Sublime

Actually, female alchemists in Greco-Roman Egypt weren’t uncommon, though they were mostly preoccupied with concocting fragrances and cosmetics. In fact, it was a collective of female alchemists in ancient Egypt who invented beer, setting up an unsurprisingly booming business by the Nile.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25, was the twenty-fifth in a series of ergot derivatives synthesized in 1938 by Dr. Albert Hofmann, a Swiss chemist working for Sandoz laboratories.

In those years, the Company of the Indies, a French corporation that managed the empire’s colonies, controlled the slave trade in the Gulf South. Over six thousand Africans, after enduring the Middle Passage, arrived in Mobile, Biloxi, and New Orleans. After Spain took control of Louisiana, in 1762, another four thousand odd Africans arrived. They

An 1889 act of the Florida legislature set aside some 10 million acres of land to be deeded to entrepreneurs willing to build new railway lines and thereby bolster the state’s economic infrastructure. As a result, Flagler was able to lay claim to eight thousand acres for every mile of track he built. In the end, he would control more than two

It is to Paracelsus, the famed “father of chemo-therapy,” that we can trace the revival of interest in opium. The great sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist, medical reformer, and quack advocated and used opium on a lavish scale.

California’s oranges are as much myth as they are fruit. They tell a story of an Eden at the end of the Wild West, of a paradise of empty land waiting to be cultivated into groves of ripe fruit by a new generation of Anglo-Americans. But that myth holds a multitude of other stories: of indigenous genocide, of forgotten foreign hands, of land

The Bahamas took a distinctly different course in relationship to the history of money-making than much of the region. African Americans who fought for the British in the Revolutionary War settled there to be free. Many of them came from the Low Country. In 1818, Great Britain declared that all enslaved Africans who set foot in the Bahamas would be

When I was growing up, we went to New Orleans annually. I do not remember which visit it was when she took me to the Bourbon Orleans Hotel. But I remember her finger, slender with heavy knuckles, like mine have become, pointing at the plaque “Former Site of Holy Family Sisters Convent.” The unmentioned historic purpose of the ballroom was that it

the founder of Astrology; the discoverer of Alchemy.