnetic field. The eerie glow tends to be green or a golden yellow when the particles encounter oxygen, and red, violet, or blue when they collide with nitrogen. While the borealis thrashes most magnificently when the sunspots are busiest, it doesn’t disappear when they subside. Your best chance to see them dance is from a northern outpost on a crisp, cloudless winter night.

article-image

Mystery of the Night Sky Glow

1958 Question: "What’s up with the faint light in the dark sky?"

2018 Answer: We’re not sure.

Have you met Steve? He’s been around for years, but was mostly overlooked in scientific circles until July 2016, when a group of citizen scientists in northern Canada spotted a narrow band of purple light shooting straight up into the sky above them. They were befuddled and enchanted by their neighbor, gave it an affable moniker, and started nudging researchers to take it seriously. It looked a bit different from the Northern Lights—unlike those wide bands, Steve was narrow and nearly vertical—but the observers figured it might be related.

New research, published this week, suggests otherwise. Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers from the University of Calgary concluded that whatever Steve is, he’s not an aurora—he doesn’t have the same charged particles that the Northern Lights do. For now, he falls under the umbrella category of sky glow. “We know very little about it,” said lead author Bea Gallardo-Lacourt, a space physicist at the University of Calgary, in a statement. “And that’s the cool thing.”

Mystery of the Cosmic Rays

1958 Question: "Where do these 'strange space travelers' come from?"

2018 Answer: Still a little unclear.

We know that cosmic rays are parts of atoms, and that they arrive from outside our solar system—but we still don’t know exactly where they originate. In 2017, a team of researchers working at the Pierre Auger Observatory, in Chile, determined that the particles travel from somewhere beyond the Milky Way. That leaves many cosmic stones unturned, but "we are now considerably closer to solving the mystery of where and how these extraordinary particles are created, a question of great interest to astrophysicists," said team member Karl-Heinz Kampert, a professor at the University of Wuppertal in Germany, in a statement.

Even if their origin is a little murky, here on Earth, cosmic rays have also been recruited to do some detective work. Take muon particles, for instance. They form when cosmic rays enter the atmosphere; when they fall to Earth, they behave in consistent, predictable ways. Muons lose steam when they barrel through dense objects—so, by tracking them, researchers can estimate an object’s density. One team tried this last year, with a novel, non-invasive way of visualizing voids inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. A similar imaging project is underway in Florence, Italy, where a team hopes to discover whether Il Duomo’s cracking cupolas were shored up with any iron reinforcements.

Mystery of the Jet Streams

1958 Question: "What causes these 'mystery winds?'"

2018 Answer: A temperature gradient—and other things.

The AMOCO map’s authors were baffled by what they described as the “300-mile-per-hour invisible tailwinds of the stratosphere.” Some of its mechanisms are pretty easy to describe: “The jet streams in the atmosphere are a straightforward, natural result of the meridional (that is, equator-to-pole) temperature gradient in the earth's atmosphere,” as James Partin, science and operations officer at the Marine Prediction Center, told Scientific American. Earth’s atmosphere is a many-layered sandwich, and scientists now know that the jet streams exist under the tropopause (the part between the troposphere and the stratosphere). The jet streams’ maximum velocity occurs during the winter, when there’s an especially large discrepancy between the temperatures at the equator and the poles.

A newer mystery, though, is why the jet stream sometimes clogs up. In a phenomenon called “blocking,” the stream sometimes wanders; when this happens, weather systems can’t budge eastward. Earlier this year, atmospheric scientists at the University of Chicago began to crack the case, and noticed that the equations they were landing on echoed ones that engineers had used to look at traffic jams. Like a congested asphalt artery, “blockages” in the jet stream occur when something—say, a mountain or coast—is in the way. The researchers say that their model, which was published in Science, could help predict future weather patterns.

article-image

Mystery of Lunar Expeditions

1958 Question: "Will humans orbit and land on the Moon? And can we set up camp there?"

2018 Answer: We sure did, and probably!

One mystery solved, one to go.

We’re not quite there yet, but a settlement is on the horizon, explains Colin Stuart, a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and author of the new book, How to Live in Space: Everything You Need to Know for the Not-So-Distant Future. “I find it really unlikely that we will get to the end of this century and there isn’t some form of semi-permanent human presence on the moon,” Stuart says.

As far as cosmic habitats go, the Moon “is relatively safe—as safe as space can get,” Stuart adds. There’s no communications delay to speak of—a radio signal can bounce to Earth within about two seconds—and if you need to return home, you can arrive within three days.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has set a target of establishing some type of Moon colony by the 2030s, and scientists have already begun prospecting for the right patch of lunar real estate and noodling over designs. The satellite’s south pole is a frontrunner for location. While the Moon’s tilt plunges much of it into long periods of darkness punctuated by weeks of light, this spot receives consistent sunlight, which could be harnessed for energy; it’s also got plenty of water, in the form of ice.

article-image

ESA recruited the architecture firm Foster + Partners to sketch some habitat prototypes. They look a bit like a hybrid of sand castle and igloo, and may rely on 3D printing and heaps of lunar soil to block radiation from the sun and exploding stars. “When astronauts went to the Moon, they were just blind lucky that they didn’t get hit with a solar flare or something,” Stuart says. “On a 10-day hop to the Moon, you got pretty good odds of dodging such a thing. If you’re talking about a base where people are going to spend months, you’ve got to make sure your radiation protection is up to scratch.” Building the homes up in space, and relying partly on materials that are already there, would slash fuel costs that would otherwise be required to haul supplies. Astronauts have already successfully 3D-printed tools aboard the International Space Station (ISS)—but full-on construction is much more complicated.

Another hurdle: the uncertain emotional toll. From the ISS, homesick astronauts can look out the window and glimpse our turf in pretty remarkable detail. Not so on the Moon. “If you’re on the Moon, you can see the Earth, but it’s pretty small, and you know you’re days from getting back,” Stuart says. “We would have to deal with isolation in a way we haven’t yet in space.” Despite simulations in light-starved, cold, and isolated Antarctic environments, possible emotional fallout remains a bit of a wildcard. Astronauts on Apollo 8 described "vast...awe-inspiring" loneliness, and Stuart suggests that future mission teams might send a psychologist along, or rely on an AI interface to help soothe tensions or ennui. “The rest is engineering,” Stuart says. “We have a good history of overcoming engineering problems if we throw enough brainpower at it.”

So how we will navigate our messy, complicated inner lives so far from familiar terrain? That’s one of the greatest mysteries of all—and we won't know until we get there, gazing out at the planet we currently call home.

Don't Touch the Monk Seals

0
0

Or any undomesticated animal you meet.

article-image

While traveling to Poʻipū Beach, Kauaʻi, a man from Alabama came across a monk seal, lying asleep on the beach. It was a rare experience: There are only 1,400 Hawaiian monk seals left in the world. The man crept up close, filming with his phone, reached out, and stroked the seal’s side. Startled, the seal woke up and turned toward the man, who fled the beach, right past a sign that warned against getting close to wildlife.

He posted the whole encounter on Instagram.

It’s become popular to share this kind of encounter with a wild animal on social media. In this case, the post led authorities from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration right to the seal-toucher. Under laws that protect endangered and marine mammals, this man-seal meeting was illegal. Based on the footage he had posted, as well as another video where he chased after a sea turtle underwater, the man was fined $1,500.

article-image

Once, people approached wild animals mostly to kill or capture them; otherwise, they gave them a wide berth. Animals as large as monk seals can be dangerous. But as the wild parts of the world disappear and human influence stretches everywhere, an encounter with a wild animal can seem like a special experience, and people can’t seem to resist getting to close—and showing their friends what happened.

Both social media companies and government agencies are trying to discourage this trend. Earlier this year, Instagram blocked the hashtag #quokkaselfie, a popular tag for photos featuring smiling humans and the cuddly-looking Australian marsupial. In 2017, the social media network also created a message about animal abuse that would pop up whenever a user searched something like “hug a sloth.” When people have gotten too close to wild creatures, government agencies have tracked them down and fined them, in the hope that the dad who lifted a baby manatee from the water or the two guys who “surfed” on a sea turtle would become examples of what not to do.

article-image

Besides the inherent danger of provoking a wild animal, these meetings can be fatal to the animal themselves. When people on the coast of the Pacific Northwest took home seal pups they thought were stranded, the pups didn’t survive the ordeal. In Yellowstone, the park had to euthanize a baby bison after tourists took it for a ride in their SUV.

