travel

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• 3/22/2020
  

  The Three Daring Women Who Traversed the Himalayas

  by Kayte Nunn

  Antonia Deacock, Anne Davies, Eve Sims set off overland from England to Tibet in 1958, a 16,000 mile journey to aim climb one of the Himalayas’ unexplored high peaks. 

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  9/30/2019
  

  Why historians are fighting to save Thomas Cook’s enormous archive

  by Stephanie Decker

  With this 178-year-old firm, its heritage is about to be lost and a number of business historians – myself included – are fighting to save it.

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• SOURCE: Quartz
  9/23/19
  

  Thomas Cook, the travel agency of Britain’s far-flung 19th-century empire, is dead

  Thomas Cook was born with a railway journey that took place in 1841—the same year that Hong Kong was ceded to Britain, then at the peak of its imperial power.

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  12-12-14
  

  Netflix ‘Chinese Game of Thrones’ charts the life of Marco Polo – so who was he?

  by George Lane

  It is a name that most will have heard of, but few, perhaps, actually know much about.

• SOURCE: AP
  1-29-13
  

  Timbuktu: ancient seat of Islamic learning

  SEVARE, Mali — Timbuktu, the fabled desert city where retreating Muslim extremists destroyed ancient manuscripts, was a center of Islamic learning hundreds of years before Columbus landed in the Americas.It is not known how many of the priceless documents were destroyed by al Qaida-linked fighters who set ablaze a state-of-the-art library built with South African funding to conserve the brittle, camel-hide bound manuscripts from the harshness of the Sahara Desert climate and preserve them so researchers can study them.News of the destruction came Monday from the mayor of Timbuktu. With its Islamic treasures and centuries-old mud-walled buildings including an iconic mosque, Timbuktu is a U.N.-designated World Heritage Site....

• SOURCE: WSJ
  1-18-13
  

  Saving old Rangoon

  AS WE SIT IN YANGON peak-hour traffic, Thant Myint-U is conjuring a golden age. The eminent Burmese historian, academic and former United Nations official has devoted much of the last two years to saving the city's spectacular architecture. Despite the gridlock as we slowly nudge through its colonial heart, we couldn't be better placed to recall the glories of old Rangoon (as Yangon was once known). It's difficult to remember today, thanks to nearly five decades of Myanmar's political isolation under brutal military rule, but there was a time when it was one of the jewels of the British Empire.