They slipped and fell. Really!

In 1907, Anna H. Sturla boarded a ferry, slipped on a banana peel, and demanded $250 in compensation from the boat’s operators. Three doctors had examined her, she claimed, and told her she needed an operation. She received $150—a significant sum at the time, although less than the $500 she received after her first banana-peel incident, a fall on the train-station steps at 125th Street and Park Avenue.

"Not six months went by after that,” a New York Times reporter wrote, “before Mrs. Sturla was once more in trouble with these arch-foes of hers, banana peels." In total, Anna Sturla received $2,950 from 17 accidents in four years. In 11 cases, Sturla blamed banana peels. When the Times wrote about her, Sturla was on trial for making fraudulent complaints.

But for years, she was taken seriously. After all, many New Yorkers suffered similar injuries. Slipping on a banana peel is a cliché, a vintage vaudeville gag. But its origins weren’t just slapstick comedy. Before it became a comedy trope, banana peels menaced New Yorkers for decades.

When bananas first arrived in New York City, it was a triumph of logistics and planning. After the Civil War, writes Dan Koeppel in Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, bananas in the U.S. were like caviar: expensive and hard-to-find status symbols. After all, sailing the tropical fruit from the nearest banana-producing area, Jamaica, could take three weeks by schooner, which was longer than the banana’s shelf life. But once an entrepreneur realized that leaving bananas on-deck kept them cool and unspoiled, it sparked a banana bonanza. Soon, networks of factories were providing ice to cool bananas in transit, and the fruit became a ubiquitous and cheap snack stateside.

But it came at a cost. Vendors touted banana skins as “sanitary wrappers” and sold them as a street food. Sure enough, New Yorkers discarded the wrappers onto the street, and the pages of turn-of-the-century New York City newspapers contained accounts of shockingly serious banana-related injuries.

“A wealthy merchant, aged 75 ... slipped on a banana peel in front of his home and broke his right leg near the hip,” the Times reported in 1884. “He is not expected to recover.” More than 30 years later, an article headlined “Banana Peel Causes Death” described how a factory worker slipped and fell into the street, where a truck hit him.

A lone banana peel on a sidewalk—its yellow color practically a hazard sign—doesn’t seem very threatening. But in the late-19th century, trash in New York City piled up ankle- or knee-deep. The city did have a Department of Street Cleaning, created in 1881. But this was the era of corrupt, Tammany-Hall politics, and jobs were handed out on the basis of party loyalty, often to absentee workers who misused funds.

Accounts and photos from the time are stunning. New Yorkers threw their trash in the street, where no one picked it up, leading the city to release wild pigs to eat the refuse. Dead animals lingered in gutters for days. In this environment, discarded banana peels rotted into slippery messes and mottled into a camouflaging brown.

Orange peels and potato skins caused slips and falls too, but pedestrians feared bananas, which scientists have since confirmed rank among the slipperiest of fruits. Letters to the editor demanded harsh penalties for discarding peels. Theodore Roosevelt, then New York City’s chief of police, declared war on banana peels, and gave a public address to his captains and sergeants on "the bad habits of the banana skin, dwelling particularly on its tendency to toss people into the air and bring them down with terrific force on the hard pavement."

New Yorkers were not alone in fearing bananas. St. Louis took up the issue and banned the public disposal of peels, and accounts of death by discarded banana came even from Panama, a country intimately familiar with the fruit. But the scale was entirely different in New York City.

In other American cities, the garbage men did their jobs and cleared trash and banana peels from the streets. Yet according to Robin Nagle, anthropologist-in-residence for New York City's Department of Sanitation, in an interview with Collectors Weekly, “New York persisted in being infamously, disgustingly dirty.” It’s likely this confluence—New York City’s corruption, and its status as an entertainment capital—that led to movie stars and comics performing so many banana-peel gags. A weary Charlie Chaplin griped the only way to get a laugh was to have a character step over a banana peel and directly into a manhole.

In the 1890s, a police corruption scandal—incited by a minister who hired a private detective to show him the city’s illegal brothels, bars, and gambling venues, as well as the policemen enjoying them—exposed Tammany Hall corruption and swept a reformist mayor into office. The new mayor, in turn, appointed the man who would rescue New Yorkers from banana peels: George Waring.

Waring was a Civil-War colonel whose re-design of sewers in Memphis, Tennessee ended an era of local epidemics. As commissioner of street cleaning, he rooted out corruption and instilled military discipline. “He found the street-cleaning force a rabble and left it an army," the Times wrote. He insisted his men wear white uniforms—to the dismay of their wives—in order to associate them with health, ordered them to march down the streets, and prioritized cleaning poor neighborhoods.

They were not met with open arms. “In the really poor corners of the city, like Five Points, to see anyone from the local government come into the neighborhood was not good news for local residents,” Nagle explained. “They threw bricks at the street cleaners and came out to fight them with sticks.” But Waring sent them out again, and eventually, they won hearts and minds in the tenements by transforming New York’s streets. Soon enough, the trashmen had pride of place in city parades, and the mayor gave them “manly and helpful talk[s]” on the importance of their work. A corrupt department that once pocketed taxpayer money had become an exemplar of government service.

As trash and peels disappeared from city streets, banana slips lived on only in films and slapstick comedy. Now, decades later, people are puzzled by banana-peel gags, and question whether it’s even possible to slip on one. Our puzzlement, though, is a testament to the success of people such as Waring and his men, who cleaned the streets of New York and saved us from the scourge of banana peels.

Atlas Obscura readers share their favorite overhead wonders.

There's wonder all around, but it's easy to forget to look up. There's the ever-mutable sky up there, and for centuries, architects, artists, and designers have tried to outdo it, often in churches, libraries, mosques, and museums. Many of those buildings save their greatest, most jaw-dropping sights for their own versions of the heavens: ceilings. We recently asked the readers in our Community Forum to tell us about the most startling ceilings they've ever encountered. What we found was heavenly (unsurprising, since many of them reside in houses of worship) and worth all the neck strain.

Take a look at some of our favorite submissions below, and if there's an incredible ceiling you'd like to tell us about, head over to our forums and keep the conversation going! Here are some ceilings just bursting with the vision and artistry of a dozen Sistine Chapels.

Santa Maria de la Victoria

Málaga, Spain

“I went to the Basilica of Santa Maria de la Victoria in Málaga and, looking straight on at the altar, you can’t immediately tell that there’s a room behind it that you’re actually looking into. Then there are signs that direct you to continue upstairs to check it out.” — alexaharrison

Austrian Academy of Sciences

Vienna, Austria

“I was quite literally walking around Vienna looking for a place to pee. I went into the Austrian Academy of Sciences and found this awesome ceiling in their main meeting hall.” — tralfamadore

Hampton Court Palace

East Molesey, England

“I recently visited Hampton Court specifically to see the wonderful carpentry work of the hammerbeam roof of King Henry VIII’s Great Hall. It was designed to impress, and it still does.” — Jaguarfeather

Dalí Theatre-Museum

Figueres, Spain

“In the spirit of the grand, sacred, painted cathedral ceilings offered here, I submit one from the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain (Catalonia), in which Dalí has shown himself, and his beloved wife and muse Gala, from the soles up, holding up a portal to heaven … as Dalí imagined it. My favorite aspect is the way he, in an uncharacteristic gesture of modesty, tucked Gala’s dress close to her legs to as not to give a view that was TOO inspiring, and the drawers emanating from his own midsection.” — johnpendleton

Aachen Cathedral

Aachen, Germany

“The beautiful ceiling of Aachen Cathedral.” — jane_13527450

Hohenzollern Castle

Baden-Württemberg, Germany

“Castles can be a brilliant source of a beautiful ceiling as well.” — jane_13527450

Chiesa di Sant' Ignazio di Loyola

Rome, Italy

“Definitely seconding Chiesa di Sant' Ignazio di Loyola. The ceiling, by Jesuit Brother Andrea Pozzo, opens up and invites the viewer to gaze into the heavens. Figures representing the four corners of the world beckon to the global missionary reach of the Jesuit order. Above the transept, Pozzo created a false dome, tricking the viewers as they approach.” — malawijay

King's College Chapel

Cambridge, England

“The complex vaults of the lofty King's College Chapel, which I got to see at Cambridge University in England.” — Philip_Shane

San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane

Rome, Italy

“The fan vaulting at King’s College Chapel in Cambridge and the elliptical dome of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome are two of my favorites, among many. There are so many good gothic and Renaissance examples, I’m challenging myself (and anyone else curious) for good modern examples also.” — MisterCustomer

Strahov Library

Prague, Czechia

“Stumbling upon the Strahov Library in Prague was a beautiful surprise. Such a hidden gem. And the sweet docents are an added bonus <3.” — alisalynn

Los Angeles Central Library

Los Angeles, California

“Oh, yeah. Los Angeles Central Library is pretty gorgeous.” — tralfamadore

Christian Science Church

Boston, Massachusetts

— Asia_London_Palomba

Galeries Lafayette

Paris, France

“Galeries Lafayette department store.” — terrazu

Thomas Jefferson Building

Washington, D.C.

“The recently restored Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., has beautiful ceilings.” — kld123

Shah Mosque

Isfahan, Iran

— Asta

Alhambra

Grenada, Spain

“I can’t pick the most incredible, there’s just too many. But the Alhambra in Grenada, Spain, has SO many amazing and intricately carved ceilings.” — jfrzr

Palau de la Música Catalana

Barcelona, Spain

— MMateu

Gur-e-Amir

Samarkand, Uzbekistan

“The Gur-e-Amir mausoleum, Tamerlane’s resting place.” — chrisboswell25300

Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis

St. Louis, Missouri

“The Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis in Missouri is an amazing, beautiful example of the art of mosaic.” — feathrd1

Ohio Theatre

Columbus, Ohio

“A former movie palace (it still has the organ, which is used to accompany films during the summer movie series), which was restored and is now home to the Columbus Symphony and national tours of Broadway shows.” — QSAT

St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral

Washington, D.C.

— QSAT

Chiesa Santa Maria dei Miracoli

Venice, Italy

“My favorite ceiling is in the Chiesa Santa Maria Dei Miracoli in Venice. Every painting in the coffered ceiling is different.” — sdmichalove

Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque

Muscat, Oman

“The Grand Mosque of Oman was incredible.” — mackenzieprice13

Recognize anything?

It was December 1833, and the Reverend J. M. Peck was feeling pretty good about Chicago. In a letter to John Reynolds, the then-governor of Illinois, Peck marveled at the not-quite metropolis. His note, printed in New York’s Evening Post to inform and delight Easterners “who wish to hear from the ‘far West,’” detailed how Chicago was spreading its wings.

Buildings were sprouting up left and right, Peck reported. Seventy schooners and two steamboats had docked between April and September. The population was climbing. And there were 30 stores “and plenty of mechanics” to cater to residents’ needs. Eventually, Peck predicted, “Chicago is destined to outstrip every other town in the State.” It was a bold forecast, given that Chicago had been incorporated as a town only a few months before.

A hundred years later, in 1933, a pictorial map was drawn to revisit those earlier days—when Chicago's population was roughly 350—and highlight some scenes from 19th-century life. An 86-year-old print of the illustration is currently for sale through Geographicus Rare Antique Maps.

The 1933 map drew upon sources from 1833, plus 20th-century research by one Walter H. Conley, an architect and draftsman who is said to have spent two years sifting through local libraries and archives to bring the cartographic scene to life. Conley owed a great debt to Caroline McIlvaine too—a librarian, cataloguer, and researcher whose career included stints at the Newberry library and the Chicago Historical Society. The map’s caption notes that, in the early 1900s, McIlvaine had compiled recollections from locals who’d been alive in the previous century, then later worked with Conley to fold those historical details into this finished product.

The vignettes, illustrated by O. E. Stelzer (sometimes written as “D. E. Stelzer” in contemporary accounts), include watering holes, public works, and depictions of the Native Americans who called the area home. Long before white settlers landed here, this was the land of the Algonquian peoples.

Explore the map, and you’ll find some notable sites—like the home of Billy Caldwell. Also known as Sauganash, he was a fur trader of British and Potawatomi descent who negotiated treaties between the United States and Native communities.