In all these scenarios, people are responding a rare circumstance—a real encounter with a strange creature unlike our own kind. Sometimes they're trying to help; other times, they want to experience something they never have before. But whether we know it or not, these animals' lives are shaped by ours. Hawaiian monk seals are endangered in part because of marine debris, the loss of their shoreline habitat, and disturbances by people in the places where they flop out of the ocean. The least we can do is leave them alone when we encounter them directly. It's like your parents told you when you were a kid in a shop full of delicate items: You can look, but don't touch.


How to Decode the Shells You Find Washed Up on the Beach

0
0

A beginner's guide to identifying conchs, chitons, and more.

No matter where you are in the world, any beach you poke along is likely to be littered with serendipitous finds. Earth's waters regularly spit out weird trash that we humans have dumped in there, along with natural treasures, such as shells, that have become dislodged from the depths.

If one of these shells catches your eye, you might want to pluck it from the waves—and if you do, you’ll probably want to know just what it is you’re looking at. When you do, you stand to learn a lot about life beneath the water.

We asked invertebrate experts for advice on how to suss out the shells you find on the beach—and if you’re sold on beachcombing, how best to set yourself up for successful shell-sleuthing.

Get your geographic bearings

Are you gazing out over saltwater, or freshwater? Contending with a gnarly current, or a glassine, placid surface? When you’re trying to decipher a find, consider what’s most likely to live where you are. “Sandy beaches often have bivalves burrowed under the sand in very shallow water; rocky shores often have chitons, top shells, periwinkles, and limpets attached to the rocks in rock pools,” says Suzanne Williams, head of the invertebrate division at the Natural History Museum in London.

Count the valves

Physical features are full of clues. Start by tallying up the number of valves and shell parts. “Of the most common groups, gastropods, have one shell, bivalves have two, and chitons have shells made up of eight interlocking parts,” Williams says.

Consider the color

In general, tropical shells are more brilliantly hued than their freshwater counterparts, and cold-water shells—particularly those in intertidal zones along the coasts of Alaska, Siberia, Canada, or Greenland—would be dark or black as a way to conserve heat, says José H. Leal, science director and curator of the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum in Florida. “Deep sea shells also tend not to be very colorful,” Williams notes. The hue offers clues about how deep a shell might have lived, and where in the world it originated. All of this can make a shell more Googleable.

Be forewarned: You might spy different coloration on members of the same species. The Southern quahog, which washes ashore all across the Atlantic Coast, starts out spangled with white-and-brown zig-zags that look something like lightning, but these fade with age. Adults are duller, with more ho-hum patterns.

article-image

Look for flourishes

Some shells are stunners that are hard to mistake for anything else. The queen conch (Strombus gigas), ubiquitous across the Caribbean, has a famously pearly lip and ruffled edges. The spider conch, meanwhile, is armed with spiky protrusions, “like good old Edward Scissorhands,” says Leal. In both cases, this flair is a barometer of age. The queen conch stops coiling when it reaches sexual maturity; afterwards, the lip gets thicker while the innards stay the same.

By the way, while it’s easy to assume that bigger shells have probably been lingering in the water the longest, size isn’t always a reliable proxy for lifespan, Williams says. The giant clam, Tridacna gigas, is hulking even when it’s pretty young. The largest of these shells weighs more than 500 pounds, and even shrimpier specimens can grow as much as one centimeter per month in aquaculture facilities, Williams notes. The oldest of the long-lived Arctica islandica clams, on the other hand, has lived for more than half a millennium, but isn’t much more than 50 millimeters tall.

article-image

Consult a visual guide

If you’re still stumped, compare your find to a visual encyclopedia that rounds up photos of shells around the world. Local park rangers or fish and wildlife officers will also have some ideas.

Plan ahead for next time

If you liked decoding your previous find and want to level up to more deliberate sleuthing, it helps to strategize a bit. Here’s how to maximize your chances of finding something:

1. Pick your moment.

Low tide will give you the best shot at spotting things freshly emerged from the water; you’ll also have easier access to things you’d otherwise have to root around for amid frothing waves. Before you set out, check a tide chart to see what window looks most promising for a treasure-strewn shore. Storms, and the waves that accompany them, might throw more shells onto the beach during the winter months.

2. Gather your gear.

Some especially enthusiastic collectors scour the beach with magnifying goggles, or strap on elbow and knee pads so that they can more comfortably squat down to scrutinize knobby heaps. If you’re not scouting for the rarest or smallest varieties (the tiniest shells are a shade smaller than a pinhead), you won’t need all of this. Instead, your kit should include the basics: at minimum, a bucket or a bag. A metal scoop or mesh sieve may come in handy, and spare you some pinches from any nearby crabs, whose nips can be “unsavory,” says Leal. You may also want a phone to crowdsource information about your find by posting an image of it to iNaturalist, an ecology tracking and identification app.

3. Scan the area.

If you’re on the shore with a single-minded mission, it helps to break the terrain up into quadrants or focus on a specific section. On Sanibel Island, the shell wonderland where Leal works, piles can reach several feet high. You might up your odds of finding something if you tackle one small area and give it a close, careful look.

4. Take some home with you.

Of course, the lowest-hanging fruits de mer are the shells you can see with the naked eye. But it’s far from unusual to spot more after the fact, and with some assistance. Leal once returned home from a trip to Mexico, just south of Cancun, with two pounds of sand he’d collected from the bottom of a coral head. When he sifted these under a microscope, he discovered 120 shell species in the mix. You can approximate this at home: “I suggest that people take some shell-rich sand home and then go with a magnifying glass,” Leal says. (One caveat: Decamping with sand or specific shells might not be legal where you are—it's illegal to harvest the queen conch in some places, for instance, for either fun or profit. Don’t be a scofflaw in pursuit of shell glory.)

For Sale: Fancy Canceled Stamps That Recorded Daily Life in a Connecticut Town

0
0

Postage-sized portraits of life during Reconstruction.

article-image

A letter sent sailing through the mail generally needs a stamp to pay its way. These are intended to be one-way tickets. To prevent recipients from prying off that prepaid postage and recycling it for another trek to a mailbox, postal services often “cancel” the stamps during transit, to indicate that they’ve been used.

In 19th-century America, this was often accomplished with a scribble or a scrawl, or else by stamping another pattern across the postage with ink. These latter styles were known as “fancy cancels”—and in Waterbury, Connecticut, they were pretty fancy, indeed.

There, a man named John W. Hill enlisted into service during the Civil War, serving as the postmaster for his regiment in the Union Army. When he landed back in Waterbury afterward, he took a job as a postal clerk. The gig wasn’t especially creative, but he kept busy; colleagues remembered him as “the man who works at the post office and is always whittling.”

Over the next few years, he carved slews of designs into cork, concocting a batch of regionally specific cancels.

article-image

Some suggest seasons—a pumpkin, various maple leaves, and an acorn with a speckled top, for instance, evoke brilliant New England autumns. Diamonds, hatched grids, pierced hearts, angular rosettes, and a smattering of stars were purely geometric, while a few varieties bore phrases that were in circulation at the time (one read, in spindly letters, “Shoo fly”). A dog speaks for itself—who doesn’t love a Good Boy?

article-image

As much as they were functional flourishes, the cancels were also pint-sized portraits of the town’s goings-on.

An elephant is thought to commemorate the circus rolling through in 1866, for instance, while a snowstorm inspired a flurry of flakes. A fireman’s bust is said to have been sparked by the brigade's parade. There are also references to the national political scene: An “A.J.” design on a tombstone commemorated the conclusion of Andrew Johnson’s presidency in 1869; eight years later, a “Hayes” logo suggested that Hill may have sympathized with Rutherford B. Hayes, the candidate who would just barely beat Samuel Tilden into the White House.

article-image

Some of Hill’s cancelled stamps are up for auction this fall as part of a sale of the collection of William H. Gross, a prominent philatelist. New York City’s Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries, which is brokering the sale, estimates that the Waterbury stamps will fetch thousands of dollars apiece. They’re a rare bunch: In a 1979 volume dedicated to Hill’s handiwork, the Collectors Club of Chicago reported that there were no more than eight stamps of the dog’s head, and no more than five of the fireman.

