Tuesday, May 7, 2024
Of course, everyone has heard of the horrors of historical corsetry in modern media, especially corsets of the Victorian era. All too famous scenes of Elizabeth Swann dramatically fainting from her restrictive 18th century stays in Pirates of the Caribbean or Scarlett O’Hara gripping her bedpost as Mammy yanks the […]
January 1925. Alaska. Norwegian musher Leonhard Seppala and his team of sled dogs led by a 12-year-old Siberian Husky, Togo, dash through a relentless Alaskan blizzard on the Iditarod Trail. The temperature reaches down to a bone-chilling -85° F (-65° C). Their cargo, precious glass vials of Diphtheria antitoxin, […]
February 1962. NASA Langley Research Center. The sounds of clacking typewriters, mumbling mathematicians and engineers, and scribbling pens fill the ears of astronaut John Glenn. Days away from leaving Earth in a space shuttle on the Friendship 7 mission, he paces the floor, anxious. A network of international tracking stations […]
King Louis XIV of France strolls through the famous Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Sparkling crystal chandeliers tower above his wigged head, as well as the vaulted ceiling, 40 feet in height and covered in extravagant murals idolizing him as the Sun King. Seventeen giant mirrors, the height of luxury […]
St. Petersburg, Russia. December 1892. Gentlemen with carefully trimmed beards and ladies dressed in the eccentric puffy-sleeved dresses of the 1890s pack themselves into the Imperial Mariinsky Theater on a blustering Russian night for the very first performance of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. Italian ballerina Antoinetta dell’Era laces up the ribbons […]