You'll also see the Sauganash Hotel, a lodge that worked overtime as a meeting space and performance hall, plus a post office, taverns, schools, and the site of the second Fort Dearborn. (The original was destroyed in the War of 1812. Its replacement, which went up four years later, was decommissioned by the middle of the 19th century, and it soon vanished too.)

The illustration is bisected by the wriggling, rippling Chicago River, spanned by a drawbridge and flowing into Lake Michigan. Around the turn of the century, engineers would reverse the river’s flow in the name of public health, diverting the waste-strewn water from the lake, where, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, it was sullying the city’s water supply and contributing to outbreaks of typhoid and other diseases.

Toward the left-hand side of the illustration, there’s another winding path—not water, but earth—and a carriage setting out on the “Road to Detroit.” An annotation notes that mail rolled in once a week from Niles, Michigan.

A reproduction of this map ran in the Chicago Tribune in the summer of 1933, coinciding with the World’s Fair known as “A Century of Progress.” McIlvaine and Conley autographed copies of the map on the second floor of Marshall Field & Company; the famed department store sold prints of it for 50 cents a pop, or $2.25 for a version framed in “toned maple.” At the time, the map may have been a nostalgic gesture—a way of meditating, in the midst of a fair celebrating growth and innovation, on the changes that the city had witnessed in its own backyard.

Of course, a lot has changed since Chicago’s first wave of urbanization. The town would be incorporated as a city four years later, in 1837, and many aspects of the map would be unrecognizable to a visitor wandering around today: In the urban core, for instance, you’ll no longer find “dense forest” roamed by deer, or shores where beavers waddle and wade (though many furry, scaly, and feathery residents live inside the Lincoln Park Zoo).

But now that nearly another century has passed, the map offers a chance to hunt for Easter eggs still hiding around the city’s grid and shores. Several of the street names on the map—Lake, Randolph, Washington, and Madison reaching east and west; State, Dearborn, Clark, LaSalle, and Wells reaching north and south—still appear in the present-day Loop, though they’ve since been flanked by many other streets.

Next time you’re in Chicago, look closely as you wander the skyscrapers and bridge around Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive: You’ll see a smattering of plaques commemorating Fort Dearborn. The river’s flow has changed, but the water is still there, snaking below buildings and sidewalks teeming with tourists.

Now flick your eyes between the map and the modern-day streets, and you might just be able to imagine yourself meandering three centuries at once.

With a little help from scientists, an oak in the Harvard Forest is sharing updates about its life.

If you’ve been sweaty and miserable, resenting summer and aching for a cool breeze, you’re not alone. A northern red oak in the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, has been hot, too.

The tree hasn’t been complaining about it the way humans do; Quercus rubra doesn’t whine or get wrung out and cranky. But oaks—and the beech, birch, hemlock, white pine, and maple trees growing nearby—are going through "the same environmental things that we experience,” says Clarisse Hart, the director of outreach and education at the Harvard Forest, a 4,000-acre outdoor research laboratory owned and managed by the university. Humans are different from trees in so many ways, except for the ways we aren’t. Trees, Hart points out, are “absolutely experiencing heat, rain, growing, breathing, sweating, eating, doing all of these things that we do.”

For the northern red oak, that includes tweeting about a heat wave.

At 85 feet tall, this particular tree soars above many of its peers, and it’s more substantial, too, with a thicker trunk and a bigger crown. It’s also one of the most senior trees in its community, the forest’s Prospect Hill Tract. Much of the forest was flattened in the fierce, 186-mile-per-hour gusts of a hurricane that wailed through in 1938.

To Tim Rademacher, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and Northern Arizona University, what really distinguishes this tree from its neighbors is that it is equipped with a slew of sensors that feed data to a bot that he built to communicate to the world what is happening in and around the tree.

Rademacher had considered other trees for the Twitter treatment, including a maple. (He really loves syrup.) But this one stuck out as a good candidate. The species is really common in the area, and Rademacher and his colleagues hoped that familiarity would make it relatable. “We wanted something everyone could find in their backyard,” he says. Also, this specimen already had fans from when, a few years ago, journalist Lynda Mapes placed it at the center of her book The Witness Tree: Seasons of Change With a Century-Old Oak, which used the Harvard Forest as a microcosm for the wonder of the leafy realm and the threats posed by a glut of carbon dioxide and a warming climate. (The paperback comes out in August 2019.)

The tree has been tweeting from the @awitnesstree account since July 17, 2019, when it introduced itself as “one of the oldest living organisms on the internet!” (Clearly, the tree hasn’t yet met @SUEtheTrex, the Field Museum’s chatty, 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex.)

The tree will continue to fire off automated dispatches roughly six times a week for the foreseeable future, drawing on data coming in from sensors wedged into the tree and scattered around its neighborhood. One of the sensors, for example, punctures the bark to measure the flow of sap. Because sap’s journey through the roots, branches, and trunk is affected by water and temperature, keeping tabs on it helps researchers understand how the tree is responding to heat and drought. “The last two days were extremely hot for July,” the tree tweeted on July 21. “When is this heatwave going to end?”

Yesterday, it was very hot. With a daily average of 27 ℃ (80.5 ℉), it was the 24th hottest day I can remember.

— A witness tree (@awitnesstree) July 22, 2019

Other sensors, called dendrometers, measure seasonal and daily fluctuations in the tree’s trunk and branches. We know that growth rings document a tree’s expansion, year-to-year, over its life, but trees also bulge and shrink on a daily scale as they soak up water and then transpire it through their leaves. Scientists hope that understanding those patterns will shed more light on how the cells themselves help store carbon dioxide and offset greenhouse gas emissions. “This year, my trunk has grown roughly 1.5 mm (0.06 inches) in diameter,” the tree tweeted on July 24. It went on to describe its interior life, in a way: “The ‘late wood’ rings I am producing now look darker, and contain more carbon, than my faster-growing ‘early wood’ rings.”

The account also draws from images captured by the PhenoCam—a digital camera that snaps photos looking up at the tree’s canopy every 30 minutes—in addition to soil temperature, air temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind speed, and more gathered four times an hour at a nearby weather station. The PhenoCam is one of roughly a dozen positioned throughout the forest to collect information about leaves, wildlife, and more.

Scrolling through the Twitter feed is a bit like leafing through a diary. “We knew that we wanted the tree to speak in the first person,” Hart says. “That was important to us.” The team figured that the perspective “would be more engaging for the audience,” says Shawna Greyeyes, a rising sophomore at Coconino Community College in Flagstaff, Arizona, who is spending the summer working on the project as an intern at the Harvard Forest. “How many accounts are there with a tree speaking for itself?” At the same time, Rademacher adds, “We’ve tried to make sure that all of the messages are data-driven or environmental facts, things we know for sure, and not about how the tree ‘feels.’”

It’s a tricky balance. If the tree reports that it’s hot, that’s an objective observation—based on comparing the day’s temperature to decades of data—maybe playfully masquerading as a subjective one. But the tone is friendly and conversational—so much so that, a reader would be forgiven for forgetting that there wasn’t a brain, opposable thumbs, or a smartphone involved.

“My trunk and branches are on the fast track!” it tweeted on July 22, evoking a kid chuffed about a growth spurt. “My trunk has grown 0.255 mm and my branches 0.279 mm so far this month.” (Every little bit counts.) On July 21, it noted that the average temperature had worked out to 80.5 degrees Fahrenheit, making it “the 24th hottest day I can remember.” There is a growing body of research into what, exactly, plants “remember,” but this tweet was actually referring to the Harvard Forest data archive, which reaches back more than 55 years.

It’s pretty common for researchers to strap sensors to their subjects, from whales to trees, but this data doesn’t usually reach the general public in any direct, accessible way. “We want to have it be so that a person who knows nothing about trees could understand it,” Greyeyes says.

Rademacher also dreams about innumerable riffs on the concept, where almost anything could be outfitted with sensors and narrate its experiences of the changing world through a bot. “I’m dreaming of an ‘IoT,’ but an internet of trees, not things,” he says. An estuary could tweet about salinity and or storm surge, a mountain could tweet about erosion—and what a user chooses to follow could reflect their particular region or interests. “If you live in Arizona, you could follow a ponderosa [pine],” Rademacher muses. “We want to connect people to what’s happening around them.”

The project is funded by the National Science Foundation, and when that grant runs out, Rademacher will try to find a full-time position somewhere. Before he leaves, he hopes to set up the tweeting tree to communicate sustainably and self-sufficiently, so it can keep going without him. Scaling up the idea would require making the sensors and hardware a little tougher and more concealed, and cheap and self-contained, with a nearby wireless connection.

We can’t know how the tree “felt” about the recent heat wave in the Northeast, but Rademacher suspects that the data holds a sense of how the tree experienced a particular day. He imagines that on a scorching afternoon, the tree would stop photosynthesizing—the process is “too stressful”—and would shut the pores in its leaves to avoid losing water and wilting. He expects to see proof of this in the sap-flow record.

These specifics matter to researchers, but on a broader scale, the project is also a call for the casually curious—not just botanists and arborists—to look closely and sympathetically at our non-human neighbors. The trees, insects, birds around us—they’re all weathering the same changing world. We share it, after all.

Everyday memories—and national history—live on in this tiny Tuscan town.

Drive the long way from Florence to Arezzo, where the highways of western Tuscany gradually give way to sun-baked backroads, and it’s easy to miss the nondescript yellow placard. Planted just beyond the creeping vines of a local agriturismo, it reads CITTA’ DEL DIARIO—the City of Diaries.

In most respects the town is a picture of Tuscan tranquility. Off the main street, a woman sells homemade pasta from her front door. In the summer months, the Tiber River is so languid it hardly gurgles. Seen from the outskirts of nearby Caprese Michelangelo, the birthplace of the famed virtuoso, Pieve Santo Stefano (population 3,156) appears as little more than a speck of butterscotch shingles in a sea of rolling green hills.

But if you listen closely, the quiet speaks volumes.

More than 8,000 diaries reside here—nearly three per capita—in the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (ADN), or National Diary Archive. Many deal with war. Others with love, madness, adventure. Together, these journals—written by Italians from every province and profession—comprise one of the richest testaments to the Italian experience available anywhere in the world. And some 200 more arrive each year.

Yet the town’s peculiar claim to fame is rooted in tragedy. Seventy-five years ago—on August 5, 1944, roughly a year after the Mussolini regime had collapsed and the Nazis had occupied Italy—the townspeople of Pieve Santo Stefano were ripped from their beds under threat of death and marched north with whatever meager possessions they could carry. The town was promptly leveled.

"Referring to the town of [Pieve] S. Stefano ... the only remaining building is a church in the center of the town," read one of the first Allied reports to emerge from the region. "Apart from this, one may safely describe the town as a heap of rubble."

Years later, even after Pieve’s hasty postwar reconstruction, many still spoke of it as un paese cancellato—a town erased. Concrete sidewalks had supplanted cobblestone side streets. Ticky-tacky facades leapt from the ruins of 16th-century portici. What had once been described as a singular jewel of Tuscan charm now felt uniform, sterile—a graveyard of memory in the cradle of the Renaissance. "My Pieve. My Pieve," lamented a villager named Dante Crescioli, reflecting on the changing face of his hometown, "whose novelty is no more."

Or so it was until the arrival of Saverio Tutino.

Born in Milan in 1923, less than a year after Mussolini's rise to power, Tutino studied law before taking up arms as a member of the Italian Resistance in the mountains of Valle D'Aosta. After the war, he tramped the globe as a correspondent for l'Unità, the official newspaper of the Italian Communist Party (founded by the Marxist philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci). For the next four decades Tutino wrote almost constantly, publishing half a dozen books in addition to his reporting. Yet by the 1980s, his focus was elsewhere.

Having grown up in a culture with one of the richest storytelling traditions in the world—but few institutions dedicated to the preservation of grassroots histories—Tutino found himself increasingly captivated by the stories of those relegated to the sidelines of Italian scholarship. These were the people who had experienced the country's biggest upheavals firsthand but never had, in Tutino’s words, “un voce al capitolo”—"a say in the matter."

Tutino envisioned a new kind of repository—one that collected and celebrated first-person testimonials by ordinary Italians, from all walks of life.

