Exploration
History on Display: The Vikings Begin
While we were at Mystic Seaport, we were lucky enough to see an exhibit titled The Vikings Begin: Treasures from Uppsala University, Sweden. Curated by the Gustavianum Museum at Uppsala University, the exhibit is based on a ten-year research project that began in 2016. Known as “The Viking Phenomenon”, the project is designed to study…
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Sailing on the Etoile, or Outed in Tahiti
Over the last year, as I’ve wandered through the dusty attics and flooded basements of history in my search for women warriors I’ve stumbled across plenty of other fascinating women that I–and presumably you–had never heard of. Case in point: French botanist Jeanne Baret (1740-1807), part of the astonishingly large number of women who disguised…
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The Storied City
In 2013, Charlie English, then international news editor of The Guardian, became obsessed with the news coming out of Timbuktu. Jihadists were destroying the city’s religious monuments because they were not properly Islamic and librarians were smuggling medieval books out of the city in order to preserve them from the jihadists. He was not the…
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