Growing up in suburban Virginia, our Italian-American family relied on my grandmother to bring us the foods we craved from the Bronx. By Gina DePalma My grandmother’s visits from New York City always began with what I call The Great Unpacking, which took place on our dining room table the very second she crossed our[…]
After an arduous journey emigrating from Vietnam in the 70s, the author benefited from both personal resilience and public assistance. I spoke my first words on a boat: “milk,” “cockroach,” and “itchy.” An unusual toddler vocabulary perhaps, but not surprising considering that I spent the second year of my life on a freighter with thousands[…]
The University of Melbourne’s anatomy museum features fossil models from an entirely fictional early human; a forgery that derailed the study of our evolution for decades. ‘Piltdown man’ was the name given to a handful of fossil fragments found at a site in East Sussex, UK in 1912. The fossils, quickly identified as being from[…]
How a New York farmer’s elaborate hoax “proved” giants roamed the Earth. One Sunday afternoon in October of 1869, Stubb Newell, a farmer in upstate New York, invited his neighbors over to view the remarkable discovery he made while digging a well on his Cardiff farm. When they arrived, he showed them the body of[…]
In a gradual process of Hellenization, the Samaritans developed their own variant of Hellenism. When Alexander the Great conquered the Middle East, including ancient Palestine, in 332 BCE, that conquest brought about profound changes in the entire region. From then onwards, all countries in that area (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Palestine) underwent a[…]
Exploring the settlement of the Thracian tribe of the Edones. Human occupation of the area of Amphipolis dates back to prehistoric times. In the sixth century BCE, it was a settlement of the Thracian tribe of the Edones, favorably situated on a hilltop (“hill 133”) on the east bank of the river Strymon. Ennea Hodoi[…]