In September 1984, Tutino visited Pieve Santo Stefano for an art exhibition. It struck him as the perfect place for a "House of Memory." Though the scope of the repository would be national, the proposal neatly dovetailed with the needs of a town still grappling with its own historical erasure.

Within a matter of weeks, then-Mayor Pietro Minelli approved the foundation of what would come to be known as the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale. Within a few years, word of the ADN spread through Italy and abroad, completely redefining Pieve Santo Stefano’s identity.

For some, Tutino's arrival was the stuff of serendipity—a fortuitous coincidence of time and place. But others see more deliberate forces at work.

"Saverio Tutino was [not just] the founder but also the soul of the archive," says Natalia Cangi, who now directs the ADN. "We like to think that [he] resolved to build the archive here as a sort of moral reparation for this place."

Regardless of Tutino’s intentions, the ADN was an immediate media sensation, thanks in large part to a concurrent innovation of its founder: il Premio Pieve, or the Pieve Prize. Eager to incentivize donations to his fledgling institution, Tutino paired its foundation with the announcement of a cash prize—1,000 euros, or $1,332—for the "best" diary, memoir, or epistolary collection submitted each year, as judged by a rotating panel of Italian literary critics who evaluate each donation based on its genuinità originale, or “original authenticity.”

If these criteria seemed ambiguous, few seemed to care. Submissions poured in from across the peninsula. Within weeks of the Premio's inception, the ADN received more than a hundred manuscript submissions. Some were directed to the prize committee, others to the archive.

They have never stopped arriving.

"Without the Premio," says Cristina Cangi, who now manages contest submissions, "I doubt we would have received even half of what we have now.

The diaries come in various forms—letters, memoirs, autobiographies. They're scribbled on paper, written longhand in journals, some even typewritten. Most are from the 20th century, though the earliest ones date to the 18th.

Today, visitors to Pieve have two options for perusing the town's trove of autobiographical materials: the ADN and its offshoot—il Piccolo Museo del Diario (the Little Museum of Diaries). Since 2013, this public-facing part of the archive (located just across the main square) has exhibited the archive's most spectacular holdings.

The entire four-room museum itself is tiny—roughly the size of a one-bedroom apartment. Yet its modest size belies the richness of its collection.

One room features a wall of wooden drawers, each containing a diary or written correspondence that's narrated aloud, via pre-recorded voiceover, when a drawer is opened. Another pays homage to Vincenzo Rabito (1899–1981), an illiterate Sicilian road worker who, at age 69, resolved to spend the next seven years painstakingly typing a 1,027-page phonetic manuscript of his life.

Finally, in the last room, is one item widely regarded as the ultimate embodiment of Tutino’s vision. Known simply as Il Lenzuolo, or "The Bedsheet," it hangs alone in the room, bathed in soft, yellow light behind a thin layer of protective glass. Save for three black-and-white photographs and a subtle border of faded pink ribbon, its face is a wall of dense, minuscule penmanship. It, too, is a diary.

As the story goes, its author—a semi-literate 72-year-old peasant named Clelia Marchi—was looking for a way to process the loss of her husband, whose sudden, accidental death continued to torment her 12 years after his passing. Finding herself out of paper one evening, she resolved to write her life story on the symbol of their union: their matrimonial bedsheet.

“I write my sadness at night, when I sleep little,” it reads, “[Because] I could not make use of this sheet with my husband any longer, I thought of putting it to use for writing.”

Elsewhere on the bedsheet, Marchia’s grief is even more palpable: “I feel empty, finished ... I spend my days crying. I would never have thought that after 50 years of married life we would be separated like that.”

Many first-time viewers of Il Lenzuolo report feeling physically staggered, as much by its scale as by the intense personal bond it evinces. That reaction is precisely why Cristina Cangi has made this town, and its mission, her home.

"That is the magic of this place," she says. "The chance to see the person behind the story—and through that process, to see your own."

A restoration project has given a once-iconic sculpture a new lease on life.

In 2015, Oakland’s most infamous monster was a washed-up husk. Its chartreuse color had faded to a drab white. Several of its knobbly concrete limbs had begun to crack. Orange shadows of rust had crept into its steel mesh frame.

It had become a menace, for all the wrong reasons, and the city had fenced it off for public-safety purposes.

But this year, after a long restoration project, the monster has finally been let out of its cage. And lo—it looks better (and greener) than ever.

The chunky, undulating sculpture affectionately known as the Mid-Century Monster was the midcentury brainchild of an Oakland parks administrator named William Penn Mott Jr. He wanted kids to have somewhere to play on the shores of Lake Merritt, according to Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Tired of seeing the same old swings and slides on playground structures everywhere, Mott commissioned the local artist Robert Winston—known for his rippling, free-flowing jewelry—to make a large piece of public art. Mott asked Winston to design something big enough that it could make kids feel like they were climbing trees.

Winston was up to the challenge. He designed a 40-foot-long structure, with angles and bends perfect for children to climb on, and all elegance of an Isamu Noguchi sculpture. In 1952 he completed the monster, which he painted light green. Two years later it graced the shores of the tidal lagoon.

The sculpture quickly became an Oakland icon, gracing the cover of Sly and the Family Stone’s 1968 album Dance to the Music. The cover shows the band members peering down from the monster’s green haunches.

But over the years the Mid-Century Monster fell into disrepair, weathered by time, use, and, well, weather. Its slow deterioration landed it behind a chain-link fence, where for years it was largely forgotten.

But then one day Oakland native Adrienne Schell read about the Mid-Century Monster in a children’s book called My City Is Oakland, by Kamaria Lofton. She’d never seen the sculpture herself, because it was tucked away in a corner of Lakeside Park that she’d never been to.

“After I visited and saw the state that it was in, I was curious to learn more,” Schell writes in an email. “I dug for information about it in the Oakland History Room at the main branch of our local library and was so fascinated by how it came to be.”

She soon changed her jogging route around the lake so that she would pass by the derelict monster. Then one day this year, much to her delight, she saw workers repairing it.

Like all the best monsters, Lake Merritt’s has groupies. Co-founded by Susan and Kyle Casentini, the Lake Merritt’s Mid-Century Monster Fan Club—a group so dedicated that it even has T-shirts—spearheaded a renovation and repainting effort. It kicked off in January, and was completed in just a few months. Now the monster is back in all its green glory.

To celebrate the beast’s return, the fan club is throwing a party this Saturday, July 28. Ample time is scheduled for selfies with the monster, whose unveiling will be scored by Oakland’s municipal band. Everyone is welcome, and participants are encouraged to bring their own hula hoop.

For now, at least, the monster’s future looks bright (green) once again.

A new book is an ode to chickpeas and the people that love them.

An Ottoman fable recounts Mehmed the Conqueror’s tradition of adding a chickpea made of pure gold to the evening’s chickpea pilaf during Ramadan. The lucky guest who found it could keep the special gift. It was with this tale in mind that graphic designer and editor Dan Alexander conceived the cover of his 408-page cookbook, Hummus, in a warm golden color.

The book is a transnational love story about “hummus,” which is the Arabic (and modern Hebrew) word for chickpea. Across the Middle East, people have a passionate relationship with the tiny legume and the variety of ambrosial dishes that can be made with it.

“As I reflect on my history with this wonderful [legume], it really is a symbol of the Middle East,” writes the British-Palestinian chef Joudie Kalla, whose family is from Jaffa. The book's contributors, whether chefs, philosophers, or sociologists, all believe that hummus is perfect. Besides being nutritious, healthy, and delicious, they describe it as "an essential culinary truth," or even "magical." One chef quotes Hazan, a falafel stall owner in Nazareth, who told her, "There's a secret in every falafel ball."

Hummus is as much an art book as a cookbook, and its organizing principle is geography. Alexander wanted to make the book a journey “between cities, people, and dreams” where borders and political arguments had vanished. The book focuses on nine cities—Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, Gaza, Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Acre, Nazareth—that comprise “the hummus route.”

The book begins in Cairo with cultural anthropologist and cookbook author Claudia Roden, an Egyptian Jew whose grandparents were from Aleppo, Syria. In the 1950s, during the conflict between Israel and Egypt, her family emigrated to London, where, she writes, “Although we had left Egypt, Egypt had not left us. Food was the one thing we could hold on to and preserve from our previous life, and it was the food that we cooked in our lively kitchen that brought us joy.”

Roden includes a family recipe for chicken and chickpea casserole; we also find a recipe for the inescapable Cairene street food dish koshary, an addictive mix of chickpeas, lentils, and rice with a spicy tomato sauce. Falafel made with chickpeas is notably absent—Egypt is the sole country that makes falafel with broad beans.

In Beirut, we hear from another expatriate: Paris-based chef Karim Haidar, who confides that he has little memory of hummus or chickpeas during his childhood in Beirut. But as a chef in Paris, he rediscovered hummus and experimented by adding a touch of orange blossom water to the dip and creating hummus ice cream. Cosmopolitan Beirut is known for its creative streak and, fittingly, the recipes include twists such as hummus with squid ink and bottarga.

In Damascus, chef Mohammad Orfali describes the city’s famous fata, or fattet, a street food made with crumbled flatbread, chickpeas, tahini, yogurt, and lemon juice. But Beirut is not the only city that gets creative with its hummus. Damascus-born Farouk Mardam-Bey, author of The Chickpea Treatise, adds that hummus can be served in many ways: “topped with chopped parsley, chickpeas or fava beans, cumin, and even ground chili powder. It can also be garnished with lamb confit, minced meat, slices of sujuk (spicy sausage), or basturma (Armenian-style cured meat), or simply, with pine nuts fried in butter, or even better in samneh (clarified butter).”

In Gaza, journalist and musician Mousa Tawfiq recounts how every Friday his mother wakes early to grind chickpeas and make falafel and hummus for the family—despite her husband’s complaints that chickpeas don’t agree with him. His mother and her friends, most of whom grew up in refugee camps and live under the decades-long Israeli blockade, believe that “hummus and falafel are an indispensable part of our heritage and history.” Making these dishes “is about memories and people. It is about our stories that we want to tell.” Gazan falafel often contains generous amounts of fresh herbs, which make the falafel balls bright green, with aromas of garlic and dill. Their cooking is also the spiciest within Palestine, and here a slow-cooked, chickpea-and-veal stew calls for two to three red Shatta (chili) peppers.

In Jerusalem, whether East or West, hummus and falafel joints can be found everywhere. “Hummus? It’s God’s!” says East Jerusalem restaurant owner Hassan al-Baghdadi, who for over 40 years has risen every day to make his hummus by hand with a mortar and pestle. Among the Jerusalem chickpea recipes, we find one from the city’s Yemenite Falafel Center that calls for spices that are unusual for Levantine falafel: cardamom, cloves, and chili peppers. Most Israelis got their first taste of this more exotic falafel when Yemeni-Jewish immigrants arrived in Israel in the 1950s.

Of course a project about hummus couldn’t just be “all peace and love,” says Alexander, referring to the Israeli-Jewish obsession with hummus that many Palestinians see as just another form of appropriation, particularly when Israelis market it as their own invention. “It’s very easy—I know that hummus is a Palestinian dish,” says Alexander, who is Israeli but lives in France. “[But] I think the chickpea embodies the history of the Middle East [and] also of humanity. We began using it 8,000 years ago, and it remains with us and will be there long after us.”

Palestinian-Israeli scientist and chef Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, who founded the Arab food festival A-Sham in Haifa, Israel, echoes this sentiment in her essay. Hummus “is a cosmopolitan seed that is slowly wandering the world and becoming assimilated in different food cultures,” she writes. “It is a seed that has caused political storms, and yet managed to remain loved by everyone. And while everyone wants to claim ownership over hummus, it has the last laugh, because the truth is, it has ownership over all of us.”

Alexander’s vision of an enlightened space in which people’s love for chickpeas can co-exist echoes a time only four generations ago when the region’s Muslims, Christians, and Jews attended each other’s religious celebrations and shared each other’s food. While putting together the book was a monumental task, Alexander says that, along the way, "I discovered some amazing souls, people who made hummus always with so much love."

Hummus, he says, offers endless possibilities.

Step 1: Evict all the pigs.

