A near ghost town awaits your visit in the Jersey Shore’s north end. Here in Sandy Hook, among New Jersey’s finest beaches and hiking trails, lies a cluster of historic structures that have very much weathered the sands of time.
Continue reading “Historic and Ghostly Fort Hancock”
Philadelphia, PA is a wonderfully weird place. Though famously rich in early American history, I chose to forgo exploring old city for my first visit. My apologies, dear founding fathers, but two strange places beckoned me: the Mütter Museum and Eastern State Penitentiary.
“And so the ghosts of the Broad Street outbreak were reassembled for one final portrait, reincarnated as black bars lining the streets of their devastated neighborhood. In dying, they had collectively made a pattern that itself pointed to a fundamental truth, though it took a trained hand to make that pattern visible.”
It’s Movember! Do you have mustaches on the brain? I sure do… In fact, I spend quite a lot of time thinking about them. Perhaps you’re wondering how this obsession began…
A few years ago, I was browsing the New York Historical Society’s open collections storage when my eyes singled out a tiny, seemingly insignificant object: a mustache comb.
Nestled in the New Brighton neighborhood of Staten Island are a small number of quaint, Victorian cottages, vestiges of one of America’s earliest suburban developments. Eleven of the original houses still stand. One beautiful Saturday in September I did a walking tour with Victorian Society in America and got to see these beautiful houses in person. I even got to tour three of them!
Continue reading “The Victorian Cottages of New Brighton, Staten Island”
One recent evening I attended a Baroque concert and was rewarded with not simply music, but a beautiful, celestial experience. “Wild Cosmos Baroque Salon,” presented by Atlas Obscura, wonderfully connected past and present in a modern interpretation of the salons of old.
Continue reading “‘Wild Cosmos’ Atlas Obscura Baroque Salon”
“We bought an 1888 house in Port Townsend (Washington’s Victorian seaport and long our favorite place) and proceeded to see how Victorian a life we could truly carve out for ourselves in the twenty-first century world.”
It’s all too easy to romanticize the past, and that is exactly what Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman make their life doing.
Singer Castle on Dark Island of the Thousand Islands is a marvel straight out of a storybook. Literally! The architect, Ernest Flagg (1857-1947), based his design around the medieval castle depicted in Sir Walter Scott’s 1832 novel Woodstock.
Continue reading “Singer Castle of the Thousand Islands: A Storybook Dream”
In Sex with Kings: Five Hundred Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge, Eleanor Herman pens quite a romp through some of history’s most scandalizing pages. Divided into twelve chapters, the book explores the history of royal mistresses and details the art of pleasing a king (er…beyond the bedchamber), rivalry, jealous husbands, royal bastards, and more.
Continue reading “Book Review: Tales of Royal Mistresses in Sex with Kings”
