Archive for March 2013
Black Athena
A recent exchange with a slightly disgruntled reader of Mankind: The Story of All of Us * led me to pull a book off the shelf that I hadn’t looked at for several years: the first volume of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena . Sub-titled The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Bernal’s book was a smack…
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History on Display: The Unexpected DeMoulin Museum Celebrates Invention, Imagination,and Industry
I freely admit that I visited the DeMoulin Museum in Greenville, Illinois, with a certain amount of trepidation. Over the years My Own True Love and I have visited plenty of small private museums that were founded to showcase an individual’s passion. All too often, they are sad, weird, and incoherent.* A museum devoted to…
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Eighty Days
On November 14, 1889, Nelly Bly, reporter for the popular newspaper The World, sailed from New York on the trip that would make her famous: an attempt to travel around the world in less than eighty days. Eight and a half hours later, unknown to Bly, the literary editor of the monthly magazine, The Cosmopolitan,…
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