Showing results by narrator "Desiree Fultz" in All Categories

One look, one smile, and I didn't stand a chance. The instant my eyes landed on Presley Chambers, I was a goner. She was a force of nature that turned my world upside down. Sweet, sassy, and sexy as hell, she brought me to my knees. But she isn't just any woman, she's a gift, she's a goddess, she's my disease...and I'll fight like hell to erase her fears. Sometimes fate has other plans. Now our future is in her hands.

A summer job. That's all it was supposed to be. It never crossed my mind that I was about to collide with a man who would obliterate every plan I ever made. My mother has always warned me that love is like a lightning bolt and it strikes without warning. But I had no intention of getting struck by either lightning or love anytime soon. I'd be too busy finishing my journalism degree and landing a job in a city far more sophisticated than Phoenix. There was certainly nothing in the cards about getting involved with an ex-ballplayer turned nightclub boss.

When archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann traveled to Ithaca, Greece in 1868, one goal was foremost in his mind: discovering the ancient city of Troy using Homer’s Iliad. The epic poem was widely believed to be no more than a myth, but Schliemann was convinced otherwise. For him, it was a map to the hidden location of ancient cities.

It started with a simple question: where were all the women pirates? Laura Sook Duncombe loved Peter Pan as a child and gobbled up every book on piracy she could find. But as she read, she was forced to face the harrrrrrd truth: All of the women seemed relegated to mere footnotes and short paragraphs sprinkled throughout books about male pirates. This curiosity spurred a quest for answers—and led to her new book.

Today, some tour operators and cultural historians are calling attention to the country's little-known Jewish heritage.

"The Forgotten Jewish Pirates of Jamaica" is from smithsonianmag.com, published on July 7, 2016.

The first country to be described as a "banana republic," albeit in a roundabout way, was Honduras. In 1904, American writer O. Henry wrote “The Admiral,” a short story published in his book Cabbages and Kings. It’s set in Anchuria, a fictional ‘small, maritime banana republic,’ that T.W. writes was clearly based on Honduras, where Henry was at the time.

The kitchen is where Michael Twitty goes to tell the truth. It’s where he first came out as gay to his mother and aunt. Where he found a spiritual connection to Judaism in the braids of a challah, years before converting to the religion as an adult. Where he invites others to listen to his sermons about the true origins of southern food.

The origins of the modern chocolate chip lie with Ruth Wakefield, the woman who created the Toll House cookie in the 1930s. But the name “chocolate chip” is older than that, writes Kate Erbland for Mental Floss.

A rare chemical reaction strengthens it even today—and that could help threatened coastal communities.

On this day in 1934, the first federal prisoners arrived on the rocky island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. Before that, the island had almost a century of history as a prison, but it wasn't always the notorious prison it's known as today. Here are five things to know about its history.

At a robust 87 years of age, Dolores Huerta speaks with the rapidity, clarity and conviction of her younger self. During the Civil Rights Era, Huerta co-founded what is now the United Farm Workers union, resolutely dedicating her life to securing the rights of immigrant farmworkers and to combatting the fierce racism underlying their mistreatment. In today’s political climate, she sees the fundamental freedoms of her fellow Americans freshly imperiled.

On this day in 1974, the last Skylab mission finished. It marked the end of what was then the longest amount of time humans had spent in space, on the space station that was the U.S.'s predecessor to the International Space Station. It also marked the end of a tense standoff.

On the night of October 29, 1964, two self-styled Miami beach boys crept onto the grounds of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History while a lookout drove a white Cadillac around the museum’s block of Manhattan.

Their horses splashed through iced-over creeks. Librarians rode up into the Kentucky mountains, their saddlebags stuffed with books, doling out reading material to isolated rural people. The Great Depression had plunged the nation into poverty, and Kentucky—a poor state made even poorer by a paralyzed national economy—was among the hardest hit.

Looking for a sign of the apocalypse? Consider this: Our global obsession with guacamole and avocado toast has helped spawn record avocado prices, financial woes for millennials and even an uptick in avocado-related crime.

In the repertoire of Renaissance cartographers, fierce mythical beasts—from sea serpents to manticores—represented dangers of unknown worlds. Rather than “here be dragons,” one early terrestrial map of the Arctic warned that hic sunt ursi albi—here are white bears. Rarely seen and poorly understood, the pale predators signified the Arctic’s challenges to the world.

Why fudge? In the normal course of things, fudge is … just another confection. It’s not as ubiquitous as, say, a chocolate bar. And yet, writes Robert Reid, “at least in America, wherever you roam, you can only go to one of two kinds of destinations: those with fudge, and those without.” Fudge is the best indicator of whether or not something is actually a tourist attraction, he writes.

Before southern California’s glorious, golden landscape was etched with eight-lane superhighways and tangles of concrete flyovers choreographing a continuous vehicular ballet.

While studying brain scans to search for patterns that correlated with psychopathic behavior, James Fallon found that his own brain fit the profile.

For many, the call to enter the political fray feels necessary. “Sure, scientific inquiry should be immune from the whims of politicians. It just isn't,” science editor Miriam Kramer recently wrote in Mashable. Others worry that staging a political march will “serve only to reinforce the narrative from skeptical conservatives that scientists are an interest group and politicize their data,” as coastal ecologist Robert Young put it in a controversial opinion article in The New York Times.