Estimates vary a bit, but this much is certain: There aren’t very many chances to step into a 150-year-old, stamp-sized slice of life.

The Political Lore of an Iconic Brazilian Sweet

0
0

Wartime rationing and women's suffrage helped popularize the brigadeiro.

article-image

The brigadeiro, one of Brazil’s most distinctive desserts, is a dense, sticky confection. It’s crafted from condensed milk, cocoa powder, and butter, and often rolled in chocolate sprinkles. Decadent ingredients aside, the brigadeiro has an unusual origin story. It became popular in the 1940s, when rations made condensed milk a wildly popular substitute for desserts. Lore holds that around this time, women sold these treats at rallies advocating for presidential candidate and Air Force Brigadier Eduardo Gomes, during the first Brazilian national election in which all women were able to vote.

Brazilian suffragists began rallying for equality in the voting booth in the 19th century. The efforts of suffragists, such as the Federação Brasileira Pelo Progresso Feminino (Brazilian Federation for Women's Progress), led by the scientist, future UN delegate, and politician Bertha Lutz, gained momentum when women won the right to vote around Europe and the United States. After decades of fighting, Brazilian women won the right to vote in 1932.

There were some prohibitive strings attached, though: Only married women who had their husbands’ permission, single women earning their own salaries, and widows were allowed to vote. This hugely affected womens’ political participation, and, as the Oxford Human Rights Hub notes, “the extension of the vote to women in Brazil was a way of including women in the public sphere, while guaranteeing that the private sphere would not suffer any losses.” Thanks to their continued efforts in fighting for equality, voting became compulsory for everyone in 1945-46.

article-image

Around that time, political groups rallied to form the União Democrática Nacional, or the National Democratic Union, and staunchly opposed the populist regime of recently-fallen Getúlio Vargas (the Estado Novo). The first presidential candidate to come out of the new party was Eduardo Gomes. Prior to his candidacy, Gomes was already famous in Brazil. Known as “the Brigadeiro,” he had been a part of a movement led by disillusioned Brazilian tenentes (lieutenants) who advocated for social reforms. In July 1922, a group of tenentes led an uprising at Rio de Janeiro’s Fort Copacabana. Nearly all of them were shot to death on the beach, save for Gomes and one Antônio de Siqueira Campos.

Gomes eventually got into politics, where he rallied against populism and became the face of a movement aimed at dismantling it. In 1945, while running for president, he also played up his bachelor status. (One of his campaign slogans: “Vote no brigadeiro, que é bonito e é solteiro,” meaning “Vote for the brigadier, who’s good-looking and single.”)

The story goes that Gomes held fundraisers ahead of the election, and women in Rio de Janeiro's political sphere were crucial in his campaigning efforts. At these rallies, they sold a bite-sized treat made of condensed milk—cheekily named the brigadeiro. “He was raising funds for his presidential campaign,” Michelli Luz, founder of Austin’s Rio Bites sweet shop, told the Texas Standard podcast earlier this year. “The women got behind him and the rest is history.” It’s an-oft told story that Maya Zellman, the owner of Maya’s Brigadeiro Brazilian Sweets in Los Angeles, grew up hearing from her family in Brazil, too. But its origins are contested, like many origin stories. "It went from the sweet of the brigadier to brigadeiro—that’s where the name came from," Zellman says. "That’s what I hear from my aunts, from everyone I know in Brazil, [but] that might just be the legend."

article-image

Either way, the treat's main ingredient was of its time. Sweetened condensed milk was invented to sterilize milk pre-refrigeration, and it became indispensable wartime fare, particularly during the First and Second World Wars. Words Without Borders notes that the Second World War created a deficit of imports that were central to desserts at the time (namely fruits and nuts), so desserts were cobbled together from what was available. It's likely the brigadeiro was invented earlier than the 1940s, but Nestle started marketing both condensed milk and chocolate powder in Brazil around then. Coupled with Gomes’ candidacy, the advertisements helped the dessert take off.

It’s unclear why supporters of Gomes chose this particular dessert to win votes for the brigadier. But while Gomes lost the election that year, and again in 1950, the fervor for condensed milk—and the brigadeiro—endured long after.

The Arctic Explorer Who Pushed an All-Meat Diet

0
0

Vilhjalmur Stefansson wanted to prove a point.

article-image

In 1928, Vilhjalmur Stefansson was already world-famous. A Canadian anthropologist and consummate showman, he promoted the idea of a “Friendly Arctic,” open to exploration and commercialization. Newspapers and magazines breathlessly covered his sometimes-deadly escapades in the Arctic, including his discoveries of some of the world’s last unknown landmasses, and, more controversially, a group of “blond” Inuinnait who he claimed partially descended from Norse settlers. But for a little while, another facet of Stefansson’s life drew media attention. While living in New York for a year, Stefansson ate nothing but meat.

Today, this would be known as a ketogenic, or a no-carb diet. It’s in vogue as a weight-loss tactic: The idea is that limiting carbohydrates, which are an easy source of energy, can make the body burn fat.

But Stefansson wasn’t trying to burn fat. Instead, he wanted to prove the viability of the Inuit’s meat-heavy diet. In the Arctic, people mainly ate fish and meat from seals, whale, caribou, and waterfowl, while brief summers offered limited vegetation, such as cloudberries and fireweed. Meals could be frozen fish, or elaborate treats such as the creamy fat-and-berry dish akutaq. Western doctors thought it was a terrible way to eat.

Even in the 1920s, a diet light on meat and heavy on vegetables was considered optimal. Vegetarians were more numerous than ever, and raw vegetables, particularly celery, took on a virtuous shine. This was the era of John Harvey Kellogg, famed for not only cereal, but his health resort in Battle Creek, where no meat was on the menu. (Stefansson was even a guest there, perhaps briefly swapping steak for snowflake toast.)

article-image

It's now widely acknowledged that the Inuit subsistence diet is quite balanced. As biochemist and Arctic nutrition expert Harold Draper told Discover magazine, there are no essential foods, only essential nutrients. Vitamin A and D, so easily available from milk, vegetables, and sunlight, can also be obtained from oils within sea mammals (particularly livers) and fish. And fresh meats and fish, prepared raw, contain trace amounts of vitamin C, a fact that Stefansson was the first Westerner to realize. It only takes a little to prevent scurvy.

During Stefansson’s day, though, doctors, dietitians, and general opinion considered the meat-heavy diets of the Arctic peoples poor and improbable. Stefansson’s year of eating carnivorously was a high-profile attempt to prove them wrong.

Stefansson himself had only come around to the diet after an extended stay in the Mackenzie Delta of the western Arctic in 1906. When a ship carrying his supplies failed to materialize, he instead depended on the hospitality of a local family. At first, he roamed far and wide to build up an appetite for the plain roasted fish he received. “When I got home I would nibble at it and write in my diary what a terrible time I was having,” he wryly wrote later. But he gradually learned to enjoy the alternatively boiled, frozen, and fermented fish that he watched Inuvialuit women prepare.

It was during this first extended stay that he started to object to what he had been told about the Arctic diet, especially his peers’ horror over the “uncivilized” practice of eating fermented fish. “I tried the rotten fish one day, and if memory servers, liked it better than my first taste of Camembert,” he wrote. It wasn’t hard to notice that the diet had other benefits, too. “[I] did not get scurvy on the fish diet, nor learn that any of my fish-eating friends ever had it,” he wrote in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in 1935.

article-image

Eating Inuit-style became Stefansson’s obsession. American and European explorers typically carried their own supplies with them, including fruitcake and whiskey. According to biographer Tom Henighan, Stefansson was (famously) more interested in eating what the Inuit were eating, and mostly hunted his own meat. This had a dual appeal: He didn’t have to bring along heavy supplies, and, as time went on and he suffered few ill effects, Stefansson became convinced the Inuit were on to something. As a result, Henighan writes, “he took issue with the medical dogma” that the best diet was extremely varied and featured the maximum amount of raw vegetables. In fact, he called those ideas the “fetishes” of dietitians. After retiring from Arctic forays in 1918, he estimated he had spent a total of five years living entirely off meat and water.

