French Quarter dot com, notes: “ Looking at the vibrant, festive Quarter with millions of visitors annually, it is hard to imagine the devastation of Holy Saturday morning in 1788. Smoking ruins stretched from Chartres to Dauphine Street, and from Conti to St. Philip.” The 1788 great fire of New Orleans deserves to be remembered.
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”.