For more than 200 years the White House had been home to presidents, site of official functions, and of course a center of governmental work of the Executive branch. It comes as no surprise then that the furniture, floors, carpets, windows - nearly everything, in fact - has been replaced a few times. And in 1882, a “fancy” but unexpected president decided to get rid of old furniture the old fashioned way: by selling it at public auction.
One of the great questions of antiquity is what ancient knowledge might have been lost with the destruction of the famed Great Library of Alexandria. We can only guess at the answer, but the question itself reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the library- what it was, where it was, why its was, and what happened to it.
In the US alone souvenir shops sold more than 21 billion dollars of merchandise in 2022. It is human nature to try and preserve memories, and one of the many ways we do that is to purchase keepsakes, mementos, or souvenirs - that remind us of where we’ve been. And evidence of that human instinct goes way back, well before anyone “exited through the gift shop”.