Stefansson even found himself defending the thesis that vegetables weren’t necessary for a healthy diet. “Stefansson Braves the Wrath of Vegetarians” was just one headline published during a flurry of media attention in 1924. “The common supposition is that a meat diet would lead to rheumatism, gout, and premature old age,” commented the anonymous writer, who also opined that while the chilly rigors of a life in the Arctic might make an all-meat diet possible, it wouldn’t be appropriate for someone living in a temperate or tropical zone.

article-image

So in 1928, Stefansson and another explorer began their culinary experiment. Checking into New York’s Bellevue Hospital, the two spent several weeks under constant supervision as doctors did blood tests and observed for signs of dietary distress. After a brief control period of a varied diet, the two men ate only fresh meat: The cuts included steak, roast beef, brains, and tongue, with calf liver once a week to ward off scurvy. Perhaps inevitably, the study was funded by the Institute of American Meat Packers.

Despite the suspect funding, the study in New York was the culmination of Stefansson’s long interest in meat and the Arctic. For years, he had promoted the Arctic as a potential meat-producing paradise, capable of sustaining vast reindeer and muskox herds. His stance on living off the land led other explorers to try to debunk his self-sufficiency thesis: Explorer Roald Amundsen told the New York Times in 1921 that he was going to take seven year’s worth of food with him on the famous ship Maud when he went in search of the North Pole. Amundsen had a point, since during one expedition organized by Stefansson, most of its members starved to death.

article-image

While doctors condemned the diet as dangerous, Stefansson was defiant, attributing his increased vigor and “ambition” to his all-meat diet. Newspapers and magazines across the country ran stories on his experiment, contrasting it with the vegetable-heavy diets most doctors recommended. Soon, Stefansson left the hospital, having lost a few pounds, and continued his meat-eating endeavor from his New York apartment. Doctors examining the two men during the year-long trial reported that neither had heightened blood pressure or kidney trouble, the expected result of a carnivorous diet. The one thing lacking in their diet, Stefansson noted, was enough calcium.

Another conclusion Stefansson came to was that the protein he was eating wasn’t as important as the fat. He briefly flirted with “rabbit starvation,” a condition named for the fact that eating solely meat without sufficient fat can prove deadly. The human liver can only process so much protein sans fat without kickstarting the symptoms of protein poisoning: nausea, wasting, and death. Fat, and lots of it, is essential to the all-meat diet. Aquatic mammals are especially rich with fat, though. Recent studies point to genetics also playing a role in the Inuit aptitude for fatty, meat-filled diets, but as in Stefansson’s time as well as today, there remain questions about the relative healthiness of fats.

article-image

Lucky for Stefansson, fat suited him. Later in life, he cheerfully returned to a diet of meat and fat, washed down with Martinis. At dinner parties, he sometimes ate nothing but butter with a spoon. He died at the age of 82.

Despite his grandstanding, Stefansson didn’t think the all-meat diet was for everyone. It was expensive, and he knew there wasn’t enough meat in the world to feed everyone in such a way. But he always insisted that it was a viable, healthy diet.

Today, Stefansson is known more for his explorations, successful and otherwise. But some scholars appreciate him shining a light on the viability of local foodways, which had been dismissed as uncivilized and baffling. “Stefansson had no intention of recording Arctic food practices,” writes Arctic food historian Zona Spray Starks. “Yet he was one of the first explorers to credit Arctic native women with cooking knowledge.”

The Marvelous Manholes of Massachusetts

0
0

An afternoon with Daniel Fireside, one of the Boston area's most dedicated drainspotters.

article-image

"I've become a horrible person to walk with," Daniel Fireside warns me as we set out for a stroll. It's hard to believe: Fireside is very pleasant company, quick to smile with an ebullient stride. But barely half a block into our jaunt around Union Square, in our joint hometown of Somerville, Massachusetts, Fireside comes to a dead stop. He gestures to me. He looks down at the ground with love in his eyes.

"Quality Water Products," he intones, reading off the hunk of metal that has grabbed his attention. "They have kind of a funky Q!" He pulls his phone out, furrows his brow, and snaps a photo.

Fireside is one of the Boston area's most prolific and celebrated manhole cover photographers. While most people step around manhole covers—or on top of them, taking advantage of their textured, anti-slip surfaces—Fireside is pulled toward them, zigzagging from one to the next as though he is magnetic.

article-image

Fireside stands over each disc, then stretches out his arms balletically—his phone poised above his subject, the rest of him out of the way—so the sunlight streams down uninterrupted. "I always say my enemies are shadows and oncoming traffic," he says. "My older son is worried I'm going to win a Darwin Award."

The history of manhole photography is narrow, but deep. In 1974, husband-and-wife team Robert and Mimi Melnick published Manhole Covers of Los Angeles, which is exactly what it sounds like. They followed up 12 years later with the broader and more ambitious Manhole Covers, which features photos gathered during a roadtrip across the United States.

"Little has been written on the subject of manholes," Mimi writes in the introduction to the latter. "What does exist, of course, are the covers themselves … in some cases their surfaces broadcast all the information we desire; in others, they hang onto their histories, leaving us to wonder."

article-image

These days, a large community of manhole-cover enthusiasts—many of whom call themselves "drainspotters"—are dedicated to cataloguing these silent badges of the street, and teasing out some of their mysteries. Some publish photography books or make art projects. But many are hobbyists who take photos on their phones: as Fireside points out, this makes it much easier to compare covers, and see small differences. They tend to gather on the internet, pooling their finds under hashtags like #ManholeCoverMonday and #IronworkThursday.

Fireside—who, when he isn't drainspotting, works as the capital coordinator for a worker-owned fair-trade coffee company—first dove in about three years ago, after a fateful walk around his neighborhood with his dog and younger son. "My kid pointed at something on the ground and went 'ABC,'" he remembers. "And I looked down and it was 'G.'"

article-image

A near miss, but it led to an epiphany: "I was like, 'Oh, wow. G for Gas,'" Fireside says. (Although manhole covers are popularly associated with sewers, there are a lot of hatches in the street that allow access to other utilities, including gas lines and electric wires.)

Once he bothered to decode this small message, it was as if a veil had been lifted. "I started noticing [them]," he says. "Within a couple feet of me, there were like five different kinds of manhole covers." Some he found interesting; others, beautiful. He started taking photos and honed his style, and he now Tweets and Instagrams at @IronCovers, where he has thousands of like-minded followers from all over the world.

Drainspotters tend to have their own areas of expertise. Some get into particular manufacturers, like New York's 19th-century craftsman Jacob Mark, who embedded his manhole covers with bubbles of colored glass. Others love the manhole covers of Japan, where many municipalities have introduced their own multi-hued designs. "There are the steampunk aesthetic kind of people, and there are people who are really into rust," Fireside says.

article-image

Fireside certainly won't turn away from a good rust pattern. ("It's nature's way of playing with metal," he says.) But his favorite manhole covers help him tap into the history of Boston, as well as the smaller towns, cities and suburbs scattered nearby. "Around here, a lot of them are dated from the dawn of the modern sewer system," in the 1870s and 1880s, he says. "You can discover this lost history of industrialization in New England ... it's like an urban treasure hunt," where the treasure is underfoot.

"You have all these nameless craftspeople who put really cool designs on them, and typefaces," he says. "Often each city mandated different styles. The Boston ones are totally different from the Medford ones."

In Arlington, the next town over from his Somerville neighborhood, the first batch of manhole covers made were individually numbered, 1 through 999. "I've found about 150 of them, scattered all over the city," he says.

article-image

Three years into his hobby, Fireside has become more discerning about exactly which covers he wants to photograph. But as he takes me, a newbie drainspotter, up and down the street, he makes sure to linger over most of them, kicking off dead leaves so I can see the details.

Slowly, differences begin to reveal themselves. The covers may be pebbled or crosshatched. We see the classic circle, but also a fair number of rectangles and squares. (Fireside jokes that he would respond to the classic Google job interview question, "Why are manhole covers round?" by providing photographic evidence that some are not.)

