Articles Tagged with #history
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Following the Riots
The Barber Comes Around
When London’s Tottenham district fell to youth-driven chaos this past August, an elderly barber almost lost everything. Then other young people stepped in to keep him cutting.
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New York's Roadside Attractions
St. Paul’s Church
I decided to visit the site last weekend because of an event commemorating the Battle of Pell’s Point, fought about a mile from the church on Oct. 18, 1776. It...
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Gonzo Geography
Handheld Time Machines
Cities are full of noise and scuffle, and they don’t always reveal their history. Armed with a fistful of maps from 1901 and a smartphone bristling with data-recording apps, one man tries to uncover a city’s secrets.
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New York's Roadside Attractions
Hamilton Grange
The weekend of Sept. 17 the Hamilton Grange was being rededicated to coincide with Constitution Day. I won’t condescend to tell you who Alexander Hamilton was or why he...
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Letters From Spain
We Must Walk the Camino Together
For centuries, the Camino de Santiago has drawn religious pilgrims to northern Spain. But those guys never did it with walkie-talkies, GPS, taxis, and Wonder Bread.
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Writing on the Wall
Tempest in an Inkpot
Don’t be fooled by the hand-lettering trend in movie posters and book covers—cursive is dead. Who cares? A million angry commenters around the web who extol the virtues of loops and curls. But the traditional form has a history that’s less than precious.
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Ghosts of New York
The Lost Pondshiners
New York’s Hudson Valley has long been haunted—by headless horsemen, and living terrors, too. In the hills between Poughkeepsie and Albany existed a clan of artisans known for their semi-wild existence—and for being a real-life connection to the region’s supernatural past.
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TMN Talks
Nom de Plume
Ciuraru has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. She has also edited...
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Portraits by Other Means
The Diets of Others
The Terrorist Diet [In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden] no longer slaughtered a lamb every day to serve his guests; now he rarely ate meat, preferring to live on dates, milk,...
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American Letters
The Man Behind the Window
Allan Seager was a student at Oxford when he contracted tuberculosis. What happened next made him one of America’s greatest writers—declared the heir to Anderson and Hemingway—ever to be forgotten. Yet one of Seager’s short stories endures in ways that none of Hemingway’s can match.
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Opinions
Les Bêtes Fromages
America adores its clichés about French culture—skinny women, hot sex, and “surrender monkeys.” But the Mali intervention shows France in a different light. From 2011, an appreciation for France’s history of conquering and oppressing the world.
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The Perils of Academia
Trust Me
A century ago food vendors were often confidence men, cutting their products with inedible substances. A study of the history of food adulteration reveals hucksters at every turn.