Commze

Today, Dallas is a wonderful place to be. The locals as well as the visitors can find something to love here, any time of day or night. It’s one of the largest cities in the country, and boasts a multicultural population, making for ongoing cultural dialogues that are always heady and always in process. There are plenty of attractions for visitors of all ages, and there is also a splendid alternative scene, making for daylight enjoyments and a multitude of pleasures after dark. Visiting is very easy, as hotels can be quite lovely, and enormously accommodating.

One of the more interesting intersections here is certainly culture, and one of them is history. Most people remember the Kennedy assassination, or at least are aware that it happened in Dallas. It’s one of those black holes in history, where an event that happens in a place is so stunning, and affects so many lives, that it starts to behave as if it were its own place in time. We always go back to the event when we hear about it, and this creates a strange sense of vertigo, but it always means that we are participants in history. We are able to continue to feel the force long after the event has passed, and this gives our own present an uncanny power.

It becomes even more complex and fascinating when the iconic moment reveals itself as mutable. We remember the Zapruder film, although it’s common knowledge that there are many films of the terrible moment. When new video is released, we may not exactly re-remember the event, but a perspective is added to the weight that we carry in our minds. This suggests that the past has a kind of elasticity, and that the present is something we can participate in, and Dallas today, in its best moments, demonstrates community participation in a way the Kennedy would have liked to imagine.

No trip along the nation’s East Coast would be complete without a stop at one of the oldest colonies in America, Williamsburg.  The first successful British Colony in North America was Jamestown, founded in May of 1607, four hundred and three years ago.  There were several failed attempts before it, with the Roanoke Lost Colony creating a number of mysterious legends in its wake (a play titled The Lost Colony was produced by the Roanoke Island Historical Association that explores this fascinating moment in American history).  In 1693, the nearby town of Middle Plantation began one of the oldest colleges in the nation, the College of William and Mary.  A few years later, Virginia’s Colony’s capital moved to Middle Plantation, where it became known as Williamsburg.

All of this history makes Williamsburg a fascinating place to visit.  You can attend Colonial Williamsburg, where buildings are virtually unchanged from the early days of the United States, and people re-enact what it was like to live in that time.  You can travel the Colonial Parkway, part of the National Park Service, taking in its scenic eleven miles, which connects Williamsburg to Yorktown.  There, you’ll find the Colonial National Historical Park, where you can see the Yorktown Battlefield, the actual place in which the Battle of Yorktown was waged.   You might check out the Yorktown Victory Center, as well, where you’ll find more living history run by the Jamestown Yorktown Foundation.

If the study of the Civil War isn’t to your liking, then you might try a ghost tour or spend a day or two at Busch Gardens Europe amusement park.  No matter what your interest, you’ll find stopping at Williamsburg will be worth it.  All you need to do is find a place to stay there, and that’s easy to do.  Just go to http://www.hotelswilliamsburg.com and you’ll find a hotel right for you.

Once cartographers had been working on the world map for many years, some astronomers and map makers began to long for maps of the outer realms.  Scientists such as Galileo, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Hevilius began to map beyond the boundaries of the known world, the known universe.  The telescope was invented in 1609, and with this invention detailed diagrams and maps of the moon and the stars opened up a view of the heavens, a road map to spaces never before seen by the human eye.

During this time, microscopes and magnifying glasses brought into view the tiny worlds that live withing ours.  Again, a world that was never before witnessed, a piece of the world globe, in the tiny worlds on the microscope slides.  Now what had begun to fascinate these scientists was the inner world, the core of the earth.  Tides, and earthquakes, mountains and volcanoes were evidence that something was indeed happening at the core, which led such scientists through deductive reasoning, men such as René Descartes, to reaching propositions about phenomena that is not seen by naked eye.  The imaginary places were now becoming very real indeed.

These phenomena were finding their way into the writings of the poets of the time, such as excerpts from Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream“. These astronomical and global happenings were finding their place as “good” and “evil”.  This brought into the minds of scientists and artists alike, a change in perspective, not only of the universe but of the human psyche as well.  The medical field had begun to seriously “map” the human physical body.  This was a time of discovery, of thinking people finally seeing the evidence of certain things that they knew all along, but had not yet seen the physical proof.  Maps, and the early creation of maps, led people not only to places they were longing to go, but to places within where they already were.