Perhaps one of the least well known European ventures in the Americas was the German Colonization of the New World and the Colony of Klein Venedig. Though the country of Germany didn’t exist until 1870, Germans from the many principalities of the Holy Roman Empire were just as interested as anyone in striking it rich by conquering a wealthy new world empire like the Aztec or Inca. Some were even driven by the desire to find that mythical city of gold, El Dorado.
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”.