Though nearly forgotten now as they have become largely obsolete in the face of rail and road, canals were for a time the end-all be-all of transportation technology, and the building of a canal could guarantee prosperity for the towns it traveled through. Hoping to get in on the game, the state of Indiana planned the Central Indiana canal, meant to connect the Ohio river to the already existing canal network And then everything went wrong.
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”.