Gaspar Corte-Real

Grant’s Tomb, officially known as the General Grant National Memorial, exudes a quiet, enduring power that many visitors to New York overlook. It may not be as crowded as Times Square or as instantly recognizable as the Statue of Liberty. Still, it carries a weight that is both architectural and historical, moral and symbolic. Rising above Riverside Drive at 122nd Street, it commands the river with a solemn authority. Its massive presence, though understated amidst the city's hustle, is a testament to the grandeur of Ulysses S. Grant’s achievements and the complexity of the era in which he lived.

The Waratah left the fitting out docks under bright Glasgow skies in 1908 as a promise: modern, roomy, and designed to stitch the old world to the new by steaming between Europe and Australia with passengers and cargo in equal measure. She rode the Clyde like a proclamation of British industrial confidence, steel plates bolted and riveted, twin screws waiting to drive her through miles of ocean, cabins appointed for emigrants and first-class travelers alike, holds deep enough to swallow wool, grain, hides, machinery, and bullion. For the Blue Anchor Line, she was a flagship in everything but name: a big ship in an age when size still carried an everyday mystique, a vessel that suggested safety by virtue of novelty. She measured approximately 9,000 gross tons, was some 500 feet long, broad in beam, and was built to cross oceans with the confidence of sound engineering and tradition behind her.

A replica of the Flor de la Mar in Malaysia

On the cold morning of January 19, 1854, the RMS Tayleur slipped from the docks of Liverpool, its iron hull gleaming in the winter sun, bound for Melbourne, Australia. It was a ship of promise, heralded as a marvel of modern engineering, a full-rigged iron clipper constructed at the Charles Tayleur Foundry in Warrington under the guidance of designer William Rennie. Launched only three months earlier on October 4, 1853, after an astonishingly rapid six-month build, she measured 230 feet in length with a 40-foot beam, displacing 1,750 tons and capable of carrying 4,000 tons of cargo. Chartered by the White Star Line, she was to ferry hopeful emigrants and precious goods to the distant colonies, riding the wave of opportunity created by the Australian gold rush. Yet beneath her gleaming iron plates and towering masts lurked vulnerabilities, an undersized rudder, untested rigging, and a compass easily distorted by her iron hull, that would conspire with inexperience to seal her fate.

In the heart of mid‑19th‑century New York, behind the Croton Reservoir where Bryant Park now lies, there once rose a building of such grandeur, such vastness, and such luminosity that it seemed to herald a new era. The New York Crystal Palace, built for the 1853 Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, was a monument to human ingenuity, a soaring testament to what America, young and brimming with confidence, could achieve. Its architects, Georg J. B. Carstensen and Charles Gildemeister, drew inspiration from the Crystal Palace of 1851 in London. Yet, they dared to imagine something distinctly American, a structure that would not merely copy but expand, elevate, and awe. They chose a Greek cross for the building’s form, its four arms extending symmetrically from a central dome that would dominate the skyline, a vast crown of iron and glass rising nearly 120 feet above the floor. To enter the Palace was to step into a new kind of world. Light poured through thousands of panes, some clear, some enameled with subtle colors, painting the interiors with a constant, shifting brilliance that seemed almost supernatural. The floor plan was monumental. Each arm of the cross was nearly 150 feet wide, divided into a nave and side aisles, with galleries stretching above to provide tens of thousands of additional square feet of exhibition space. On the ground floor alone, visitors could traverse over 111,000 square feet, moving among inventions, works of art, industrial marvels, and the finest examples of human craft. The air itself must have seemed electrified, charged with the hum of machinery, the whispers of discovery, and the collective awe of a million visitors who came over the fair’s course.

La Salle’s Le Griffon set out from Green Bay in mid-September 1679, laden with a rich cargo of fur pelts, under orders to sail back to Niagara. By all accounts, the ship was last seen by La Salle and his companions from shore. The weather was unstable, and Indigenous observers had warned of a brewing storm. But despite their warnings, the pilot ignored them, confident that the ship could make headway. What followed is opaque, to put a generous word on it, and what remains are competing stories, all fragmentary, each plausible in certain respects but none conclusively verifiable.

The first time New Yorkers descended into the City Hall station, they not only entered a place of transit; they stepped into a small, secret theater of civic pride. It was October 27, 1904, the day the Interborough Rapid Transit opened the city’s first underground line, and the air below City Hall Park smelled faintly of newly laid tile, hot mortar, and something else more challenging to name: the thrill of modernity. Newspapers that week gaped at the novelty of being shuttled beneath the streets, and for many riders, especially those from neighborhoods still governed by the elevated lines, taking that first ride felt like a ceremonial occasion. They were not merely commuting; they were witnessing an invention that promised to reshape the city.

In February of 1822, a Chinese junk of extraordinary size set out from the port of Amoy, modern-day Xiamen, on a voyage that would end in catastrophe and obscurity. Its name was the Tek Sing, translated as “True Star,” and on board were nearly 2,000 souls, including sailors, merchants, families, and migrants seeking new lives in the Dutch East Indies. The vessel itself was vast, stretching more than 50 meters in length, with a towering mast that gave it presence on the South China Sea. It carried a crew of about 200 and somewhere between 1,500 and 1,600 passengers, mostly Chinese emigrants heading for Batavia, now Jakarta. Crammed into its holds alongside them was cargo worth fortunes: silk, tea, medicinal herbs, furniture, but most famously, a staggering quantity of porcelain, hundreds of thousands of pieces made for everyday use in Asia’s bustling markets.

The SMS Amazone was more than a ship; she was the heart of Prussia’s fledgling Navy, a three-masted sail corvette launched in 1843 to train the officers who would one day command the kingdom’s growing fleet. In a nation defined by land power and continental ambition, the Amazone represented a rare and deliberate reach toward the sea. She carried cadets across the Baltic, the North Sea, and as far as South America, instructing them in navigation, discipline, and command. For nearly two decades, she was a school and a symbol, a vessel through which the young men of Prussia learned not only to sail, but to aspire to something larger than themselves.

Bughouse chess is one of the most widely played and beloved chess variants, but unlike the origins of standard chess or even other variants such as Fischer Random, the beginnings of Bughouse are more obscure, existing in fragments of anecdotal history rather than a clear invention story. What is certain is that the game took form sometime in the early 1960s, probably in the United States and Europe around the same time, when players began experimenting with multiple boards and teams of two. The basic concept was simple: when a piece is captured on one board, it is handed to one's partner, who may then "drop" it onto their own board instead of making a traditional move. From this single rule emerged an entirely new approach to chess, characterized by speed, chaos, and a fundamentally different nature from classical play.

In the heart of Manhattan’s East Village lies a neighborhood that pulses with history, memory, and resilience. Known as Little Ukraine, this cluster of streets has been shaped for over a century by the lives of immigrants who carried their homeland in their hearts and sought to reimagine it in exile. Here, amid the bustle of one of the world’s most dynamic cities, Ukraine's quiet but persistent voice speaks through church bells, community halls, bowls of borscht, and the letters of long-forgotten manuscripts.