Voyages

In honor of the Texas Memorial Museum's 83rd birthday, and on a less uplifting note, to draw attention to the dire financial situation it's currently experiencing, please enjoy this re-release combining my two episodes on Texan paleontology and reconstructing behavior from fossils. The stories featured here center on the museum and its invaluable collections, and if you're inspired to make your voice heard, there's a petition circulating on Change.org. If you're a Texas voter, you have an even better opportunity to make your voice heard by contacting your legislature and urging them to support one of the most important institutions for preserving and celebrating the natural heritage of the Lone Star State.

In this final installment of our journey through Victorian architecture, we travel the globe in the wake of the Royal Navy to see how the technologies that allowed the British Empire to grow also made Victorian architecture a global style. Then, we travel to the Wild West of the US to see how this backwards-looking school of design led to the radical new architecture of Modernism.

In the third installment of our journey through Victorian architecture, we travel to the north and west of England to explore how new technologies - especially iron casting and glass manufacturing - led Industrial Era engineers to build entirely new types of buildings for an entirely new - and rapidly expanding - market.

At the same time the first modern geologists and biologists were arguing about the meaning of the distant past, Victorian architects were engaging in their own debates about incorporating historical styles into their work. The two controversies collided when an increased interest in natural history led to the construction of several museums showcasing the wonders of the natural world. The results were some of the most spectacular exhibition spaces ever constructed, and we'll explore these and the implications they had for the understanding of the past in Industrial Britain in this second installment of our exploration of the weird world of Victorian architecture.

The Victorian Era was a chaotic period in which ideas and ideologies bounced off one another, with diverse and surprising results. Nowhere is this more clear than in architecture, where clashes over the meaning of the past and a present of incredible new technologies led to a style that had unexpected impacts on the future of design. This holiday season we'll be journeying through London, Great Britain, and the world to explore the gloriously weird union of art and science that is Victorian architecture. We begin with the most spectacular building of the age, the Crystal Palace. The building itself is long gone, leaving only a few relics, but these remnants tell us a lot about life in Industrial Britain, and you can see them all for yourself in a park in south London.

I'm giving myself a brief mid-season break as I catch up on a backlog of work and get ready for a seasonally-appropriate series in December that I'm really excited about. I'm re-airing this episode on Charles Darwin and London because it's a perfect prologue to that series, which will prominently feature one of the same destinations in a new context. We'll be back with new episodes in the days following Thanksgiving, but in the meantime, enjoy this re-airing of teh Voyage After the Beagle!

October 13th is National Fossil Day in the US, so on this episode of Voyages I'm joined by several of my friends and together we nerd out about some of our favorite fossils. Join us to travel from the forests and coastlines of the ancient Midwest to the oceans of British Columbia and Kansas and to the stomping grounds of some of the strangest horses that ever lived, as well as to the museums where you can visit these fossils for yourself.

In the final episode of our exploration of the Missoula Floods, we travel to the Columbia River Gorge and the Willamette Valley, where the human side of the floods' story becomes clear. Join me to discover how the floods shaped indigenous culture, how they instigated an economic cold war between Britain and the US, how they made the continent's largest overland migration possible, and how they changed the face of travel in America.

On this episode we continue our journey along the path of the Missoula Floods. Having encountered the giant lake that caused them, we now move downstream to Washington to see what happens when that much water is unleashed on a landscape.

During the most recent Ice Age, floods of an almost unimaginable size swept across northwestern North America, changing the face of the landscape, stoking one of the liveliest debates in the history of geology, and shaping the region's history and culture in surprising ways. In this first of three episodes, we'll explore western Montana, where the floods - and the study of them - began.