For years, the Kanaele bog didn’t look like itself. Instead of its characteristically, consistently moist, spongy ground, the bog brimmed with muddy, misshapen puddles. In place of a natural garden of native flowers and grasses, ferociously invasive strawberry guava trees sprouted at every turn. And there were no white-tailed tropicbirds circling overhead, just feral pigs trampling the ground and fiending for food. It was a fallen bog.

Kanaele is an unusual bog for Hawaiʻi, which makes it a rarity among rarities. It is the state’s only lowland bog ecosystem (the uncommon others are montane), Kanaele was a natural gem—at least if you’re a bog scientist, and before it was overrun with non-native plants and feral pigs. But now a cleanup project, 16 years in the making, has restored Kanaele to its former quaggy glory.

Nestled deep within the amphitheater of the lime-green mountains in southern Kauaʻi, Kanaele is hard to get to—which isn’t actually inconvenient, as it’s not open to the public. The bog is tucked away behind the town of Kalaheo at an elevation of 2,100 feet, accessible only by winding private roads that demand four-wheel drive. The land Kanaele is on is owned by the real estate company Alexander & Baldwin, which recognized the sorry state of the bog and signed a 10-year management agreement with the nonprofit The Nature Conservancy (TNC) to get the ecosystem back on track. The Kanaele preserve is also a part of the Kauaʻi Watershed Alliance, a public-private partnership of landowners committed to protecting Kauaʻi’s watersheds.

The challenge was enormous, mostly because of the pigs. Pigs love bogs because pigs love digging, and moist bog soil is more snout-friendly than the dry, hard sort. Hawaiʻi’s feral pigs aren’t the soft and lazy type. Bristly, and sometimes with an intimidating set of tusks (the better for destructive digging), they had done a real number on the bog. Tasty native plants had evolved to grow without large grazers and rooters such as pigs, and therefore never needed the kind of evolutionary trickery that other plants developed to stay alive, according to Melissa Fisher, the director of TNC’s forest program in Kauaʻi. “Hawaiian mint is mintless,” she says, by way of example. “It’s part of the mint family, but it doesn’t smell like mint. So pigs love it.”

And even after the foraging ferals move on, their snouts and hooves leave behind mud puddles that disrupt the bog’s hydrology and become prime breeding ground for mosquitoes, which carry diseases fatal to the island’s native honeycreepers. The small birds pollinate native plants such as the ʻōhā wai, or the Pele lobeliad, a sizeable shrub with talon-shaped flowers the color of ripe eggplant. The pigs are basically a perfect storm of bog insults.

“We knew we’d lose the battle until we removed the feral pigs,” Fisher says. So TNC members and volunteers built a sprawling, 6,552-foot-long protective fence around the 57 acres of Kanaele. The fence is made of rather aptly named hog wire.

After the bog was safely enclosed and pork-free, it was time to weed. The main perpetrator was the fragrant, deceptively attractive strawberry guava plant, or Psidium cattleianum, an invasive species that has decimated Hawaiian forests since it arrived on the islands in 1825. Strawberry guava, though charming, is also almost impossible to kill. It produces sweet fruit beloved by animals (including humans). “Pigs love it, birds love it, and humans love it,” Fisher says. “So it definitely outcompetes native plants.” Strawberry guava is also a sneaky invader, as it can grow multiple trunks from just one plant. As the invasive weed specialist Chuck Chimera told The Atlantic, the plant is just like the Hydra: “Cut off its head and five or 10 will spring up in its place.”

So it wouldn’t be enough to rip the plants out by their roots. Instead, Fisher and the other weeders used knives to feather the bark of the plant and apply a tiny drop of herbicide on each one, usually dyed bright pink or blue. But it’s a delicate process. “We’re very careful with the amount we use,” Fisher says. “We measure all the herbicide to know how much is used in an area because we have to be careful not to kill native plants.”

One of the hardest parts of the treatment plan was merely getting around the bog, especially without causing further damage. For all their ecological fragility, bogs are more treacherous than they appear. Fisher and the other volunteers had to walk around the fenced perimeter of Kanaele before venturing to an area deeper in the bog. “It’s quite wet and spongy,” she says. “If you’re not watching yourself, you could sink up to your knee.” After marking a plant for death, the weeders documented the areas they covered in a geographical information system to determine where they would need to re-weed in the future. Weeding is never a thing you do just once.

Since the weeding started in 2008, TNC has removed more than 90,000 plants from the bog, 82,437 of which were strawberry guava. Other offenders include the Asian melastoma, a shrub with purple flowers, and clidemia, a densely thicketing plant with shiny leaves. In Hawaiʻi, it seems, even the weeds are pretty. But once the pigs and alien plants were gone, Kanaele began to replant itself with what thrived before. “It’s not restoration work in the sense of planting plants, but taking away the threat,” Fisher says.

When the restoration began, Fisher and the TNC team weeded every few weeks. Now they only need to return three or four times a year. Under the guidance of TNC, Kanaele has once again become Hawaiʻi’s last intact lowland bog. All the others had already been trampled out and overtaken beyond the point of saving.

In its natural form, Kanaele is precious in part because so many of its lifeforms are miniaturized. The ground is both waterlogged, from the 160 inches of rain it receives each year, and unusually acidic, conditions that stunt the growth of the various species of flora that make their home there. Many of the species that grow in these conditions exist in no other habitat in Hawaiʻi, or any other bogs around the world, for that matter. Healthy Kanaele now swarms with low-lying species, such as native grasses, sedges, mosses, and lichens, as well as dwarfed trees such as the ʻōlapa, a flowering ginseng, and the modest green shrub hame and the Pele lobeliad. A refuge for the lobeliad is particularly welcome. Of the 126 species of lobeliads native to Hawaiʻi, half are endangered and as many as 20 may be extinct, according to Keola Magazine. The critically imperiled Viola helenae, or Wahiawa stream violet, has also returned to Kanaele. These bog-based violets can grow up to 26 feet tall, and only thrive in two known wild populations.

The most famous among the bog’s native flora is the mikinalo, or carnivorous sundew. Though the mikinalo is found in Japan and southern Europe, the Hawaiian population is a subtropical variant that grows much smaller and does not experience a winter dormancy period. On Kauiʻi, mikinalo are diminutive—just around two or three inches tall—and delicate predators that feed on insects. Bugs are drawn to the mikinalo’s nectar, which functions as a glue trap. Then tiny fuschia mucilaginous tentacles—yes, they're really called tentacles—carry more and more glue until the critter is covered, consumed, and digested. Mikinalo often grow nestled among the spiky shards of native sedges, where it can be spotted with its hot pink tentacles.

Since the initial phases of the project were completed sometime around 2015, when Fisher returns to weed a little more, she’s been astonished by the native species that have returned, and ones that just pass through. She’s noticed native damselflies buzzing around streams and the migratory Pacific golden plovers hopping around the misty ground. This year, she even swears she spotted a pueo, the elusive Hawaiian owl, endemic to the island chain. And when she steps outside the fence to lock up Kanaele—the fence will remain as long as the pigs do, which seems to be forever—the water running out of the bog is no longer muddy, but clear. “These areas can change,” she says. “They can heal themselves.”

The newly minted doctors had deft handiwork.

In 1896, a group of women in Philadelphia embroidered a white pillow sham. It was crisp and creamy, with a frilly, ruched border edged with eyelets and tiny white flowers. There was nothing especially unusual about the pillow covering—at least until these women got their hands on it.

They stitched their signatures across it, in tidy loops and swoops of red, yellow, and black. And around their names they embroidered some symbols of their trade: a doctor’s bag, a thermometer, a skeleton, a figure, unsmiling and broad-shouldered, decked out in a cap and gown.

One side of the sham read, in elaborate crimson letters, “W M C of P.” The embroiderers were newly minted physicians from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, and they were ready to leave their mark.

The Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania—which began its life, in 1850, as the Quaker-founded Female Medical College of Pennsylvania—was among the earliest American institutions to grant degrees to female physicians. The school eventually went coed, and was rebranded as the Medical College of Pennsylvania, then merged with Hahnemann University (formerly known as Hahnemann Medical College), and eventually became part of Drexel University. The sham is now in the collection of Drexel’s Legacy Center. There, archivists store it in a large, flat box, and it sits alongside photographs, letters, journals, and other ephemera that narrate the experiences of some of America’s first female MDs—both inside and outside the hospital.

Many women of the time were eager to become doctors. “Medicine attracted more women votaries in the 19th century than any other profession except teaching,” writes historian Regina Morantz-Sanchez in the anthology Sickness & Health in America, Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health. According to Morantz-Sanchez, by 1900, there were several thousand female physicians in the United States. (Women still only made up only a single-digit percentage of practicing doctors, and according to the American Medical Association, this held true until well into the 20th century.)

At the Woman’s Medical College, at least, the curriculum spanned anatomy, chemistry, physiology, hygiene, and more. Students scribbled notes in lectures, peered through microscopes, bandaged wounds, and dissected cadavers while wearing waist-nipping, floor-grazing dresses. On one busy February day in 1893, a student told her diary that she had spent four hours in the laboratory, followed by three hours of classroom instruction, and then three hours with her cadaver. But training—and possible career paths—often differed for men and women.

At the time, female doctors were often shunted toward obstetrics and maternal health; in an era in which health reformers had appointed women the stewards of family well-being and hygiene, female physicians were frequently trained mostly treat other women and their children, with a focus on preventive care. So students at the college paid house calls to pregnant patients, and collected urine samples and performed pelvic exams outside the hospital. The male students studying nearby were way less likely to do so. Prior to the 20th century, writes nephrologist and author Steven J. Peitzman in a history of the college, “such practical maternity work occurred rarely in all-male American schools, from many of which it was possible to graduate without ever having delivered a baby.”

But some female doctors delighted in the advantages of a focus on preventative care and intimate access to patients' lives. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in America, and her physician sister, Emily, once remarked that female doctors bridged public and private worlds, “occupying positions which men cannot fully occupy, and exercising an influence which men cannot wield at all.” And Prudence Saur, trained at the Woman’s Medical College, argued that female physicians had a particular potency: “How much more God-like, to prevent as well as cure!”

The class of 1896 made a particular point to document their lives with their teachers, patients, peers, and cadavers. The class historian, Laura Heath Hills, collected their experiences in a notebook, “Souvenirs of the Class of 1896.” Its handwritten pages include musings about whether a premature infant would survive the night in her incubator, and how the class president had earned a plum position by touching “the arthritic spot” in another doctor’s heart.

The doctors-to-be also chronicled their lives outside of the classroom, but medicine was rather all-consuming. The students snapped photos of one another poring over brick-thick books, or scrutinizing a bone against leafy wallpaper. They bonded in their snug bedrooms and over shared meals, and they pulled pranks, such as smuggling skeletons into their dormitory and dressing them up in jaunty jackets and caps.

The embroidered sham, which the archivists believe may have been presented to the dean as a gift, nods to these slivers of life away from scalpels and forceps. In neat needlework—which notably resembles sutures—the students crafted little flowers and birds, and placed two names in interlocking hearts. They added two bicycles, as well, maybe a reminder of how they navigated campus, or perhaps as a celebration of setting out down a new and unfamiliar path, with the breeze in their hair.

William Dampier's food-writing firsts included the use of the words "barbecue" and "chopsticks."

For all the perceived glamour of piracy, its practitioners lived poorly and ate worse. Skirting death, mutiny, and capture left little room for comfort or transformative culinary experience. The greatest names in piracy, wealthy by the day’s standards, ate as one today might on a poorly provisioned camping trip: dried beef, bread, and warm beer. Those of lesser fame were subject to cannibalism and scurvy. The seas were no place for an adventurous appetite.

But when one gifted pirate permitted himself a curiosity for food, he played a pioneering role in spreading ingredients and cuisines. He gave us the words “tortilla,” “soy sauce,” and “breadfruit,” while unknowingly recording the first ever recipe for guacamole. And who better to expose the Western world to the far corners of our planet’s culinary bounty than someone who by necessity made them his hiding places?

British-born William Dampier began a life of piracy in 1679 in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche. Orphaned in his late teens, Dampier set sail for the Caribbean and fell into a twentysomething job scramble. Seeing no future in logging or sugar plantations, he was sucked into the burgeoning realm of New World raiding, beginning what would be the first of his record-breaking three circumnavigations. A prolific diarist, Dampier kept a journal wrapped in a wax-sealed bamboo tube throughout his journeys. During a year-long prison sentence in Spain in 1694, Dampier would convert these notes into a novel that became a bestseller and seminal travelogue.

