Only an artist could dream up a house like Olana, the Victorian Middle Eastern-style home of Hudson River School painter Frederic Church. The artistic oasis overlooks the Hudson River and it’s easy to see what drew Frederic Church to the landscape all those years ago. Today, visitors flock to the site to marvel at both the landscape and what lies within Olana’s beautiful archways.
Continue reading “Olana: A Historic Painter’s Paradise on the Hudson”
A compendium of weird medical history? Yes please! (Disclaimer: if you just ate or are about to eat, you might want to read this later…)
Continue reading “Book Review of Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything”
At last, two years in the making, the book I contributed to is finally out!
As I am enamored by both Russian history and beards, what better way to kick off Movember than with a post on Peter the Great, otherwise known as the Tsar who sheared a nation.
Continue reading “Once Upon a Movember: Peter the Great’s Beard Tax”
Here I am actually talking about ghosts! But make no mistake, Ghostland by Colin Dickey is more than a compendium of ghost stories. Rather, Colin Dickey treats each of these tales as a case study for examining different types of hauntings, their origins and development. Most of all, he is interested in what these stories say about America’s relationship to its past.
Continue reading “Book Review of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey”
The New-York Historical Society’s fourth floor recently debuted its new look…
Continue reading “The Newly Illuminated New-York Historical Society”
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.
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.”