As we come across the names of various utility companies, Fireside rattles off their pedigrees, and what happened to them. "Especially in less-traveled areas, you can find ones from the Boston Edison Electric Illuminating Company," he says. "Thomas Edison founded that, and [a dozen] name changes later it's Eversource."

article-image

When we find a manhole cover stamped with the year it was made—1882—it spurs an imaginative exercise. If you time traveled to 1882, he points out, "this would be the only thing you would recognize. The trees are all different. Stores and buildings were not there. The streets weren't paved back then. But this object that was built by people is this little time capsule. And people put some energy and thought and creativity into it. "

Of course, they made mistakes, too. "Sometimes I find little typos," he says. "They put the 3 backwards, or they ran out of N's and they put 3 nails together." He smiles, and guesses at what they probably thought at the time: "'Eh, 132 years from now, no one will notice."

Tell Us About the Most Incredible Strangers You've Met While Traveling

0
0

It's not about the journey or the destination, it's about the people you meet along the way.

article-image

In a lot of ways, travel is less about the places you go than the people you meet along the way. I’m sure someone said something terribly insightful about this once, but the simple truth is that a chance encounter with a unique character can turn any journey into an unforgettable experience. Now we want to hear about the most memorable people you’ve run into on your travels.

On a recent Atlas Obscura trip to Transylvania (did I mention that we offer trips?), our travelers met just such a character while he was tending his own grave. I’ll let our Director of Trip Design and Operations, Tao Tao Holmes, who was there, tell the story:

“An older man, wearing suspenders and holding a bright yellow pail, emerged along a narrow path that rose out of the woods and up the hill. He ambled towards us, and soon began chatting with Ovidiu, our local Romania guide (I was there with our small group of travelers, on our very first Atlas Obscura trip to Romania).

article-image

The man, named Toth (age 86) led Ovidiu over to one grave in particular, and the rest of us slowly followed. Toth paused and pointed to the names on the headstone, and Ovidiu looked up at us, translating Toth's words into English: this was Toth's own gravestone, and those were the names of Toth and his wife. We leaned in closer to see that their dates of birth, followed by a dash, were already inscribed, followed by blank space. Toth chuckled as he lifted up the bed of ivy carpeting the gravestone, as if lifting a welcome mat.

Toth comes to tend his grave about once a week, he told us, and he remains the first and only person I've ever met doing just that. He left all of us with our own ponderings as we parted ways.”

Powerful stuff.

Now it's your turn. Tell us about the odd fellows, mysterious personages, and memorable strangers that you’ve met on your travels, via the form below. Be as detailed or simple as you’d like, but be sure to tell us how the chance encounter changed your trip or made it more special. We’ll collect some of our favorites in an upcoming round-up. We won’t be strangers if we share our stories!

The Secret London Exhibition for Spies' Eyes Only

0
0

During World War II, the Natural History Museum showcased tools for sabotage.

When Ealing Studios released a feature film in 1948 that showed a secret wartime spy workshop hidden in London’s Natural History Museum, the plot was too far fetched for critics and the public. The New York Times said Against the Wind conveyed only “a minimum of the truth” behind Second World War sabotage efforts. Its director Charles Crichton—perhaps best known for the comedy A Fish Called Wanda—was also rebuffed: “Only Crichton would think of having his secret London headquarters in a museum of stuffed dinosaurs” scoffed one critic.

Half a century later, a series of documents emerged that would have astonished Crichton’s skeptics. In the 1990s, after the British government released formerly classified intelligence files from the Second World War into the public domain, historians were finally able to access an official history of the Special Operations Executive, a secret department created by Winston Churchill in 1940 to undertake sabotage in enemy territory. Crichton’s story, it turns out, was more plausible than it had initially appeared.

article-image

The Special Operations Executive recruited, trained, and briefed agents for missions abroad, and had a camouflage section to ensure that agents were supplied with the complex disguises and means of concealing weapons needed to reach and attack foreign railways, military vehicles, and factory machinery without being caught.

To do this well, the camouflage section relied on insight about an agent's designated territory from the SOE’s country specialists. Everything from photographs of popular brands of cigarettes, to news that the rationing of rubber had impacted the size of heels being produced for womens’ shoes, was considered important. When an agent in France reported that a ban on coal had made it a risky carrier for explosives, the camouflage section created incendiary logs made to match the region’s most common trees instead. According to archive records, its attention to detail even extended as far as agents’ collar button holes, which in England were affixed horizontally, but on the continent were sewn on vertically.

The SOE employed a film director to head the camouflage section. Lieutenant-Colonel J. Elder Wills initially operated from a workshop in the Victoria and Albert Museum with a small team of mostly prop-makers recruited from the film industry—many of the briefs sent to the camouflage section required imagination and unusual production skills. In fact, one of Wills’s early recruits, Walter Bull, a plasterer responsible for producing exploding coal, later went on to become the chief plasterer on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

article-image

As the organization grew, the SOE acquired a number of stations. The proximity of the Thatched Barn—a hotel on the Barnet Bypass acquired from Billy Butlin, founder of the famous holiday camps—to Elstree film studios made it useful for dealing with large-scale production. Meanwhile the sites in London’s Kensington neighborhood dealt with prototypes and housed the country specialists. Another building at 2-3 Trevor Square hosted a photographic section responsible for producing agents’ fake documents. The author Leslie Bell tells a compelling story in the 1957 book Sabotage! about a number of specially selected women from the Auxiliary Territorial Service who were employed to appear at the door of SOE bases dressed as ordinary British housewives in the middle of household chores so as to ensure that deception was maintained.

The HQ for the country specialists was not far from the west wing of The Natural History Museum, which had sent its valuable exhibits off for safekeeping in the countryside for the duration of the war and closed its doors to the public. One of its former employees, a crystallographer called Dr. Frank Claringbull, had joined the SOE as an explosives advisor (and became the museum’s director in 1968), but this was not the extent of the Natural History Museum’s connection to SOE. In a somewhat unusual turn of events, the camouflage section acquired the west wing, with the help of the museum’s then-director Sir Clive Forster Cooper, and filled it with it a private display of explosives, camouflage, and vehicles used by SOE agents.

article-image

It is not entirely clear why the Special Operations Executive created the secret exhibition, nor is it apparent why they held it in a sealed-off section of the very well known and centrally located British institution. As the author Mark Seaman notes in The Secret Agent’s Handbook of Special Devices, the camouflage section claimed that the exhibition was created “in order that the Agent should receive every possible help and avail himself of ‘food for thought.’” But it was also recorded that attendance was low and relatively few members of SOE actually took advantage of the opportunity to examine the latest inventions. King George VI, however, did not decline the opportunity, nor did Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, the Director-General of the Political Warfare Executive, who wrote in his diary that it was:

“Most interesting and very well done. One exhibit showed ties, shirts, underwear, etc of continental manufacture showing the difference from British makes. Likewise shoes. Most ingenious, too, were the blocks of wood, spars of ships, petrol tins, etc, used for concealing radion sets and even tiny but useful motorbikes, not to mention arms, tommy-guns, etc. Also very ingenious containers and one-man submarines, also many kinds of disguised bombs and explosives which stick to ships. A good show.”

Rumor has it that J. Elder Wills created the exhibition as a public relations tool for persuading other departments to support the work of the camouflage section and the SOE in general, which perpetually experienced difficulties in convincing the War Office that they needed unusual personnel, such as artists, prop makers, and property agents, instead of the usual “army tradesmen.” The SOE operated independently from the Secret Intelligence Service, and the two were often competing for resources and facilities—the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Sir Stewart Menzies, was famously outspoken about the SOE and did not hesitate to denounce them as “amateur, dangerous, and bogus.”

article-image

Although other historians had written about the exhibition when the intelligence files were released in the 1990s, the Natural History Museum’s connection to SOE wasn't recorded in the museum’s official history until the early 2000s when one of its crustaceans experts, Dr. Paul Clark, was tipped off about the secret exhibition by his father, a former flyer for SOE during the war. From the records released into the public domain, Clark was able to map the spy exhibition to the layout of the museum and discover that the exhibition began at what is now “the mammal gallery,” just off the left of the Hintze Hall.