Parts of A New Voyage Around the World read like a 17th-century episode of No Reservations, with Dampier playing a high-stakes version of Anthony Bourdain. Aside from writing groundbreaking observations on previously un-researched subjects in meteorology, maritime navigation, and zoology, food was a constant throughout his work. He ate with the locals, observing and employing their practices not only to feed himself and his crew but to amass a body of knowledge that would expand European understanding of non-Western cuisine. In Panama, Dampier traveled with men of the Miskito tribe, hunting and eating manatee. “Their flesh is … [extraordinarily] sweet, wholesome meat,” he wrote. “The tail of a young cow is most esteemed. A calf that sucks is the most delicate meat.” His crew took to roasting filleted bellies over open flames.

Dampier was later smitten, on the island of Cape Verde, by the taste of flamingo. “The flesh of both young and old is lean and black, yet very good meat, tasting neither fishy [nor] any way unsavoury,” he wrote. “Their tongues are large, having a large knob of fat at the root, which is an excellent bit: a dish of flamingo’s tongue [is] fit for a prince’s table.” Of Galapagos penguins, Dampier found “their flesh ordinary, but their eggs [to be] good meat.” He also became a connoisseur of sea turtles, having developed a preference for grass-fed specimens of the West Indies: “They are the best of that sort, both for largeness and sweetness.”

While flamingos, penguins, and turtles never caught on, several contributions from A New Voyage reshaped our modern English food vocabulary. In the Bay of Panama, Damier wrote of a fruit “as big as a large lemon … [with] skin [like] black bark, and pretty smooth.” Lacking distinct flavor, he wrote, the ripened fruit was “mixed with sugar and lime juice and beaten together [on] a plate.” This was likely the English language’s very first recipe for guacamole. Later, in the Philippines, Dampier noted of young mangoes that locals “cut them in two pieces and pickled them with salt and vinegar, in which they put some cloves of garlic.” This was the English language’s first recipe for mango chutney. His use of the terms “chopsticks,” “barbecue,” “cashew,” “kumquat,” “tortilla,” and “soy sauce” were also the first of their kind.

One entry, however, would have dire consequences for the Crown and one unfortunate crew in the South Pacific. Dampier wrote passionately of a Tahitian fruit: “When [it] is ripe it is yellow and soft; and the taste is delicious … The inside is soft, tender, and white, like the crumb of a pennyloaf.” He and his men dubbed it breadfruit. For British sugar planters of the West Indies, who struggled to feed their slaves on small plots of land, these broad-branched, fast-growing, nutritious fruits, which required little cultivation and stood up to hurricane winds, rang of an ideal solution. Dampier unknowingly sold the British on breadfruit, which served as the impetus for a British mission to bring a thousand potted breadfruit trees from the South Pacific around the Horn of Africa to the West Indies. With the ship retrofitted to shelter the saplings, the miserably crammed and mistreated crew mutinied, leading to the fiasco, book, and film that came to be known as the Mutiny on the Bounty.

In the years following its publication, A New Voyage became an international bestseller, skyrocketing Dampier to wealth and fame. The first of its kind, the work generated a hunger among European audiences for travel writing, serving as an inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Charles Darwin brought a copy of A New Voyage with him aboard the Beagle’s voyage to South America, having cited the book as a “mine of information.” Noting his keen eye for wind and current mapping, the British Royal Navy consulted him on best practices, later extending him captainship of the HMS Roebuck, on which he was commissioned for an in-depth exploration of South Africa, Australia, and Indonesia.

Despite the popular excusal of his pirating days, Dampier eluded long-term renown due to one entry from A New Voyage. His observations on the aboriginals of Australia were employed, decades after its publication, as justification for the colonization of Oceania and the subsequent genocide of its original inhabitants. In 1697, he wrote that “the inhabitants of this country are the miserablest people in the world. They differ but little from brutes.” And indeed, viewing the aboriginals on a scientific expedition in 1770, Sir Joseph Banks, president of the British Royal Society and advisor to King George III, wrote, “So far did the prejudices which we had built on Dampier’s account influence us that we fancied we could see their color when we could scarce distinguish whether or not they were men.” The later publication of a full transcript of Dampier’s journals does indicate an up-close and far more favorable analysis of the aboriginals, yet by then the Crown’s campaign to colonize was well underway, and his reputation as a bigot was sewn. For generations, Dampier was taught throughout much of the Commonwealth as, first and only, a piratical figure.

Other negative testimony accumulated against him in court-martials later on as well: He lost the Roebuck to a leak and was accused of mistreating and even marooning subordinates—par for the course in the life of a pirate. Disgraced and indebted by court fines, Dampier died penniless, and his exploits became mere footnotes between the nary-criminal lives of Sir Walter Raleigh and James Cook. Nevertheless, each time you order avocado toast, call some friends over for a barbecue, or ask for a pair of chopsticks, you are living Dampier’s legacy.

During a crisis, locals turned their root cellars into an attraction.

For hundreds of years, Elliston, a tiny town in Newfoundland, Canada’s most eastern province, was a fishing community. And cod was king. To this day, the lean white fish is so central to local culture that “fish” in Newfoundland is simply shorthand for cod.

But the cod couldn’t last forever. In 1992, due to overexploitation, the Canadian government imposed a cod fishing moratorium. Overnight, thousands of livelihoods were wiped out. Many locals left for work in other provinces. The few who stayed behind were convinced the moratorium would be short-lived. It wasn’t. In Elliston, even the street lights flickered out, once there was no longer a large enough tax base to pay the electricity bill.

Faced with one of the darkest periods in the town’s history, Marilyn Coles-Hayley, the chairperson of Tourism Elliston, and a few other residents decided to put some of the legendary Newfoundland bootstrapping spirit to work. “We thought of what we could offer that was unique,” she says. “Number one was our root cellars.”

Visitors passing through Elliston had long noticed the primordial-looking structures dotted throughout the town. Venturing inside your typical root cellar, a small vestibule leads to a door, beyond which is a small, dark chamber redolent of earth and moss. Troughs all along the walls hold root vegetables: potatoes, beets, parsnips, and carrots.

From the outside, the grass-covered mounds with their latched wooden portals seem like quaint homes for hobbits. But for centuries, such cellars kept Elliston residents alive. “Everyone had a cod fishing boat, a subsistence garden where they grew root vegetables, and a root cellar to store them during the long winter,” says Coles-Hayley. “Before refrigerators, root cellaring was essential in winter. Without them, people would not have been able to survive.”

Beyond a mere attraction, locals knew that root cellars could tell the story of Newfoundland, a place where hyper-local food has always been a necessity rather than a lifestyle option. So, in July 2000, they declared Elliston “The Root Cellar Capital of the World.”

Some Elliston families had maintained and used their root cellars over generations. Others were decayed. So the town organized a restoration of a number of its root cellars, while leaving some as-is. But even the run-down specimens had a "ruin porn" appeal for visitors coming to snap cellar photos.

Many root cellars received new roofs and concrete reinforcements. According to Sid Chaulk, a volunteer on the restoration team, they restored 43 cellars between 1999 and 2001. Older members of the community provided vital information on root cellar construction. For example, the short corridor, known as the porch, helps keep frost out, as do the doors. “These cellars always have two doors, though some even have three,” he says. “You were taught to shut the first door before you opened the second.”

Even after fridges became popular, the rustic-looking cellars proved to be superior storage facilities. They provide just the right level of humidity to keep vegetables fresh and frost-free for months and months. Due to layers of insulating earth and rock, root cellar temperatures never dip below freezing, and never climb higher than 8°C. Many regional dishes are based around the vegetables stored in cellars: Jiggs dinner, a quintessential Newfoundland Sunday meal of boiled carrots, turnips, potatoes, cabbage, pease pudding, and salt beef, is the most iconic. Bottled moose with a side of boiled root vegetables is another.

Soon after the declaration, a group of Memorial University students undertook to document and map the town’s root cellars. Toronto-raised Crystal Braye, a lead student on the project, had never seen a root cellar before. She recalls spending the summer traipsing around the town, interviewing older members of the community while collecting “measurements and GPS coordinates,” she says. They found 135 root cellars around Elliston (a town of 308 people). The earliest dated back to 1839.

Their study identified five different types of root cellars. Because of its rocky local landscape, Elliston’s root cellars are predominantly the double-door, ground-level entrance variety. Built into hills, rather than dug underground, they were often sealed with moss before the introduction of concrete. Another popular style was the “hatched entrance,” a mound cellar where you enter through the roof.

A map of the town’s root cellars is available at the Elliston visitor center. While planning a vacation around root cellars seems like something out of Monty Python, root cellars do draw visitors to the town, along with prime iceberg, whale, and puffin viewing. Another attraction is the Roots, Rants and Roars food festival (“rant” is Newfoundland-speak for great conversation, not a fit of anger). The September festival consists of a scenic hike through the area, with stops at tasting stations for dishes using local ingredients. Chefs Chris Sheppard and Roger Dewling are in charge. “We want to make sure it is and remains a celebration of root cellars and the food that comes out of root cellars,” says Sheppard, who once made a root cellar donut: a carrot donut with parsnip cream-cheese icing and fried beets on top.

Some abandoned cellars now belong to the town. “We put vegetables in the root cellar in September,” says Coles-Hayley. Those are used for the annual Bird Island Puffin Festival in July, when locals cook a big Jiggs dinner for attendees in a local park.

Beyond tourism, these powered-down storage systems resonate with a new generation focused on locally grown foods and the greenest ways of preserving them. Elliston residents are still restoring old cellars and building new ones. As Braye concluded in a paper after her summer of fieldwork, not only are the root cellars of Elliston “anchors to practices and values of past generations,” they also serve as inspiration for a more sustainable future.

These tamarins have an affinity for disturbed rain forest.

The Amazon rain forest still dominates much of northern South America, stretching across nine countries and providing a home to countless creatures and plants, large and small. Amid alarming news about its future, both animal life and indigenous tribes are increasingly being forced to relocate as deforestation and mining encroach deeper into the forest. Up against these threats, two pint-sized monkeys are proving to be engines for rebuilding forest spaces—with their feces.

Mustached and black-fronted tamarins eat a varied diet, but they’re known to frequent Parkia parunensis, a plant with a flower that looks not unlike a sea anemone, all pink and plumed. Inhabiting the borderlands between Peru and Brazil, the little monkeys' habitat often overlaps with human interests. The animals are not endangered, but they suffer just the same when the forest canopies they call home are clear-cut. According to a recent paper published in Nature, however, the tamarins tenaciously help reclaim damaged forest by dispersing their seed-rich droppings in the areas humans had razed.

Typically, when a tract of rain forest is clear-cut, the animals who used to call it home flee—and don’t come back for a long time. According to Karen Holl, a restoration ecologist at the University of California Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the research, many species will not “venture out of more intact forest.” But these tamarins are different, as they appear to have an affinity for the logged areas.

“Over the years, data accumulated on the tamarins' habitat use,” says lead author of the study Eckhard Heymann, of the Liebnitz Center for Primate Research in Göttingen, Germany, via email. “When we looked at these data in retrospect, we realized that the tamarins had increased their use of the disturbed area.”

To the research team’s surprise, the tamarins enter deforested areas soon after they are cleared, leaving a wake of P. parunensis seeds behind them. Over a 20-year period, Heymann’s team witnessed how the two species ingested seeds in the existing, primary forest, and then deposited them in places humans had cut down, kickstarting the forest rehab process.

“Populations of many of these fauna have declined due to a number of reasons, primarily overhunting and habitat fragmentation,” says Holl. “It is good news that the tamarins are dispersing seeds of a variety of primary forest species, and it is particularly interesting they are increasingly dispersing larger-seeded, later successional species from primary to secondary forest over time.”

It takes a while for rain forest to recover—if it ever truly does—but these two hungry, indiscriminate tamarins have shown themselves to be indispensable to the process.

But it’s not easy to say how long the Anglo-Zanzibar War actually was.

Sayyid Khalid bin Barghash Al-Busaid got to be sultan for a day. A little more than that, actually—42 hours—give or take 10 crucial minutes.

