You’ve likely heard of Samuel F.B Morse, generally credited with the invention of the telegraph. But you might be less aware that the man who famously used his code to say “what hath God wrought?” was also an artist, in fact one of America’s best and most prolific portrait artists, one of our most gifted historical artists, and a leading figure in the development of an American school of art.
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”.