On January 22, 1883 the New York Times lamented: It is a mockery of science and human skill that a ship so well-appointed and furnished with all the modern appliances, that the Cimbria should be run down and sunk, with nearly all on board.” Before the Titanic, there was the Cimbria, and the victims of the Cimbria disaster deserve 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”.