Exploration
Road Trip Through History: Lake Itasca State Park and the Headwaters of the Mississippi
As you know if you’ve been reading along, My Own True Love and I just drove a portion of the Great River Road. Several years ago we drove the southern leg of the road, traveling south from Memphis to the point on the Gulf where the road dead-ends in chain link fences and industrial parks…
Read More
Sir Richard Burton: Not the Actor, the Other One
Recently I had cause to pull a biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) off my to-be-read shelf, where it has sat since 1990. I originally bought it because I was writing my dissertation on the way the definition of the Orient changed over time with increasing exposure to the non-Western world and Burton was…
Read More
History on Display: The Vinland Map
On October 11, 1965, just a few hours before Columbus Day,* Yale University announced that it owned a newly discovered map of the world, dating from approximately 1440 AD, that showed an island named Vinland, the Vinilandia insula of the Icelandic sagas, off the coast of North America. The timing was not accidental: if the…
Read More