Clark proved it is possible to match up the interior architecture visible in photographs with the gallery space as it exists today. An archway that hosts a bench for weary museum visitors was then host to a display case of Balinese carvings designed to conceal explosives for agents in Southeast Asia. A wall of taxidermied porcupines and bears was once occupied by wireless sets. Behind the case at the end of the gallery that now hosts a stuffed polar bear, there was a door to a room of machine guns and pistols.

A parallel gallery featured explosives: incendiary Chianti bottles, cigarettes, and “tire busters” designed to match the geological structures of different stones. You could also find an explosive rat here—skinned by a former bacon hand at the grocer Sainsbury’s—which succeeded in undermining the Nazis’ efforts despite never being detonated. A history of the camouflage section reports that after an unsuccessful operation led to the rat’s discovery, the Germans were so paranoid about whether dead rats were explosives or not that “the trouble caused to them was a much greater success to us than if the rats had actually been used.”

article-image

After the defeat of Germany, there was little need for the SOE’s activities to continue and it was formally shut down in January 1946. The Natural History Museum’s exhibits were returned and the institution reopened to the public. Many of the SOE inventors, designers, and craftsmen returned to their former roles. A career history for J. Elder Wills held by the British Film Institute shows that he returned to the film industry after the war, mostly as an art director for films that happened to have plots about blackmail and deception. The only anomaly in his list of art directing experience is a credit for a story he told that was made into a film in 1948—Charles Crichton’s Against the Wind.


A Day in the Life of a Pennsylvania Plant Detective

0
0

Researchers are comparing age-old herbaria with muddy riverbanks to track decades of ecological change.

article-image

There were no more trains chugging past—or even tracks, for that matter—but Richard Niesenbaum was searching anyway, looking for the path of a railroad that once traced the contours of Cedar Creek in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He was pretty sure he had found it, on a marshy riverbank near the site of what was once a quarry. Niesenbaum is a botanist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, and he was helped greatly in this question by the fact that his predecessors, plant-collectors of yore, were pretty fastidious record-keepers.

Niesenbaum has spent hours with their notes—and he even fought to save them—because this brainy chicken scratch is full of clues that he uses to hunt for plants that may have vanished from the Pennsylvania landscape.

The university's herbarium—a collection of leaves pressed flat and mounted on archival paper, with accompanying notes—is 60,000 sheets strong, so it takes up a fair amount of storage space. Some institutions are offloading their plant collections, Niesenbaum says, but he went to bat for this one even before he knew exactly how it might be useful. “Something inside of me, said, ‘We’ve got to save this thing,” Niesenbaum recalls. “There’s got to be value in it.’”

Soon enough, he found it. A handful of researchers have been looking to university and library herbaria as repositories for data about long-term ecological change, especially as industrialization and urbanization have reshaped landscapes around where the plants were collected.

That sounded familiar to Niesenbaum: Allentown has changed a lot since some of these specimens were collected, in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Now, 51,496 of the university’s pressed plants and marginalia have been digitized as part of the Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis Project—an effort to track flora along the urban corridor between New York City and Washington, D.C.

article-image

To build on that work, Niesenbaum decided to put boots on the ground (or riverbank), and return to the historic collection sites to see whether the plants that once thrived there have continued to live on, even as the world has changed around them. Earlier this summer, he and Lindsay Press, a student researcher, began looking through the herbarium specifically for things that might have changed—such as plants that are now classified as locally extirpated, endangered, threatened, or rare. They wondered what those collection sites look like now.

That’s how Niesenbaum found himself splashing into Cedar Creek, looking for a rare sedge and aquatic grass.

The now-vanished railroad was key. At the time the old samples were collected, railroad rights-of-way had a tendency to preserve the native landscape right around them, which made them attractive collection sites. Plus, the previous botanist, prolific collector Harold W. Pretz, working in 1924, had been generous with details. He wrote down intersections, mileage from a point in town, and proximity to the quarry, which Niesenbaum confirmed through aerial photographs. “We could draw intersecting lines to get a search area based on that,” he says. In other instances, where land has been transformed beyond recognition, he's employed county tax records and real estate databases.

article-image

Those clues led his team to a marshy stretch of Cedar Creek, a tributary of the Little Lehigh, where they spotted an old wooden trestle and a handful of rail ties still in the ground. It’s an active place for trout, and a reservoir for local drinking water. These riverbanks are within a public park, but this portion doesn't get a ton of foot traffic. Occasionally, Niesenbaum crossed paths with people working at the nearby food bank, who "didn't seem to mind us botanizing in their backyard."

At first, things looked fairly promising. “When we first popped into the site, we got so excited, because the first thing we saw was a sedge,” Niesenbaum says. He thought it might be Carex tetanica, which is threatened in this part of Pennsylvania. (It looks vaguely grass-like, but with triangular stems instead of blades.) He also thought he saw the wetland grass they were after, Potamogeton zosteriformis, which is listed as “rare.”

He slogged into the water to get a closer look and to grab a tuft for the lab. “It was an impromptu jump in,” Niesenbaum says, “with hiking boots that got soaked.”

Niesenbaum’s enthusiasm was understandable—at least for a botanist. “Grasses in streams in Pennsylvania are not super-abundant now,” he says. When nutrients from, say, lawn fertilizer take over bodies of water, algae follows, choking out the native grasses that once lined the region's waterways. The sightings were a good sign. But when he got the samples back to the lab and continued growing them in water, they turned out to be much more common varieties—likely Carex lurida and Vallisneria americana, respectively.

article-image

It was a disappointment, but Niesenbaum wasn’t too bummed out. Though he did not find what he set out for, “the good news is that we found a native plant,” he says.

That is notable because, even though the park appears more "natural" than a vacant lot or swath of asphalt, it's still a managed ecosystem, and changes to the way land is used leave ripples far and wide. The area around the park is a floodplain, Niesenbaum says, and its banks are a riparian buffer zone that have been dominated by non-native plants, such as Japanese stiltgrass, knotweed, and the common reed. These are a mixed bag. They do help protect the stream from runoff and the land from flooding, but they’re also “crowding out rare and threatened plant species that would normally grow on the side,” Niesenbaum says. He was glad to find a little native grass holding its own. “At least a common wetland plant is still common, as we see the decline in wetlands.”

The project is going to continue, "but to really move this forward, we're going to need a team of people who are really field-hearty," Niesenbaum says. The work can be tedious and slow-going, and it's tough to spend all morning looking for a sedge, only to find the one you're not looking for.

The payoff is worth its though: an ecological record hidden in plain sight. Over time, by comparing its holdings with the present day, the university's herbarium may be able to provide a leaf's-eye view of a century or more of sweeping changes. It could show, for instance, how climate affects the timing of flowering or leafing, both locally and across the corridor. “You have to start to zoom in first,” Niesenbaum says, “and from there, get the bigger patterns.”

The Fabulous Design Manuals for Japan's 19th-Century Sweets

0
0

Wagashi range from elegant to surprisingly modern.

Across Japan, recipes for elegant wagashi sweets made from adzuki beans, mochi, and agar-agar have been passed down over generations. But that wasn't always the case. After culinary infusions from ancient China and the Portuguese, wagashi crystallized into beloved sweet treats during the cultural maelstrom of the Edo period, between 1603 and 1868. Back then, confectioners experimented with nature motifs as well as modern-looking abstract patterns. Soon, there were so many designs that sweet-makers and customers alike needed a way to keep them straight.

article-image

Enter the wagashi design book. These lavishly-illustrated volumes, which depict the breadth of colors, shapes, and designs possible to render in sweet form, are still preserved in Japanese libraries. In them, illustrators painted wagashi as delicately shaped bamboo shoots, chestnuts, or cherry blossoms, reflecting the changing of the seasons. Flat slabs of bean-paste yōkan bear bold designs and equally bold names, such as "Mountain Peaks at Dawn." In these many books, such as one named the Onmushigashizu, designs were often inspired by classical poetry and literature.

The books allowed wagashi-makers to keep sweets consistent over generations. For example, the Fukushimaya wagashi shop in Tokyo still uses an 1867 manual created by their founder, and to this day recreate the exact designs painted on the pages. While new styles of wagashi are still being developed, even older styles look up-to-date, and are still just as delectable.

article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image

The Wild Alaskan Island That Inspired a Lost Classic

0
0

A century later, “Quiet Adventure in Alaska” still sounds pretty good.

