The bright red flower called the poinsettia has become a traditional part of American Christmas celebrations. But the flower’s common name, which, while it sounds exotic, has nothing to do with the native name for the plant, is a reference to an American diplomat of whom a 1929 edition of the Baltimore Evening Sun wrote “His Career was as flamboyantly colorful as the poinsettia, and yet he is almost forgotten.”
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”.