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Category / Nostalgia

The Camp Culinary Adventures of TV’s First Celebrity Chef

You can’t beat a bit of Fanny, especially in the kitchen. Overshadowed by modern day macho MasterChefs, Fanny Cradock paved the way as the first ever celebrity chef and remains one in a million, like a dish you can perfect just once and never recreate. Spicing up British TV from the mid-1950s-70s, folks tuned in…

Naked in the Mountains 100 Years Ago, She Invented the Advanced Selfie

Anne Brigman was turning up her selfie prowess about 100-years before the rest of us. For one, she was never the stoic, buttoned-up type, and felt more at home on a mountaintop than with a roof over her head. When Brigman stepped inside the lens of her camera, the result was a ‘selfie’ that looked…

Test Your Sense of Direction with Star Maps and Stick Charts of Polynesian Wayfinders

In an age where we almost entirely rely on our smartphones and satellites orbiting Earth to tell us what direction to go in, imagine traversing thousands of miles of open ocean using only your senses. This is how the first people who populated the islands of the Pacific Ocean traveled, and some still do, relying…

She Was a Black Librarian Who Could Equal America’s Most Powerful Man

Today, we meet a heroine by the name of Belle da Costa Greene. Under the honey-hued lights of Manhattan’s Morgan Library, she became the guardian of the world’s greatest cultural treasures: not one but three Gutenberg bibles, illuminated manuscripts, originals by Da Vinci, Mozart, Michelangelo, and others – the list goes on (in its very own…

The Famous Red Carpet Express Train Rides Again

One of America’s most iconic train journeys of the past is making a comeback, for it is now possible on special occasions, to ride the tracks that hugs the banks of New York’s Hudson River northwards on one of the most luxurious trains to ever grace the rails – the 20th Century Limited. Thanks to…

Ibiza’s Long Lost Utopian City Built Inside a Bouncy Castle

Before the days, and nights, of Ibiza’s club-culture tourism and world famous pool parties that popped up in the early 1980s, a peculiar inflatable structure appeared on the island a decade earlier, and no, it wasn’t a blow-up bar. In 1971, a bunch of hippies built a DIY utopian city on the northern coast of…

Once Upon a Summer in Black Eden…

Today, the glory days of Idlewild feel a bit like a fever dream. Just ask any of the African American vacationers who made the pilgrimage to the Michigan resort from the 1910s-60s. “It was something that you’d never believe…stranger than fiction,” reflects one woman in Coy Davis Jr.’s documentary, Whatever Happened to Idlewild? In the midst of Jim…

Eight Hundred Lost Children and a Voyage Around the World

In 1918 a group of American men and women from the American Red Cross wound up in Siberia where they encountered 782 Russian summer campers and their teachers. The schoolchildren were from Saint Petersburg, and had been away at summer camp when a violent war broke out. They fled the fighting by heading east to…

A Dinner Party with History’s Most Notorious Art Thieves

Imagine gathering around a dinner table with the guy who stole the Mona Lisa, an heiress who stole a Vermeer, the “gentleman thief” responsible for some of the most sensational art thefts in Europe, and let’s throw an invite to Pablo Picasso for good measure, for his own attitude towards the world of art fraud…

The Paris of Tomorrow That Thankfully Never Was

What do you love most about Paris? Perhaps it’s looking up at all the limestone detail of Haussmann’s grand boulevards or getting lost down a cobblestone street leading to a hidden bucolic courtyard. Those classic grey zinc roofs that provide the perfect reflection for the city’s famed sunsets aren’t bad either. Or maybe it’s just…

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