Rockwell Kent did not know where he would live in Alaska when he arrived in 1918. His intention, if it can be said that he had one, was to find a place apart from other people, and to paint. From Seward, a town full of men who had come north in search of gold, Kent and his young son—also called Rockwell—took a small boat into Resurrection Bay, where a chance meeting led them to an empty cabin on a small, wooded island. On August 28, under gray and drizzling skies, they loaded up their small boat and moved to Fox Island.

Kent was an artist from New York, a slight man with a long, sharp nose and a soft chin. Among his supplies was a heavy load of books—Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, both the Odyssey and the Iliad, a collection of poems by William Blake, and more. Alaska, he imagined, might provide fuel for his work for a time. He was a landscape painter, and this place had wild and unexploited natural sights and resources for a man like him.

Kent didn’t think of himself as writer, but in the months he spent on Fox Island, many nights were dedicated to letters home, describing the Alaskan days and nights in detail. That writing became a book, Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska, and at least one British magazine thought it to be “easily the most remarkable book to come out of America since Leaves of Grass was published.”

One hundred years after Rockwell Kent, father and son, went to Fox Island, their own lonely, snowy paradise, discovering Kent's book feels like uncovering a secret. Now little-known, Wilderness makes going off to the wilds of Alaska—as long as they're not so remote, not as Into the Wild as the places Christopher McCandless sought—seem like an excellent idea. The book counts as forgotten classic of nature writing, with striking illustrations by Kent, that paints a picture of people settled in lonely landscapes, a dream that seems impossible a century later.

article-image

On Fox Island, life was simple. The two Kents settled into the homestead of the man they called Olson, who had built their cabin to shelter a herd of goats, which he still kept. The Kents stuffed the cracks of the cabin with moss and spent mornings cutting down trees, to feed their stove through winter. Many days were rainy, but Kent painted, as he intended, and sketched, and made wood-cuts, and he was happy with his work. And there were moments where they got that head-rush of outdoor glory. After climbing up one of the island’s mountains, “we stood in wonder looking down and out over a smooth green floor of sea and a fairyland of mountains, peaks and gorges,” he wrote. Or another time: “The night is beautiful beyond thought. All the bay is flooded with moonlight and in that pale glow the snowy mountains appear whiter than snow itself."

Seward was less than a day’s boat ride away, but for the most part father and son were isolated. When the water was choppy, when the snow fell, when the wind picked up, which was most days, it was too dangerous to cross. They spent months alone with Olson, his goats, and the foxes he raised. The island felt to Kent like it was on the edge of human experience.

article-image

“A banana peeling on a mountain top tames the wilderness,” he wrote. “Much of the glory of this Alaska is in the knowledge I have that the next bay—which I may never choose to enter—is uninhabited, that beyond those mountains across the water is a vast region that no man has ever trodden, a terrible ice-bound wilderness.”

Kent is being naive here, though perhaps not willfully. Long before gold miners settled Seward, the area around Resurrection Bay had been peopled with native traders and hunters. He wrote that “so little do we feel ourselves related, here in this place, to any one time or to any civilization that at a thought we and our world become whom and what we please,” but this was because he bought into an idea of timeless, wild nature that doesn’t quite hold up 100 years later.

article-image

But at that moment, in that place, he had access to a land barely populated, with few rules to limit how he used it. Throughout the winter, the Kents razed a small forest to keep their fires burning, and young Rockwell kept trying to make pets of wild animals. They all died in his care. But the wilderness around them was robust enough to shrug off their presence.

Fox Island today is still covered in trees, and in the winter months it still seems apart from the rest of the world. But now it’s a managed wilderness, owned in part by the state and in part by a private tourism company that charges $1,280 per person for an overnight stay on the island. (Two nights minimum.) Alaska still has stretches unmarred by banana peelings, but the wilderness that’s easily reached from town has been spoken for, and Kent’s quiet adventure is the sort of experience that people will pay dearly for.

article-image

But in a way, the price that one pays to exist on Fox Island doesn't really matter. Kent found timeless nature because he imagined it was there, and the people who travel to Fox Island on commercial cruises often find the same thing. If Seward now has a few thousand residents, instead a few hundred, it’s still little more than a fleeting concentration in a place where humanity is spread thin.

Kent first found his lure to the trees and water in the writings of Thoreau and Emerson, and this can be seen in his work, which has a transcendentalist bent, tinged with a 20th-century ambition and melancholy. For writers who encounter his work today, especially those who love Alaska, Wilderness has a similar allure. In a small way, the experience Kent found still exists. Anyone who has a small boat or strong arms can row out to Fox Island just as the Kents did and spend the night on the unimproved shore of the state parks, hoping the night stays beautiful and the moon shines over the bay.

article-image

England's Forgotten Pet Massacre of 1939

0
0

Why were hundreds of thousands of pets put to sleep in London?

article-image

In the first week of September of 1939, London’s animal shelters were overflowing with patients. Lines of pet-owners, all waiting to euthanize their cats, dogs, birds, and rabbits, stretched out the door, in some cases wrapping around the block for nearly a mile. But none of the animals were dying. In fact, none of them were even sick. The distraught Londoners had brought them to do what they thought was the humane thing: Spare their pets from the atrocities—and food shortages—of the impending world war.

The British Pet Massacre of 1939 is a horrific, if not seemingly impossible, twist in the narrative often told about the “People’s War.” In fact, animal cruelty was often used to embody the cruelest reaches of fascism. One piece in the Daily Mirror ridiculed a German ambassador for abandoning his dog when fleeing the embassy, stating “[t]hat’s what Britain is fighting—the inherent brutality of Nazi-ism, that has no justice or human feeling—even for its pets.”

Instead, England championed its brave-hearted canine war heroes. At the Ilford Pet Cemetery, you’ll find headstones commemorating World War II animals such as Simon, the beloved cat who received the Blue Cross and the PDSA Dickin Medal for his Naval service. But, according to author and historian Hilda Kean, buried alongside these celebrated critters are thousands of pets who were killed before a single bomb had been dropped. “The PDSA grounds might well be defined as a site of memory,” Kean writes, “only certain, individual, animals, whose exploits are narrativised to fit within the notion of a ‘good’ war are actually remembered.” And until recently, that darker history has remained, largely, underground.

article-image

The National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee (NARPAC) had estimated that England was then home to six to seven million dogs and cats, 56 million poultry, and more than 37 million farm animals—about twice as many domestic animals as there were people in the country. War not only meant the potential for air raids on the homeland, but also for rationing and major food shortages. In anticipation of wartime conditions and sparse resources, NARPAC issued an advisory pamphlet to animal owners encouraging them to send their animals to the countryside. But if the animals couldn’t be placed into someone else’s care? The pamphlet suggested it would be “kindest to have them destroyed.”

So when, on September 3, 1939, Neville Chamberlain publicly announced that Britain would be going to war, thousands of Londoners marched dutifully to their local clinic to do what they thought was right. Veterinarians worked overtime to meet the demand. The National Canine Defense League allegedly ran out of chloroform. A 1939 report of the mass euthanasia in Animal World later recounted that “the work of destroying animals was continued, day and night.”

article-image

According to Kean, this hadn’t been NARPAC’s intention—they had given specific instructions for agricultural animals, but had omitted any provisions for domestic pets. In fact, in the following weeks, they issued a notice stating “those who are staying at home should not have their animals destroyed.” But it was too late. Within the first week of the war, around 400,000 animals had been killed.

But the bigger question remains: If the state wasn’t wholly responsible for the massacre, how had hundreds of thousands of pet owners come to carry this out? Perhaps it wasn’t just to protect themselves and their families from food shortages, but also to shelter their pets from the atrocities of war.

According to Kean, the role and perception of pets had changed in the decades leading up to World War II. By 1930, dogs were required by law to be collared and taxed, and expected to be trained and leashed, bringing them closer to—and making them increasingly reliant on—their owners. Dogs in particular began to lose their autonomy in pet owners’ eyes, morphing from an independent mammal to man’s best friend.

article-image

Those who had lived through World War I knew what a war-torn country looked like, and they never wanted to live in such conditions again. As pets became increasingly integrated into families, it became harder for owners to envision them fending for themselves—or failing to do so—once the war started. According to Kean, many who had lived through World War I stocked up on poison, claiming they’d rather see their children dead than put them through wartime conditions. And perhaps, Kean posits, this was enacted, instead, on their animals. “When war came, however, no mass murders of children took place,” writes Colin Dickey in the Los Angeles Review of Books. “Instead, it appears, many people sublimated this impulse toward mercy killing by exercising it on their animals instead.”

