Cross-cultural “Stuff”
The First Common Market?
My Own True Love and I leave next week for Belgium and my thoughts are turning toward Waterloo, Flanders Field, and the Hanseatic League.* Especially the Hanseatic League. I’m fascinated by traveling merchants, from the Silk Road caravans that brought luxury goods from China and India to the Muslim peddlers who sold dry goods…
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Public Toilets and Heads of State
As those of you who are reading along know, I recently learned that public toilets are called vespasianos in Italy, after the Roman emperor Vespasian, who introduced the concept to the empire. This led my brain to London bobbies, named after British Prime Minister Robert Peel, who founded the London police when he was Home…
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Slouching Toward Jerusalem
I’ve been fascinated by the Crusades for several years now. Not surprising, I suppose, given my basic interest in the times and places where two cultures touch (or in the case of the Crusades, whack at) each other and change. I’ve read accounts of what the Crusades looked like from the Muslim perspective. (Barbarian…
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