A digest. One to three times a week.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs- commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours […]
Cheers to either MMW or MLP for putting me onto this one. From a NY Times review, 1987: JAN MORRIS, one of the very brightest travel writers, gives us here an account of travel to a place the author never visited. That place is Manhattan in 1945. Ms. Morris came close, visiting the island first […]
March 8, 1933. President Franklin Roosevelt has gone to visit Oliver Wendell Holmes on the occasion of the retired Justice’s 92nd birthday. Once everyone had found a seat in the library and Mary Donellan, the Irish waitress and parlormaid, had poured the tea, the conversation was genial and scattered. The President and the Justice talked […]
from Cameron Crowe’s memoir: With San Diego Comic-Con approaching, it’s time to revisit our 2024 question, What Is San Diego? Perhaps the suffocating banality of official San Diego’s pious “America’s Finest City” mantra has led even those who know better to think that nothing is possible here other than the affectless pleasure that comes from […]
Alma, in later life Claus Spreckels was born in Germany in 1828. After the bad harvests of 1845 and 1846, the resulting inflation and hunger crisis reached its peak in 1847. Spreckels emigrated to the United States in 1848 at the age of 19 to start a new life, with only one German thaler in his pocket, […]
I am concerned with a single substance called sucrose, a kind of sugar extracted primarily from the sugar cane, and with what became of it. The story can be summed up in a few sentences. In 1000 A.D., few Europeans knew of the existence of sucrose, or cane sugar. But soon afterward they learned about […]
On Simon Bolivar Buckner (and Jr) – apparently one reader has spoken with “Bill” Buckner, whose father was a WWII general and whose grandfather was a Confederate general, and he’s still kicking. And on Lakes of France – cool job!
A passion: traveling and seeing the places on the map come to life. Reading the history of Savoy, Chambéry came up again and again. A 30-40 minute train ride from Annecy, we decided to have a morning’s look. Chambéry sits in a nice, elevated spot on a mountain pass, near Lac du Bourget. It’s a […]
Great advertising. The town is not exactly like it pretends be at the train station. But it’s not bad. We love when a country looks like itself, or our idea of itself. Aix-les-Bains looks like the idea of France. Aix-les-Bains is blessed with thermal springs which have been an attraction since Roman times. People would […]
Let’s have a list of the largest lakes in France, please! Rank Lake Area Type Note 1 Lac Léman (French portion) 234 km² of 582 km² total Natural, glacial Shared with Switzerland 2 Étang de Berre 155 km² Natural, saltwater lagoon Largest entirely in France 3 Étang de Thau 75 km² Natural, saltwater lagoon 4 […]