It was August 1896 in Zanzibar, the island off the East African coast that is now part of Tanzania, and Khalid’s cousin, Sultan Hamad, had died suddenly. Rumors spread that he had been poisoned, and Khalid was under a cloud of suspicion. In Zanzibar, according to Geoffrey Owens, an anthropologist at Wright State University, “There was a long history of brothers and uncles and cousins trying to overthrow one another.” But the young prince was likely more concerned with the British Empire, which was threatening to declare war on him.

The Anglo-Zanzibar War, as the ensuing conflict is known, was composed of a single battle between an empire upon which the sun never set and an island nation half the size of Rhode Island. It has gone down in history as one of the most lopsided conflicts in history, and certainly the shortest. But due to the murky matters of the rules of engagement, inconsistent reporting, and an extreme lack of clocks on the scene, it’s impossible to say how long the “shortest war” truly lasted.

At the time, Zanzibar was technically its own country, though the British had established a protectorate in the region. The colonial power had coveted the island for its clove industry, which was the largest in the world at the time. Zanzibar’s governing structure was “dual jurisdiction,” in which the British legal structure functioned alongside the Zanzibari sultanate, itself a product of the island’s previous colonization by Omani Arabs earlier in the 19th century.

“The British, at that point, they want a lapdog,” says Elisabeth McMahon, a historian at Tulane University who specializes in East Africa. “They want someone wholly in their pocket.”

Khalid was not that person. The British had been seeking to end slavery in Zanzibar, an agenda that Khalid’s father, when he was sultan, had notoriously resisted. Hamad had been more cooperative toward British interests, but Khalid was openly defiant of their authority. He had attempted to take the throne before, so when he abruptly announced himself sultan after Hamad’s death, the British went into crisis mode. They were supposed to have approval over who became sultan. Consul Basil Cave and the portly First Minister Lloyd William Mathews rallied their naval power. Cave warned Khalid his declaration of sovereignty constituted an act of rebellion. Things escalated quickly.

“Are we authorised in the event of all attempts at a peaceful solution proving useless,” Cave wrote to British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, “to fire on the Palace from the men-of-war?”

Salisbury assured Cave that he had the crown’s support. Khalid, ever-defiant, quickly overplayed his hand. A messenger from the Zanzibari palace declared to the Brits, “We have no intention of hauling down our flag and we do not believe you would open fire on us.” Whoops. In a curtly British reply, Cave responded, “We do not want to open fire, but unless you do as you are told we shall certainly do so.” What happened next was—technically, at least—a war.

Asked about the definition of war, Michael Rainsborough, head of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, turns to the writings of Prussian general and war theorist Carl von Clausewitz. In his treatise Vom Kriege (On War), von Clausewitz defined it as “an act of violence intended to fulfill our will.” His other, perhaps more popular maxim, is that “war is the continuation of politics by any other means.” Wars can constitute many kinds of conflicts—insurrections, proxy wars, revolutions, civil wars, and more—and their beginnings and ends can be obscure. They can begin without declaration, and can end without surrender.

“It is not defined by duration or extent, or bound by formal declarations of the beginning and the ending of hostilities,” says Rainsborough via email. “War can be an instantaneous discharge of violence or a conflict extending over years, decades, or centuries.” The events in Zanzibar were much more like the former.

At 9:00 am, on August 27, having received no reply from the palace, the British ships amassed in the harbor and instantaneous discharged violence on Khalid. The outcome was never in doubt.

“The town of Zanzibar is right on the water, and the sultan’s palace in town is directly on the waterfront,” says McMahon. “When Khalid locks himself in the palace, it’s easy for the British to take their boats right there and just shoot into the palace.”

The royal yacht was sunk almost immediately and settled to the harbor floor, its masts jutting out of the water like periscopes. Mortar and stone from the palace lifted in the air and tumbled back to the ground, disassembled.

In a matter of minutes, about 500 Zanzibari soldiers and civilians were killed or wounded. Just one British seaman was injured. How many minutes it lasted, however, is uncertain. A New York Times report the following day said 50; two months later, the same paper said 30. The Guinness Book of World Records says 45. Nobody really knows. (The next shortest wars—such as the 1969 “Football War” between El Salvador and Honduras, and the Six-Day War of 1967—lasted at least the better part of a week.)

The British shelling was definitely less than an hour, but war chroniclers didn’t keep track of every shot fired that day. It’s impossible to say its exact duration in the absence of anything official or definitive. Scholars generally cite the war as having lasted between 38 and 45 minutes. Any additional specificity would be a matter of guesswork.

“They bombed the clocktower, so the big indicator of time in town wasn’t available,” says McMahon. “Most people in town didn’t have watches, so that seven-minute difference in time is hard to say.”

The smoke lifted and dust drifted, and Khalid had fled, seeking refuge in the German consulate down the coast. Military historian Hew Strachan, of Oxford University, notes that “an individual cannot go to war. It is a group activity.” Despite this, the British spent the rest of the day tracking the prince down—maybe further challenging the length of the war itself.

“The reality is they bombed, and he fled, and this ‘shortest war in history’ thing probably took the whole day,” says McMahon. “It still may be the shortest war in history, but it was probably a day-long thing.”

The Germans did not turn Khalid over, but assured Britain that the offending prince would never touch British (and hence Zanzibari, at the time) soil again. Khalid was spirited away to Dar es Salaam, then part of German East Africa. He would eventually set foot on British soil, as following a spell in exile, he died in British Mombasa in 1927. The propped-up sultanate—under more compliant “rulers”—continued until the island gained independence in the 1960s, followed by a merger that created modern Tanzania.

For all its brevity and imbalance, the Anglo-Zanzibar War could go by other names—rebellion, insurgency, massacre—all of which it was. These categories of conflict, it turns out, overlap. This asymmetric war was also a colonial war, as it was an uprising, as it was an attempted coup. Whatever you call it, it was brief.

A creamy new sculpture at the Ohio State Fair honors the Apollo 11 crew.

The moon may not be made out of cheese, but some astronauts are, in fact, made out of butter.

In a sculpture not for the lactose-intolerant, several members of the historic Apollo 11 crew—commander Neil Armstrong, lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin, and command module pilot Michael Collins—are rendered in ephemeral dairy yellow at this year’s Ohio State Fair. The life-size renditions, composed of more than a ton of exquisitely molded butter, are in place to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

The theme of this year’s sculpture, unveiled on July 23, was set in stone, er, butter last year. Armstrong, born in Wapakoneta, Ohio, is one of the state’s most famous natives. “We’re always looking for good Ohio anniversaries,” says lead butter sculptor Paul Brooke. “And this is one of the strongest ones we’ve ever had.”

The full display depicts a kind of montage of the historic July 1969 mission, when humans took their first steps on the moon. On the left, there’s a butter sculpture of Armstrong in his space suit, standing next to the lunar module Eagle and saluting an American flag that ripples almost surreally (considering that it’s made of firm, refrigerated butter). In the center, renditions of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins sit with their helmets off. The more traditional subjects depicted in the butter sculpture—a cow and calf—get in on the Apollo action too: Each sports ear tags marked with “Apollo” and “11,” respectively.

Before they started sculpting, Brooke and his partner, Alex Balz, spent 100 hours planning, gathering photographs of what they saw as the most iconic shots of the Apollo 11 mission. Then they welded the skeletons for each figure using black iron pipe. “[The pieces] screw together pretty easily,” Brooke says. “A 10-inch piece of pipe is great for an upper arm.”

Once the skeletons were complete, it was butter time—2,200 pounds of butter in total, courtesy of the Dairy Farmers of America. The material arrived in 40 55-pound boxes, each slightly past its expiration date. The sculptors then left the butter out for three days, so it could soften enough to be molded by hand.

Once the butter was pliable, Brooke, Balz, and four other sculptors worked for 400 hours in a 46-degree cooler. They carried in the softened butter from another room, then quickly globbed it onto the black iron pipe frames before it could harden.

But butter-sculpting is a delicate art—and one that can’t be rushed. “You can’t put too much [of the butter] on at once, especially in the belly of the cow,” says Brooke. To do otherwise would result in 100 pounds of carefully molded butter thudding onto the floor.

Brooke says he’s made it four or five years without a major butter mishap. His last one involved a sculpture of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ mascot, which suffered an unfortunate crack and required a last-minute trip to Columbus for extra butter.

Making the state fair sculptures required some physical ingenuity as well. When six people gather in a small, cold room to mold Neil Armstrong’s face out of dairy, it’s a real game of Twister. ““We were constantly leaning over other people or reaching around to sculpt a guy’s face,” says Brooke.

Luckily, each of the Ohio-based sculptors has an area of expertise. Balz, a plumber by trade, is the face and anatomy guy. Dairy farmer Matt Davidson handled the cow. West Chester resident Tammy Buerk worked on the calf. And Columbus resident Erin Swearingen, who loves detail work, crafted the Apollo 11 logo. The team also had an intern: Karen Tharp, who’s pursuing an MFA at Ohio State University, helped detail the spacesuits.

Brooke says parts of the sculpture were harder to make than you might think. The American flag, for example, created a lot of what Brooke calls "engineering problems." Turns out, it’s hard to hold up a hefty sheet of seemingly rippling butter with only a thin flagpole (also, of course, made of butter). Brooke says had to solve such dilemmas by strengthening the frame to ensure that the flag wouldn't fall over.

But these sculptures don’t just celebrate the anniversary of the moon landing. They also commemorate Brooke and Balz’s 20th year together as lead butter sculptors at the Ohio State Fair. Their past masterpieces have depicted, among other things, the Liberty Bell, the 90th anniversary of the ice-cream cone, and the robotic toy Furby.

“Butter sculptors are not easy to find,” says Jenny Hubble, senior vice president of communications for the American Dairy Association Mideast, which sponsors the butter display. “All our sculptors have fine-art degrees.”

These works of dairy art will stand tall and creamy in the 46-degree room until August 4. When the Apollo scene is dismantled, the butter will be recycled and refined into an ingredient that's used in animal feed, biodiesel, tires, and cosmetics.

Call it one small step for butter, one giant leap for the expired-butter industry.

Century-old traces of a bygone resort are starting to surface at Castlewood.

Ballwin, Missouri, a suburb to the southwest of St. Louis, is home to a nearly 2,000-acre public recreation area called Castlewood State Park. The park, which kisses the free-flowing Meramec River, was formally established in 1974. Since then, its trails have attracted bikers, hikers, and more.

But in the early 20th century, when the Missouri Pacific Railroad began shuttling city dwellers off to the great outdoors, Castlewood was a very different place. It was a bustling resort town.

“People lived in downtown St. Louis, and they got smokin’ hot during the summertime,” says Kevin Albrecht, deputy regional director of Missouri State Parks. “They had the rail, so people would hop on the train to [go] cool off in the river.”

Recently, a visitor at Castlewood stumbled upon a staircase to nowhere, obscured by nature and time. Now that discovery is prompting a deep dive into the history of the area and its early years as a summertime social setting, long before it became one of Missouri’s several state parks (after a conservation group called the Open Space Council of St. Louis encouraged the state of Missouri to take over the land).

The Castlewood resort was open from roughly 1915 to 1940, but its heyday as a vacation getaway was the 1920s. “Local people who lived in the area—west St. Louis County—probably got there by foot or bike or car,” says Albrecht. “But the lion’s share of [people coming out] these weekends were coming from [the city] ... They had special cars made so that you could bring your canoe on the train … [you could] hang it up and bring it to Castlewood.”

Up until World War II, thousands of families used the Castlewood depot, especially on hot weekends. It was their gateway to summer recreation—swimming in the river, dancing in one of the seasonal clubs, ferrying to the popular Lincoln Beach sandbar.

The walls of the park office today are lined with old photographs donated by locals whose parents and grandparents vacationed at Castlewood, and who have worked to preserve a bit of the site’s lost history. Newspaper clippings advertise the popular Lincoln Lodge. Personal photographs illustrate the roughly 10,000 visitors that Castlewood received each weekend, including an aerial shot that Albrecht says shows “people by the hundreds.”

But by the middle of the century—after the advent of air conditioning made it more appealing to spend summers in urban areas—tourism at the riverside resort destination waned.