In the end, many of the surviving pets didn't starve—but rather became even further enmeshed into their human families. While there was no official ration for pets, human meals were shared. Inevitably, scraps of meat would be slipped to the family pup.

Fully understanding the pet cull, perhaps, requires a deep dive into the collective psyche of a nation on the brink of total war. But in some ways, the Ilford Cemetery makes clear the collective amnesia that many post-war nations tend to adopt—remembering the good, forgetting the atrocities, and forging a cleaner, more palatable narrative—in order to carry on.

Reflecting on the Cost of Conflict at France’s Interactive WWI Museum

0
0

At Romagne 14-18, visitors are encouraged to touch and even rearrange the objects on display.

Surrounded by the Belgian border and the low-lying Vosges mountains, Meuse served as the multi-year front line between French and German armed forces during World War I, with the Voie Sacrée, an arterial route dubbed the Sacred Way, ferrying troops and supplies to the trenches.

In this battle-scarred region of northeastern France, the Great War has given rise to a cultural landscape marked by mourning. Now a full 100 years after the end of the war, the hushed, still sparsely populated department in Lorraine—equally famous for its namesake quiche—boasts monuments, memorials, and museums in dizzying numbers.

There are booming multimedia installations that mime the furor of battle, with shells whistling across projection screens and pixelated bursts of artillery, and gleaming, American-built neoclassical landmarks in which the losses of war are glossed with a veneer of patriotism.

And then there is Romagne 14-18.

article-image

The multi-floor, relic-packed museum, which doubles as a sandwich bar, is hidden inside a barn in the tiny village of Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. Despite its unassuming location, it receives about 20,000 visitors a year, according to founder Jean Paul de Vries, among them several thousand regulars, including veterans.

Once inside, visitors will find a dimly lit trove of half-eroded artifacts, sprawled floor-to-ceiling in immersive tableaux and dilapidated mises-en-scène. In one corner, a beat-up wooden table has been laid with rusted, dust-covered dishes, and piteously fancied up with a few candle nubs. In another, prosthetic limbs and medical miscellany surround two battered stretchers. The effect of the cavernous installations is of something time-eaten but very much intact, like the mossy, ghostly remains of a shipwreck.

Originally from the Netherlands, de Vries, now 49, started collecting battle memorabilia as early as age six, when he and his family began visiting the Meuse region on annual camping trips. He scoured the countryside for relics, a lifelong fixation he likens to the “gold fever” experienced by prospectors during a gold rush. Romagne 14-18 serves as a surreal repository for the fruits of a lifetime spent scavenging, a practice that is generally discouraged for both reasons of safety and the integrity of the archaeological record.

article-image

The 12-year-old war museum is really more of an anti-war anti-museum. In lieu of explanatory panels or contextualizing information—mainstays of the modern museum—the exhibit offers an unvarnished jumble, a purposefully unannotated and anarchic mess. Unlike most other institutions, visitors are encouraged to touch and even rearrange the objects on display.

“Things are not cleaned so you can still see they survived—they really lived,” says de Vries. “I mark nothing. Because I want people to let their own imagination work.”

The wreckage of the First World War is difficult to fathom, a litany of mind-boggling statistics: over 20 million soldiers and civilians dead and just as many wounded. This region of rural France was among the hardest hit, and its low population density is ongoing evidence of the forced depopulations that occurred as a result of war. Beneath a layer of bucolic charm—mustard-yellow rapeseed fields, turreted fairytale castles—lie deep battle scars.

article-image

Trenches zigzag through the regrown forests. Battlefields have morphed into lunar-like landscapes, battered by a months-long barrage of shells. Guillaume Moizan, a professional tour guide who grew up in Argonne, has seen craters that descend 60 feet into the ground. Roadside plaques memorialize dozens of demolished villages. In one, the shell-splattered walls of a church still stand, but with thick grass covering the nave.

Between 500 and 800 tons of old military munitions are discovered each year in France. The use of metal detectors is strictly prohibited, and the forests are still littered with potentially explosive mines and grenades, making scavenging a risky pursuit. In 2007, a pair of deminers were killed in nearby Metz, and in 1981 a group of Alsacian school-children died handling a live mortar shell.

article-image

Simon Verdegem, a Belgian archaeologist specialized in WWI, cautions against unlicensed digs—because they might hurt the relics, too. “If an artifact is taken out of the battlefield without recording the context or location where it was found, it loses its value completely,” he says. “The story behind the artifact is gone.”

According to Moizan, the tour guide, there is another reason to leave relics scattered through the original landscapes. “It is interesting to me to have things still visible,” he says. “I live there and can see remains every day.” He leads about 150 visitors a year through the battlegrounds and the untouched Zone Rouge (“Red Zone”), where people can still spot weaponry, barbed wire, spoons, and tin cans of food.

“Although most people imagine war as fighting and offensives, in reality that’s only 20 percent of the time. So finding items from daily life is very special,” Moizan says. “We imagine the soldier stopping for a few minutes and eating something. And we wonder what happened next. Did he survive? Was it his last lunch or dinner?”

article-image

On my way to Romagne 14-18, I join Moizan on a short hike through the cratered forests of Saint Mihiel. Together we find a scrap of boot heel flattened into the gravel path. Then, on the edge of a small mound, I spot a sheen of dull metal, recognizable by its tapered base: a German bullet.

Immediately, I am hit with what the French cultural theorist Roland Barthes famously described as “punctum”—that piercing sense of ça a été, meaning “This has been.” More than a translatable phrase, it’s a feeling of immediacy that Romagne 14-18 revels in (and monetizes), cataloging the ghosts of battle through the objects left behind.

article-image

Later in the museum, the punctum sensation hits again as I pound the keys of a tangled scrap of metal, now only faintly reminiscent of a typewriter. In the summer, the odors of diesel and gunpowder emerge from the sun-baked barn, adding to the institution’s evocative power.

“People get emotional in the summertime,” says de Vries. “It’s a very emotional museum.”

The museum has a few analogues in the art world, like the Lebanese artist Lamia Joreige's "Object of War" series, which recasts the personal items of Beirut residents used during Lebanon’s civil war as metonymies of conflict. After all, war is an attack on the sanctity of the everyday. Embedded in the relics of Romagne 14-18 is the curator’s own distaste for battle. “I’m against war, I think it’s senseless,” says de Vries. “War is only for big enterprises. For them, it’s okay. They need money. But it’s normal humans like us that go into war.”

article-image

Last year, the Musée de l’Armée in Paris opened “The Life of a Soldier: From Ancient Rome to the Present,” a temporary show that exhibited shoes, backpacks, and even lunch pails from thousands of years of military campaigns, humanizing soldiers by spotlighting the modest, everyday needs of the body.

According to Olivier Renaudeau, who co-curated the exhibit, these objects have mostly remained the same since antiquity, despite advances in military technology. The mental and physical conditions of conflict have also cut across historical divides. “The soldier of today has the same difficulties and exhaustion,” says Renaudeau. “In reality, the everyday life of combatants hasn’t changed.”

article-image

One of the goals of the exhibit, much like Romagne 14-18, was to remind visitors of the “humanity and proximity of soldiers,” Renaudeau says. Echoing de Vries’ rebuke of the political and economic structural forces that send people to battle, Renaudeau says he sought a way to make visitors “question the means and missions of the armies that they finance with their taxes.”

In Romagne 14-18, it is the weary universality of the objects on display that offers the most poignant commentary—particularly within a department that in recent years has heavily favored France’s ultra right-wing, anti-immigrant party, the National Front. Though particular to WWI, the ravaged relics of the museum—cobwebbed helmets, lines of sinewy shrapnel, corroded canteen cutlery—invite empathy for other rubbled, war-torn regions of the world. They recall the days when France, too, was devastated by conflict and displacement.

Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images