Book Images

An advantage of the U.S. federal system. Individual states can adopt laws that initially seem crazy to other states, but that eventually prove sensible and become adopted by all of the states -- such as California’s becoming the first state to permit right turns on a red light after stop.

This portrait of Poggio appears in the manuscript of his work 'De varietate furtunae.' the work, written when Poggio was sixty-eight years old, eloquently surveys the ruins of ancient Roman greatness. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poggio_Bracciolini

www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm

Poggio's friend Niccoli here brings his long-awaited transcription of "On the Nature of Things" to a close with a customary word "Explicit" (from the Latin for (unrolled). He enjoins the reader to "read happy: ("Lege feliciter) and adds -- in some tension with the spirit of Lucretius poem -- a pious "Amen"

The heretic Hus, forced to wear a mock paper crown declaring his misdeeds, is burned at the stake. afterwards, to prevent any sympathetic bystander from collecting a relic of the martyr, his ashes are shoveled into the Rhine.

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The Ladies of Goust, a self-governing hamlet-republic in the Pyrenees, photographed by the American tourist in 1889: "They kn of no taxes of any kind, to pay; they always marry within the village, except where the patriarchs may grant a dispensation with an outsider. (Edwin Dix, A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees.)

The menhir near Dol-de-Bretagne, at Champ Dolent (Field of Woe or Wailing -- a local name for “abattoir). Local legends associated the stone with Gargantua, the Devil, two warring brothers and Julius Caesar. Romantic scholars associated it with the Druids. The Church often ‘converted’ the stones by carving them into the shape of a cross or by inserting a crucifix.

Road building in the Oisans (French Alps) c. 1918. The first surfaced road to cross the region was completed in 1862. The slopes had already been cleared by soil erosion and avalanches. Most of these roads were built for the tourist trade by the Italian workers.

Shanty town in Belleville, in the eastern Suburbs of Paris, previously an area of vineyards and quarries. Photograph by Chalres Marvbille, C. 1865

An assistant of the anthropologist Hippolyte Muller, founder of the Musee dauphinois in Grenoble, collecting ethnological artefacts in 1917. Muller cycled all over the region seeking our prehistoric sites to “connect the earliest inhabitants of ‘pays’ with those who live there now.”. The photograph was taken inJuly 1917 at Le Coin (6,600 feet), one of the hamlets of Molines-en-Queyras in the Alps.

Asombre desert where the cicada sings and the bird is silent, where all human habitation disappears (V. Hugo). Shepherds in the Landes, at La Mouleyre, near Commensacq, on one of the few surviving parches of the original Landes. The encroaching forest of oak and pine can just be seen on the horizon. A shepherd on stilts could travel at the speed of a trotting horse. www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=463242529292093&set=a.426151079667905

Paul Delaroche, Napoleon crossing the Alps by the Great Saint Bernard Pass on 20 May 1800, with the help of local guide. The pass was patrolled by paramedical dogs of the hospice at the summit. The only surface track was the vestigial Roman road. Mules were the most reliable form of transport, not only in the mountains. Until the mid-nineteenth century, mules and mule-trains accounted for about two-thirds ofall traffic on the French roads.