“Tastes changed back then,” says Albrecht, “but probably the biggest single factor [was] the automobile. When you think about the time frame, [not] that many people had automobiles ... but by the time you get back from World War II, the housing boom happens and then everyone has a car, so people started going other places.”

Today, the history of Castlewood as a summer hotspot is largely grown over. Most of the man-made buildings here, and the man-made beach, have been erased by decades of frequent river flooding.

“Over time natural deterioration took over,” says Albrecht. “Castlewood is one of five parks on the Meramec River … people started selling and abandoning properties, so a lot of it has just gone away with time and flooding.”

Yet the grand staircase, a concrete crescendo that runs from the bottomlands up toward the limestone bluff, still remains. Another wooden staircase, which once led vacationers from the train depot to their hotels, now takes explorers 250 feet above the river to a hiking trail. These steps have been maintained because the public still uses them, says Albrecht.

They also offer a hidden route for the sharp-eyed visitor: “There’s a pedestrian tunnel that goes under the railroad to the bottom of the staircase, and then you can walk up to the bluffs.”

Ruins of a few other buildings remain as well.

“There are two concrete foundations that exist,” says Albrecht. “Within the park itself, if you go down off of [a trail] alongside the river, there are concrete foundations up in the tree line [of the woods].”

These foundations may have belonged to one of Castlewood’s former dance halls or general stores. For years, one of the resort’s old wooden cabins was used as the on-site residence of the park superintendent. But six years ago, says Albrecht, after several failed attempts to renovate it, the structure was demolished.

Vestiges of the Lone Wolf Club, a Prohibition-era speakeasy open only to private members, can still be seen as well. Its stone wall and archway, which helped conceal illegal drinking in the 1920s, are on the grounds of Ballwin’s neighboring Wildlife Rescue Center. In fact, says Albrecht, “the ruins of the Lone Wolf Lodge may well be the best preserved piece [of old Castlewood] that remains.”

Since the resort stopped welcoming hot visitors in the 1940s, various campaigns to restore it to its former glory have surfaced. But none has come to fruition. It seems likely none ever will.

At least one thing hasn’t completely changed. The Missouri Pacific Railroad, which once ushered guests out to the Meramec River, still runs past the wood. Only now it’s called the Union Pacific.

The leafy green grows to monstrous size under the midnight sun.

In 1914, the Seattle Star published a picture of a little girl triumphantly holding a huge, leafy stalk above her head like a spear. "Alaska is not all snow and ice," the headline blared. "Rhubarb pies!"

The little girl, Dorothy, was something of a rhubarb princess, being one of the daughters of Henry D. Clark, who was known around Skagway, Alaska, as "the Rhubarb King." Clark didn't rule alone though. Across the United States, from Ohio to California, Washington to Illinois, various "rhubarb kings" were lauded for their ability to grow great quantities of the fruit-vegetable. (While a leafy green, rhubarb's sour stalks are typically treated like a fruit and cooked with lots of sugar. The leaves are toxic.)

But Clark's rule was different. For one thing, he farmed in Skagway, where summer days stretch to 19 hours. Rhubarb turned out to be a serendipitous choice. To the awed delight of early Alaskan farmers, not only does rhubarb like the cold, but it grows to monstrous size under the midnight sun.

According to Dr. Danny L. Barney, former curator of the Arctic and Subarctic Plant Gene Bank in Palmer, Alaska, cultivated rhubarb has a history of hardiness. Likely originating in chilly Tibet and China, it stepped off the steppes to become a valued medicine, with ancient doctors lauding its roots as effective against everything from cancer to the plague. Rhubarb eventually made its way to Russia, and from there to Western Europe, where it found a foothold in chilly England.

For centuries, rhubarb stayed more treatment than treat. As Barney writes in an email, "It was only after processed sugar became widely available [around the mid-1700s] that the acidic and sour stems became popular for culinary use." Soon after, Barney believes, cultivated rhubarb arrived in Alaska when Russian trader Gregorii Shelikhov brought it with him to Kodiak Island in 1784.

By the 19th-century, cheap sugar had enabled rhubarb to become known as "the pie plant." By mixing lots of sugar with its chopped stems, housewives could make a sweet, tangy filling without any citrus or apples. Rhubarb became a kind of fruit substitute, especially in Alaska. After all, many culinary rhubarb varieties are hardy, require minimal care, and thrive in cool climates.

In early 1900s, settlers in the frontier marveled at rhubarb's massive growth potential. Newspapers and books often profiled Clark's farm in particular. The man himself came from humble beginnings, says Caroline Hill, general manager of Jewell Gardens, which occupies part of Clark's old homestead today. Clark hailed from Wisconsin, and trekked to Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush. On the infamous White Pass Trail, Hill says, Clark witnessed people suffering from scurvy.

"We think that maybe he had rhubarb seeds in his pocket," Hill says. On his return to the town of Skagway, Clark established his rhubarb farm⁠—a wise decision, considering the local lack of fresh food. A photo from 1913 shows Clark holding a humongous rhubarb stalk, topped with a large fluffy leaf, along with a yardstick in one hand to demonstrate its size. "That's three feet just there," Hill points out. "I don't think he was an abnormally short or tall man. So it's a very large piece of rhubarb."

Along with other varieties, Jewell Gardens still grows Henry Clark's strain of rhubarb, which has a white, pink-tinged stem instead of the usual bright red. Henry Clark's rhubarb also grows throughout the town—a consequence of the farm's tragic end. During World War II, the military commandeered Clark's land to store fuel, says Hill. Townspeople gathered up his rhubarb before it could be destroyed. While Clark died in 1945, descendants of his plants grow on.

Many Alaskans still feel passionately about rhubarb, even though other fruits are easier to buy locally these days. Ruby Hollembaek, who owns a bison and elk ranch near Delta Junction, Alaska, founded the "Alaska Rhubarb" Facebook group almost 10 years ago. She sees a bright future for rhubarb. "It is such an easy crop to raise, and it's good for you," she says, noting that rhubarb could be a boon for remote communities, where locals depend on imported, often unhealthy foods.

"Traditionalists still like rhubarb," agrees Barney. He has a soft spot for the Crimson Cherry variety. But he acknowledges that the sour stalks, which require a high dose of sugar, are going up against the one-two punch of easily available fruits and a modern fear of high-sugar products. It doesn't help, he says, that with a few exceptions, large-scale farming hasn't proven that successful in Alaska yet.

Barney has since retired to Wasilla, Alaska, and has taken on the task of breeding rhubarb suitable for commercial growers. "Historically, most rhubarb varieties came about as chance seedlings that growers found appealing, named, and cloned," Barney notes, but he carefully chooses plant parents, looking for crosses that produce good features such as size, sweetness, and suitability for juicing. The future of rhubarb, he muses, may lie in the tourism industry. Rhubarb, he hopes, could become Alaska's calling card: the star of "specialty culinary dishes unique to the region."

In the meantime, rhubarb still has pride of place at Jewell Gardens. At their 2019 Summer Solstice and Rhubarb Festival, a thousand attendees stayed out in the Skagway sun late into the night. The Gardens handed out prizes for the largest locally grown rhubarb leaf and stalk (35 and 40.75 inches, respectively) and sold various rhubarb treats. "We did sell 120 rhubarb pies that night," Hill lists off. "65 pounds of rhubarb barbecue. Five gallons of rhubarb lemonade."

"It's kind of a fabled thing," she muses, along Barney's lines. "People come here and they want to eat rhubarb pie."

For half a century, researchers have been spilling chemicals in the waters of northwestern Ontario.

On a morning in June last summer, Keval Shah boarded a motorboat on a lake in northwestern Ontario, wearing navy coveralls, rubber gloves, and a respirator mask. He and nine others, all dressed in similar protective gear, were going to do something they had never done before: spill nearly 120 gallons of oil into the lake.

Over the course of the next two hours, Shah and his colleagues—a team of environmental technicians, chemists, boat drivers and photographers—carefully piped the viscous liquid into a series of sectioned-off zones in the lake. “We were all laser-focused,” he says. The operation, part of an ongoing project, was designed to simulate oil spills for scientific research. For the past three summers, scientists have been studying deliberate spills to find out more about how oil affects lakes in boreal regions, forested landscapes that stretch across northern Canada, Russia and Alaska.

The project is one of the first of its kind, says Jules Blais, professor of biology at the University of Ottawa and one of the project’s leaders. Most oil spill studies are conducted inside test-tubes or after accidental spills. These conditions have their limits. Lab experiments can only mimic simplified versions of complex ecosystems. And when disasters strike, the focus is on cleaning up oil as fast as possible, not on collecting scientific data. There is also a lack of baseline information at accidental spill sites. “It’s like arriving at the scene of an accident,” Blais says—you don’t know what happened, how it happened and what was there before, making it harder to compare conditions from before and after. By closely monitoring manufactured spills in boreal lakes, researchers are hoping to gain insight into oils’ effects on the environment in real-world conditions, which could help policymakers and the oil industry develop better ways of managing spills in the future.

Deliberately polluting a lake might seem like a wonky way of protecting the environment. But the International Institute for Sustainable Development Experimental Lakes Area (IISD-ELA), the facility where the research is being conducted, is famous for it. The area consists of 58 small water bodies within a 75-square-mile swath of boreal forest, and for over 50 years, researchers have been using these lakes as real-life labs. They have poured all sorts of pollutants into their waters, including fertilizers, mercury, sulphuric acid and, for reasons you’ll see shortly, estrogen. Seeing how these toxins affect ecosystems, and often entire lakes, has been instrumental to freshwater research and policymaking. “This kind of research has actually resulted in a dramatic improvement in water quality all over the world,” Blais says. The oil spill project comes at the end of a long line of experiments where poisoning one lake has helped preserve many.

This paradox was built into the IISD-ELA right from the start. When the research facility opened in 1968 (then simply referred to as “ELA”), an onslaught of pollution was causing algal blooms, choking oxygen out of the water, and killing fish in Lake Erie, which sits on the border between the United States and Canada. The algal bloom phenomenon, called eutrophication, was poorly understood: A chemical soup of pollutants had been draining into the lake from farms, cities and industrial zones, and researchers didn’t know which pollutant was responsible for triggering the blooms.

Two scientists, Wally Johnson and Jack Vallentyne, were tasked with untangling the root of the eutrophication problem. They thought that whole-lake experiments might provide answers. So they searched through maps to find a suitable spot. They needed an uninhabited region with minimal human influence: No vacation homes, no agriculture, and limited logging.

They settled on a spot about two hours’ drive from Kenora, Ontario, a city on the province’s western edge. “It’s Canadian wilderness at its finest,” says Richard Grosshans, a research scientist with the IISD, the ELA's parent organization. The area is covered in thousands of small, pristine lakes set in bedrock and bordered by thick spruce and pine forests. Still today, only one gravel road leads into the area, which visitors require a permit to use. The area is covered in thousands of small, pristine lakes set in bedrock and bordered by thick spruce and pine forests. Still today, only one gravel road leads into the area, which visitors require a permit to use.

In the late 1960s, the ELA saw its first suite of experiments to test eutrophication. A team of scientists led by David Schindler, now a professor of ecology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, strung a plastic curtain through the middle of Lake 226 (each lake is numbered). The researchers poured carbon and nitrogen into both sides of the lake, but added phosphorus to only one. Soon enough, the phosphorus-tainted side clouded over with algae. An aerial photo of the experiment became famous. It’s “the single most powerful image in the history of limnology,” James Elser, a biologist from Arizona State University, told Science in 2008 (limnology is the study of inland aquatic ecosystems). The image convinced policymakers that phosphorus should be controlled. In the 1970s, governments in Canada and the United States passed legislation to ban phosphates in detergents.

Since then, researchers have used the ELA for a variety of high impact experiments. From 1976 to 1993, Schindler and his crew poured sulfuric acid into Lake 223, finding that lake organisms suffered at acidity levels lower than what was considered safe. From 1999 to 2007, another team added mercury to Lake 658, demonstrating how the heavy metal exuded from coal-fired power plants can accumulate in food webs. And from 2000 to 2003, scientists discharged synthetic estrogen into Lake 260. This experiment showed that the hormone, which gets released into wastewater in the urine of people who are on birth control pills, causes male fish to develop female traits, eventually leading to population crashes. Overall, the research persuaded governments to adjust water quality guidelines, supported proposed legislation and got policymakers talking.

