Ancient History
The Great Wall of China
When faced with a threat or simply with contact with what we learned in graduate school to call The Other, our natural instinct is to build a wall to keep Them out or to keep Us in. * The earliest cities that we know of, the tel culture in what is now Palestine, were built…
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Road Trip Through History: In Search of Roman Florence
When you’re in the heart of Florence, it’s hard to remember that anything happened there other than the Renaissance. You can find the Etruscans in the nearby village of Fiesole. Sienna is essentially a medieval town. But Florence seems to be all Renaissance, all the time. In fact, the city of Florentia was founded by…
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Thinking About Stonehenge
As I mentioned in my last blog post, I’m writing a kid’s book on the history of architecture.* I just finished a chapter on building in stone: fieldstone walls, pyramids, megaliths and standing stone circles. I wrote several paragraphs about Stonehenge, none of which made it to the final version. I started to recycle them…
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