Discoveries
James Wright and the Poetry He Had to Learn to Write
James Wright came from a place that could have produced an entirely different kind of poet. Born December 13, 1927, in Martins Ferry, Ohio, Wright grew up along the Ohio River in a community shaped by steel mills, factories, smoke, labor, and the hard industrial economy of the American Midwest. The landscape surrounding his childhood carried the marks of industry, yet the poetry Wright eventually became known for could seem almost impossibly delicate. His poems found beauty in abandoned places, lonely people, fields, birds, rivers, and brief moments of human recognition. The contrast became one of the defining tensions of his career. From a world marked by industrial hardship, Wright developed a poetry capable of making room for astonishing tenderness.
By Tim Carmichaelabout a month ago in History
Celebrating 819 Years of the Poet Rumi
The great Poet Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh, a great center of learning and culture in what is now Afghanistan. His childhood unfolded during a period of upheaval that would eventually drive his family from their home and send them westward across Central Asia.
By Tim Carmichaelabout a month ago in History
Radithor: When America Drank the Atomic Age
In the 1920s, radium represented the dazzling promise of modern science. Then someone decided to bottle it... America entered the 1920s looking toward the future. Electric lights had transformed the night. Automobiles were remaking cities and countryside alike. Radio carried voices invisibly through the air. Airplanes, once an impossible dream, were becoming machines of commerce and adventure. Science seemed capable of anything. And few discoveries seemed more mysterious, or more promising, than radium.
By The Iron Lighthouseabout a month ago in History
The first perfume invented in the world
Long before perfume became a luxury sold in glass bottles, it was already being created on the island of Cyprus. The story does not begin in Paris, Milan, or Grasse. It begins thousands of years earlier in the eastern Mediterranean, where Cypriot craftsmen mixed plants, oils, heat, and imagination to create some of the earliest known fragrances in human history.
By The Revolutionabout a month ago in History
The Cyclists Who Paved the Way for America's Cars
Imagine purchasing the finest bicycle money could buy in 1895. It's a beautiful machine... gleaming metal, pneumatic tires, a comfortable saddle. You’ve joined a cycling club, acquired a handsome riding outfit, and informed your family that you intend to spend Sunday exploring the countryside.
By The Iron Lighthouseabout a month ago in History
Time's ticking in hunt for the illusive Nazi gold train
War, huh, yeah, what is it good for? Absolutely nothin... words written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong for the Motown label in 1969 that, although first recorded as an album track by The Temptations, went on to become a number one hit for Edwin Starr.
By Steve Harrisonabout a month ago in History
The Black Knight mystery in orbit around the Earth
In its edition on 7 March 1960 Time magazine reported that the “mysterious ‘dark’ satellite wheeling overhead on a regular orbit” that had made headlines three weeks earlier, causing “nervous speculation that it might be a surveillance satellite launched by the Russians”, was in fact “a space derelict, the remains of an Air Force Discoverer satellite that had gone astray”.
By Steve Harrisonabout a month ago in History
When the military sealed off secrets of 'Tsarichina Hole'
The story of Golyamo Gradishte and the Cave of Bastet in the first part of this investigation finished on ancient Egyptian mythology about a foxy feline goddess and the possible whereabouts of her tomb in Bulgaria’s Strandzha Mountains but the second part moves on to far stranger territory a decade later and an even bigger mystery in a vast tunnel complex to the north under the country’s Balkan range, where a two-year excavation came to a rather abrupt end in November 1992 having found nothing... but at the cost of an arm and a leg.
By Steve Harrison2 months ago in History
Baba Vanga and Bulgaria's buried Egyptian anomalies
About 28 years after British entertainer and comedian Bernard Cribbins’ novelty song “The Hole In The Ground” was released a team sent in by the Bulgarian defence ministry was “digging this hole” in Tsarichina, about 30 kilometres outside Sofia, although “it’s not there now, the ground’s all flat” but beneath the stone that marks where the work supposedly took place you probably won’t find a “bloke in a bowler hat”.
By Steve Harrison2 months ago in History
