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The history that is not consigned to the past

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There are historic sites that, time has ensured, are no more than ruins – for example, the Roman forum, Machu Picchu, and Acropolis. Then, there are historic sites that are still physically intact eliciting grandeur – the pyramids of Giza, Chichen Itza, the many castles of Europe – but have lost their vitality and their intended purpose. Finally, in my mind, there is the third kind – heritage sites that still live today and retain their authenticity; the historic sites that take you back hundreds of years but refuse to consign themselves to history. Ait Benhaddou is one such place. Our road trip started in Casablanca. We were on our way to Merzouga to celebrate the New Year in the middle of the Sahara desert. We spent two days in the beautiful Marrakesh and the night before at Ouarzazate. The next morning instead of driving east our friend, Hakim, took the road back to Marrakech. After driving for about 15 mins, he took the detour north. The air got thinner as we got higher. He said he...
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The map of the motorcycle diaries

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Ernesto "Che" Guevara along with his friend Alberto Granado set out on a travel around South America in Granado’s motorcycle Norton La Poderosa II in 1952 from Buenos Aires. When they started the trip, they were just two adventurous souls keen on taking a semester off to see the world that they had only read about in books. Over the next seven months, Guevara would visit Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela, and witness social and political injustices that would have a profound impact on him, the history of Latin America, and the history of the modern world. His story is more a discovery of self. This is not a political article. In this article, we track the footsteps of Guevera and Granado with the curiosity of an adventurer, a traveler, and a history buff. Guevera, in an alternate universe, would have become a great traveler and a travel writer as evidenced by the eloquence and knowledge with which he describes the experiences of his travel. In my favorite line f...
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To the beginning of photography in Texas

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The world is awash with photographs. Anyone with a camera in hand is a photographer. Billions of photos are taken every day worldwide and a vast majority of them never even get a second look, let alone take a physical form, lost in the vast emptiness of the digital cloud. However, things were different back in the day. In the early 19th century, pioneers of photography were busy developing new techniques and demonstrating their results to the public, starting a revolution that would go on to transform the world. Practical photography was generally accepted to be born in 1839, the year Louis Daguerre commercially introduced the photographic process that he developed, which came to be known as the daguerreotype process . The photograph that was developed using this process was itself called a Daguerreotype . Parisian Louis Daguerre had been working on this process since the mid 1820s. The process was faster and demonstrated commercial viability making it the first successful photographic...
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