The ELA is the only place in the world where scientists can manipulate entire lakes and watch the consequences unfold, often over decades, Schindler says. It’s been called “the supercollider of ecology.” Big experiments at the ELA have had a disproportionate influence on policy, says Vince Palace, head research scientist at the IISD-ELA and one of the oil spill project leaders. The science clearly applies to the real world, he says.

Bridging lab experiments and actual ecosystems to better understand the effects of human activities is the ELA’s bread and butter. And the ongoing oil spill study falls right in line with that legacy. Last summer, one team of researchers added oil to eight enclosures throughout Lake 260, mimicking real spills—from small incidents to the 2010 Kalamazoo River spill, one of the largest freshwater spills in U.S. history. The team studied how the oil moved through water and affected organisms, including bugs, fish, and amphibians. They have yet to release their findings.

This summer, scientists created a fresh set of spills in 18 enclosures along the shoreline. Once they discharged the oil, they removed the bulk of it using conventional cleanup methods, such as soaking up the oil with absorptive pads or spraying the shoreline with low-pressure water hoses. There is always a residue left on the shore and on plants, however, Palace says. The researchers want to find the best ways of sopping up that residual oil. They’ll be testing a variety of cleanup techniques, including shoreline cleaners, natural bacteria and floating treatment wetlands—untethered islands of native plants that have shown promise in tests in India and Pakistan.

Experiments like this one and others run by the IISD-ELA, surprisingly, raise little controversy. People typically don’t get upset, and the researchers at the Experimental Lakes Area put a lot of effort into informing the public of their undertakings, says Palace. They hold information sessions with various communities near the research area and post updates on their website as well as social media. They also don’t dump chemicals into lakes willy-nilly. Scientists have to prove to regulators that their experiments won’t have any toxic effects on humans or affect downstream waters. And they are required to return lakes to their natural state within 10 years.

“One of the most important parts of a project like this is not the actual insult,” Palace says. “It’s the recovery.” Now that the oil has been spilled into Lake 260, scientists will probe the soiled sections of the ecosystem for years to come, looking for ways to salvage oil-tainted waters far beyond its shores.

Some associate him with a real-life Asterix, though less successful in resisting the Romans.

A housing development, West Sussex, England. That’s where the Late Iron Age warrior appeared in 2007. It’s the kind of place that most of them show up these days, what with the digging and all. When he emerged, the warrior was clad in dense mud—in his eye sockets, between his ribs—that held his precious cargo in place for more than 2,000 years. After years of analysis and conservation, the material he was buried with will be going on public display, at The Novium Museum in Chichester.

Though he was unearthed about 50 miles from London, archaeologists now believe this ancient fighter, known as "Bersted Man," may not have been English at all. Analysis dated the skeleton to about 50 BC, during Julius Caesar’s campaign against the Gallic tribes of what is today France. That year might sound familiar to fans of the French Asterix comics series, which had for decades chronicled the adventures of a village of Gauls holding out against the Roman legions. Bersted Man may be a warrior from the same conflict.

Andrew Fitzpatrick, an archaeological consultant at the University of Leicester, says that the isotope analysis they conducted does not operate with “postcode precision,” so the warrior’s country of origin is uncertain, as is his allegiance in the Roman-Gallic conflict. But the items buried with him—an elaborate headdress and helmet, a bent sword, and various other trinkets—tell the story of a soldier of considerable importance for the time, and suggest he was Gallic.

“Many swords similar to the one buried with Bersted Man have been found in northeast France and the ritual of 'killing' weapons by bending them is also well-known there, but both are rare in Britain,” says Fitzpatrick. “We think it is most likely that he grew up on the continent. He may have arrived in Britain as a ‘conflict migrant.’”

The historian Plutarch wrote that about a million Gauls were killed in the campaign and another million enslaved. Some Gallic fighters may have absconded to Britannia—not yet governed by the Roman Empire—rather than face the legions.

Though the helmet is of a fairly common style, the headdress is unique, says Fitzpatrick. Given the size and weight of its latticework, he adds, “How the man looked was more important than how practical the headdress was to wear.”

Without the helmet and headdress, the warrior would’ve stood at 5’8”, according to Melanie Giles, an archaeologist at the University of Manchester, slightly above average at the time. But with the elaborate topper, says Giles, “You can imagine this was a most impressive sight.”

There is still much to be learned about Bersted Man, but it is clear that he lived in a time fraught with world-shaping military ambitions that put a variety of cultures into contact with one another. The Gallic Wars ended in a Roman victory, and were vital to Julius Caesar’s trajectory toward domination of the Roman Empire. The holdouts of Asterix’s comics were, so far as we know, pure fiction, like the magic potion that enabled their resistance.

How a visit to Vesuvius shaped his prescient vision of a hot core.

The pair set out after midnight, clambering up steep, rugged Mount Vesuvius in the dark. The path toward the 4,200-foot summit was rough, but Athanasius Kircher and his unnamed Italian guide kept at it. They climbed and climbed until they reached a crater.

There, they were transfixed. It was awesome in every sense of the word—tremendous, terrible, fearsome.

“I saw it all lit up by fire,” Kircher later wrote, “with an intolerable exhalation of sulfur and burning bitumen.” The smell was so unbearable that Kircher kept heaving up the contents of his stomach. And he was scared, too. With the “groaning and shaking of the dreadful mountain,” he went on, “I believed I was peering into the realm of the dead, and seeing the horrid phantasms of demons.”

It was the 1630s, and the passionate Jesuit scholar, priest, and scientist—and Atlas Obscura hero—wanted a glimpse into the belly of the Earth.

Maybe things looked slightly less dyspeptic in the morning, or maybe Kircher spent the remainder of the night gathering his courage. Either way, when day broke, he climbed down into the crater. There, he saw a straight, hollow chute—“all up and down everywhere, cragged and broken,” opening into a pool “boiling with an everlasting gushing forth, and streaming of smoke and flames.” (English translations of his writings vary slightly, but they’re all powerfully sensory and overwhelming.)

Kircher went on with his life, but the scene was seared into his memory. On Vesuvius, writes Kircher biographer John Glassie, he had begun “to envision what it might be like even deeper within the earth, and how the mountains and fires and rivers and oceans might somehow all be connected.” Kircher couldn’t stop thinking about it, and he eventually put his vision into a fascinating, prescient, detailed map of the inner-workings of the planet.

For as long as people have walked the Earth, they’ve looked up in wonder. Like many natural philosophers before him, Kircher studied the Moon, and mapped its mottled face. But Kircher also looked down, and devoted much of a hefty tome, Mundus Subterraneus, to the world beneath our feet. It was a journey, as he put it, into “the fecund womb of Nature.” Two of the prints made to accompany the 1665 edition are currently for sale through Geographicus Rare Antique Maps.

Far below us, Kircher figured, there was a series of buried lakes and rivers, which he imagined winding toward the planet’s core like blood vessels. And fire—so much fire. Nearly three decades after his trek into Vesuvius, Kircher was still trying to understand what these molten rivers might have to do with earthquakes and other natural phenomena.

At the time, a prevailing idea posited center of the Earth as a fiery warren. In the 17th century, writes archivist Frances Willmoth in the science history journal Endeavor, many natural philosophers were convinced that the Earth was “riddled with passages, large caverns, smaller channels and cavities, all capable of transmitting air, water and other substances.” Like Seneca, Aristotle, and others, Willmoth writes, some of these scientists theorized that earthquakes were the product of air and water rushing through those channels; many speculated that thunder or lightning played a role, too.

In Mundus Subterraneus, Kircher depicts the very center of the Earth as a fireball. In his print, it looks like a central lake of flame with jagged rivers stretching out to feed roughly a dozen volcanoes depicted on the surface, like vents. Elsewhere in the book, Kircher also imagined a system of underground seas and rivers, and the interplay between the water and fire. In Kircher’s view, writes Kevin Brown of Geographicus, “the volcanic system interacted with the hydrosystem by superheating parts of it, causing the movement of water to and from the surface—hence ocean currents, earthquakes, tides, and more.”

Kircher’s map looks fantastical, as does the totality of his theories, but centuries of science have borne out some of his ideas. “His hypothesis of a central source of heat inside the planet, and his realization that volcanoes and earthquakes are a global phenomenon, are now widely accepted,” NASA’s Earth Observatory notes. We know that volcanoes do tend to cluster, and that their eruptions coincide with molten movement deep within the Earth, even if they don’t quite look like Kircher thought they would.

There are many more volcanoes than Kircher’s map suggests—as many as 1,500 potentially active ones, discounting the “continuous belt” of underwater ones along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). By the agency's count, about a third of these have erupted in recorded history. Many of the feistiest occupy what is known as the Ring of Fire, where tectonic plates collide. We also know, of course, that the core is definitely hot—up to 10,800 degrees Fahrenheit—though made mostly of iron and nickel, not an open, flickering flame.

Even as we peer ever-deeper into space, the world below our feet is largely a mystery to those of us who aren’t geologists, planetary scientists, or cavers. Nature writer Robert Macfarlane observes as much in his new book, Underland, which takes readers into crevasses, caves, and other claustrophobic corners of the world. “We can look up and see the Moon,” he said at a recent talk in New York, “but we look down and only see our feet.” Hundreds of years after Kircher climbed down into Vesuvius, there’s still much to learn about what’s down there, and you don’t need to stumble into volcano to be awestruck.

The country came together—and installed 350 million trees in just 12 hours—to combat climate change.

On June 22, 2013, Pakistan’s Sindh Forest Department set a Guinness World Record when 300 people planted 847,275 trees in 24 hours. Three years later, on July 11, 2016, India eclipsed that mark, planting 49.3 million tree saplings (comprising 80 different species) in the same amount of time.

But yesterday, the arboreal record was shattered again—in half the time. A nationwide planting spree in Ethiopia saw volunteers plant more than 350 million trees across 1,000 designated sites—in just 12 hours.

This latest eco-challenge was designed as part of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s “Green Legacy Initiative,” a reforestation plan to address Ethiopia’s rapid tree loss. At the start of the 20th century, 30 percent of the country’s land was forested. Now, less than 4 percent of it is.

Ethiopia is not alone when it comes to tree loss. In 2015, 10 African countries launched the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, which aims to restore 386,000 square miles of the continent's land by 2030.

The benefits are legion.

“Restoring our landscapes brings prosperity, security, and opportunity,” Vincent Biruta, Rwanda’s minister of natural resources, said at the time. “With forest landscape restoration, we’ve seen agricultural yields rise and farmers in our rural communities diversify their livelihoods and improve their well-being. Forest landscape restoration is not just an environmental strategy; it is an economic and social development strategy as well.”

As part of this effort, Ethiopia pledged to tackle 57,915 square miles of its landscape. On July 29, Prime Minister Ahmed encouraged millions of Ethiopians to each plant a minimum of 40 seedlings. The citizenry took him very seriously. Some schools and government offices closed to encourage full participation.

Ethiopia’s primary industry is agriculture, which has contributed to frequent droughts—and forest decline—thanks to land degradation. The “Green Legacy” campaign to re-green the east African country aims to counteract that—and climate change more generally—by planting 4 billion indigenous trees between May and October, the rainy season.

Trees offset climate change’s effects by absorbing carbon dioxide—a large contributor to greenhouse gases—from the air. According to Dan Ridley-Ellis, head of Edinburgh Napier University’s Center for Wood Science and Technology, trees are a particularly effective antidote to the predations of climate change, “combating desertification and land degradation, particularly in arid countries. They also provide food, shelter, fuel, fodder, medicine, materials, and protection of the water supply.”

While planting millions and millions of trees is a huge step in the right direction, more strides need to be taken. If the saplings in Ethiopia aren’t watered properly in the coming weeks, for instance, they’ll be susceptible to disease and death—which would undermine the heroic efforts Ethiopians just made.

The country's record-breaking tree-planting day is nothing if not timely. Earlier in July, a study published in Science argued that planting a trillion new trees over the next few decades could absorb roughly 205 billion tons of carbon dioxide from our compromised atmosphere.

Time will tell if Ethiopia’s recent effort has planted the seeds for a brighter—and greener—tomorrow.