Tag: History Travel
The Day the Wall Came Down
by Stefanie Michaels | 11.09.09 | 10:39 AM ET
iStockPhoto The wall fell 20 years ago today. Stefanie Michaels visited Berlin recently to hear a personal recollection.
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Yahoo! BuzzPhoto You Must See: Where the Berlin Wall Once Stood
by World Hum | 11.09.09 | 10:17 AM ET
A line marks the path where the wall once cut through the streets. It’s been twenty years today since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Shackleton’s Scotch: Coming to an Auction House Near You?
by Eva Holland | 11.03.09 | 2:43 PM ET
Two cases of the explorer’s drink of choice have been discovered under a hut at Cape Royds, apparently left behind after a failed 1909 polar expedition. The question now, of course: What will happen to the excavated bottles? If they do go to auction, maybe the lucky buyer will want to BYOB on Shackleton’s ship-turned-restaurant.
Interview with Pat Croce: Pirate Soul
by M.B. Roberts | 10.29.09 | 3:56 PM ET
M.B. Roberts asks the founder of Pirate Soul Museum in Key West, Florida, about the enduring appeal of pirates
The Perfect Traveler
by Pico Iyer | 10.28.09 | 10:14 AM ET
He was cool, steady and prone to breaking rules. Pico Iyer celebrates the life and work of Somerset Maugham.
Athens: A New Look for an Old City
by Rick Steves | 10.20.09 | 11:37 AM ET
Exploring Europe, exploring travel as a political act
Looking for the USSR in Moscow
by Michael Yessis | 10.13.09 | 3:02 PM ET
World Hum contributor Jim Heintz says that one of the hardest things to find when visiting the Russian capital “is a sense of how bleak life was under the hammer and sickle.” He writes:
Unlike Rome or Athens, where the tourist is called upon to imagine the glory that once was, in Moscow you have to visualize what wasn’t there. Walk into a food store and imagine the shelves empty; picture the store without a clever name or attractive logo—its sign would have read only “meat” or “milk” or “products.”
These days it’s unlikely that one’s tour guide briefs the secret police at the end of the day. Your hotel may not be cute or comfy, but it’s probably not overtly scary like the Rossiya, a signature Soviet monstrosity that’s now a vacant lot. In a way, this may be kind of a disappointment: Going to the Evil Empire had more cachet than a trip to the Overpriced Capital.
The Medieval Icelandic Guide to Marauding
by Eva Holland | 09.22.09 | 12:35 PM ET
The Telegraph highlights the mostly intimidating descriptions of Scotland that pop up in a series of 13th-century Icelandic chronicles. “Icelanders who want to practise robbery are advised to go there,” reads one section. “But it may cost them their life.” The chronicles, the story explains, “were often used as route guides for raiders, traders, crusaders and explorers, effectively a road map of medieval Europe and the Middle East.” Apparently, they’ve remained accurate enough over the centuries that they’re still used by archaeologists today.
Roald Dahl’s Childhood Candy Store Found
by Eva Holland | 09.14.09 | 11:29 AM ET
Call it Charlie and the Chinese take-out joint. A literary landmark has been rediscovered at the Great Wall of China restaurant in Llandaff, Wales—where researchers believe Mrs. Pratchett’s Sweet Shop, the store thought to be the inspiration for Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “The Twits,” was originally located. A historic marker will go up this week, and I’m sure the Dahl pilgrims won’t be far behind. (Via The Book Bench)
Young Travelers, Education and 17th-Century England
by Eva Holland | 09.08.09 | 9:33 AM ET
Academic David Evans has just discovered a practical, real-world application for his graduate studies in 17th-century English literature: Encouraging young students to join the global community.
It turns out that the reading I did about young male English travelers to the Continent in the mid-17th century is remarkably relevant to our current needs. For example, one of the prevalent elements of the conversation in the 1640s and 1650s had to do with various attitudes towards Catholic countries on the Continent, and how young travelers should manage their interactions with those countries. We are, oddly, having a very similar discussion now about travel to Muslim countries, and for some of the same reasons and from some of the same (good and bad) motivations.
In 17th-century England, the big question was, “Why travel?” The encounter with difference, even the relatively mild difference between Dover and Calais, was a tremendous leap for many people in 1640. But the advocates of foreign travel at that time believed that knowing the world, even if just a little, would give young travelers tremendous benefits and advantages when they returned home.
No War Re-Enactments, Please, We’re Canadian
by Eva Holland | 09.04.09 | 11:33 AM ET
Next weekend marks the 250th anniversary of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec City, a decisive battle in the British and French struggle for present-day Canada—so you might expect a loud, colorful historical re-enactment, complete with muskets and period costumes. Right? Um, no. Instead, a “unifying” battlefield poetry slam is in the works. You can’t make this stuff up.
