Blog
A Kid’ll Eat Ivy, Too
This Iranian jar is almost 6,000 years old. It depicts the Persian, or Bezoar, Ibex – the ancestor of our domesticated goat. While our modern goats have horns, the bezoar ibex has the largest horns, considered in proportion to body weight, of any animal in the world. The enormous horns, and the characteristic beard (from which we get the word "goatee"), are beautifully represented. The ibex's distinctive form and trophy-worthy horns have made it the object of hunters for millennia. Today, t...
Cider: An American Revival
By the19th century, New Jersey was already established as serving both the New York and Philadephia markets with a variety of goods and services. One of the many products that New Jersey excelled in making, especially around the Newark area, was cider. Today, "cider" means "freshly pressed apple juice", but back then cider was an alcoholic beverage, made from apples by pressing and fermentation. At long last, real cider is making a comeback in this country, propelled in part by the success of...
A Young Gardener
The cultural and political legacy of Thomas Jefferson is complicated, just as the man himself was. The man who wrote that "all men are created equal" kept other human beings as slaves. The man who kept slaves also wrote "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it." The man eventually elected to lead the...
