The pre-dawn blue hour is often chilly, as the Venice Carnival takes place in midwinter. Dress warmly to greet the stoic and mysterious women (and a few men) who don marvelous costumes and pose before the gondolas, in the lee of the Doge’s Palace and the Bridge of Sighs, waiting for the sun.
On the afternoon of June 25, 1876, high atop the bluffs over Montana’s Little Bighorn River, General George Armstrong Custer, clad in frontier buckskins, lead 210 men of the U.S. 7th Cavalry down a ravine in pursuit of rebellious Sioux Indians. Two days later, a relief force curious as to his whereabouts arrived and found a gruesome sight. Scattered over a wide area on several hills were all 210 of Custer’s men… each man lying in the sun, scalped, stripped naked, and often mutilated. One victim had 105 arrows stuck in him…
Three nights in Tokyo Japanese winters are fairly mild with rare snowfalls, apart from the Hokkaido ski slopes. This makes winter a perfect time to see Tokyo and other Japanese cities without the tourist crowds of spring and summer. Tokyo has a population of 37 million. Despite its size, the world’s largest city is sparklingly…
High above Salzburg’s Alstadt (Old Town), the stark, impregnable, 11th-century stronghold of Fortress Hohensalzburg looms over a city long ruled by mighty prince-archbishops—Catholic prelates who wielded both spiritual authority and secular power within the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted from 800 to 1806. Below, amid glittering domes and ornate courtyards, visitors stream through the Salzburg…
By Sharon McDonnell UNESCO has called the Mogao Caves the “largest, most richly endowed and longest-used treasure house of Buddhist art” in the world. The caves are located outside Dunhuang, an oasis city in northwest China at the edge of the Gobi Desert in Gansu province. Filled with vivid murals and statues depicting Buddha and…
By John Gottberg Anderson Seven-year-old Goku Alexander stood on one leg, like a stork, raising his right knee to waist level. His gloved fists hovered just above his eyes as he peered intently at his taller opponent, a Thai boy named Pingkong. Anticipating one another’s every move, the pair began cautiously, trading light jabs. Then…
By RC Staab On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, this country can sometimes feel like it is coming apart at the seams. Voices shout past each other to beg the question whether this grand experiment in democracy can hold. So, in the spirit of both escape and inquiry, I decided to step into a…
By Kerrick James America’s greatest writer, Samuel Clemens, who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain, grew up on the western shore of North America’s greatest river, the mighty Mississippi. Abraham Lincoln called it the Father of Waters. I prefer to think of this wide, muscular river as America’s Nile, since it drains 1,125 million…
By Christine Loomis Jason Younis y Delgado, fifth-generation tinsmith, sits at a table off the sunbaked plazuela of Casa San Ysidro in Corrales, New Mexico. The Casa is part of an historic adobe complex affiliated with the Albuquerque Museum. Surrounded by pieces of tin and rows of tools, he’s fabricating traditional tin works to sell…
The British Army was on the move and the American militia was scattered across the New York countryside. What followed were nights of courage and defiance that helped shape the outcome of the Revolution. Through midnight rides, strategic river control, and decisive battles from Long Island and Fort Ticonderoga to Saratoga, New York emerged as a true battleground that determined America’s fate. Join writer Mark Orwoll as he traces the battles, landscapes, and forgotten heroes that made New York the linchpin of America’s fight for independence.