Mapping Manhattan in 1609
by Eva Holland | 09.03.09 | 12:32 PM ET
Union Square in the early 17th century? According to The Mannahatta Project, an interactive map that lets users search block-by-block for the ecological and wildlife history of Manhattan, it was home to the meadow vole and the white-footed mouse, rather than the Greenmarket browsers of today. (Via Boing Boing)
20 Years Later: Reading up on the Berlin Wall
by Eva Holland | 08.31.09 | 9:34 AM ET
With the 20th anniversary of the wall’s destruction coming up in November, the time seems right for a look back. Here’s a handy starting point: The Guardian’s books blog has a thoughtful list of 10 must-reads, fiction and non.
‘The Island of California’ and Other Ancient Maps
by Eva Holland | 08.27.09 | 12:19 PM ET
Check out this roundup of unusual historical maps from Free.edu. I can’t decide which I like best: the ones with familiar places rendered unrecognizable, like the misnamed 17th-century “Modern and Completely Correct Map of the Entire World,” or the 1886 “Map of Venice”—which, to my eye, seems virtually identical to the handouts at the tourist office there today. (Via Kottke)
Into Jamaica’s Maroon Country
by Eva Holland | 08.25.09 | 10:59 AM ET
Matt Carroll recently ditched the resort and went looking for the descendants of the Maroons, the historic communities of escaped slaves that formed in the Jamaican interior and fought a running battle with the British for more than a century. His story is in the Guardian.
Back to the Garden?
by Eva Holland | 08.25.09 | 10:35 AM ET
ERIC THAYER / Reuters On the festival's 40th anniversary, Eva Holland goes looking for the spirit of Woodstock
A Short History of Fast Food and Travel
by Eva Holland | 08.18.09 | 12:04 PM ET
In the Smart Set, Tony Perrottet looks back to the post-Civil War era for the origins of American roadside fast food. Here’s a sample:
The long-distance trains from Omaha to San Francisco had dining cars only for the first-class passengers. Everyone else had to wait until the trains stopped at specific stations for scheduled meal breaks, when hundreds of passengers would madly dash into cavernous dining halls on the platforms. Inside, cadres of white-aproned waiters were poised to splash meat and potatoes onto their plates and granular coffee into their cups. The whistle would blow and patrons would have to abandon their half-eaten meals and dash back to the moving train. The whole indigestion-inducing process, travelers complained, might last only ten minutes.
For anyone else who’s made the agonizing bathroom-or-Big Mac decision on a flying Greyhound stopover lately—sound familiar?
20 Reasons for Tourist Gratitude
by Eva Holland | 08.17.09 | 11:14 AM ET
Fed up with flight delays? Hotel wi-fi cutting out? Take a deep breath and check out the Telegraph’s list of 20 reasons why Victorian travelers had it worse. Among the highlights: rickety stagecoaches, damp sheets, and the “Inodorous Standard Pail” offered in lieu of a toilet. There. Feel better now?
Museums and the Hunt for ‘Real Culture’ on the Road
by Eva Holland | 08.14.09 | 11:01 AM ET
In a recent post over at BootsnAll, Roger Wade explains why he believes museums are overrated. “If you think about it, with only a few exceptions, museums are all history museums one way or another,” he writes.
The most famous ones display stationary art that only the elite classes could ever hope to own or even see. Sure, some of them tell the stories of what life was really like at the time, but many of them are idealized versions or nothing like reality at all ... History certainly has its place, but when you visit Madrid today might it not be more interesting to see some intricacies of modern big city Spanish life than what a lone artist a few hundred years ago was thinking?
Later, after offering some museum alternatives—grocery stores and the like—he adds: “You’ll learn far more about their real culture of today in a place like this than you would at the famous museum…”
Now, I’m a big fan of foreign supermarkets. But I’m also a bona fide history geek, and as such I’m worried about what seems to be an increasingly popular theme in travel advice these days: the idea that museums, and history more generally, are somehow distinct or cut off from a destination’s true culture. Does anyone really think that a visit to the Terror House won’t improve their understanding of post-Soviet Budapest? Or that the Transit Museum doesn’t shed some light on the way New Yorkers live? And I know, I know, we’ve all had Madonna-and-Child art gallery overload at some point—but trying to understand the Catholic world without taking a look at its most powerful iconography seems crazy to me.
Go ahead, call me a geek, but I’ll balance out a good people-watching session with some museum time any day. And I just don’t see how the one is more “real” than the other.
A Resuscitated Keats House Reopens
by Eva Holland | 08.06.09 | 3:59 PM ET
The Hampstead house where John Keats wrote “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and spent some of his final, tubercular days has reopened to the public after a two-year, $700,000 restoration. This Wall Street Journal story has some nice details about the house, and about Keats’ own literary pilgrimage to the one-time home of Robbie Burns.
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