While researching my historic destinations, one place that came up in every conversation was the Merchant House Museum in Manhattan’s East Village. The home was built in 1832 and...
Late last month the artist Bob Cassilly was killed in an accident on the grounds of Cementland, the 54-acre disused cement factory near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi...
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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,...
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.