Missouri Botanical Garden
Darwin’s Fern
Wanna see one of the specimens that Darwin collected during his voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle—you know, the voyage that changed how we thought about most everything? It’s a sweetly innocuous fern, Asplenium dareoides Desv., scooped up in 1834 from the west coast of South America before Darwin reached the Galapagos. The climate-controlled herbarium at the Missouri Botanical Garden safeguards that fern, along with a bit of Samolus repens (water pimpernel) collected on Captain James Cook’s first voyage around the world.
Monster Mash
Bernard Becker Medical Library
Unless you’re in med school, you can’t begin to imagine what’s tucked away in the Bernard Becker Medical Library. A gold-and-white 1802 hearing device doubles as an elegant centerpiece, hollowed to hold flowers or fruit, with a tube (easily concealed by linen napery) running from its ornate base to channel sound to the guest who can’t hear clearly. A different sort of creativity shows up in Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum Historia, a 1642 “natural history” that jumbles dragons, centaurs, cyclops, and satyrs with medically documented cases of gigantism, dwarfism, and werewolf syndrome.
Where Were You?
In 1905, a cocky reporter pronounced journalism “the rough draft of history.” Well, in the Missouri History Museum archives, you can find a 5-foot-long carbon copy of a teletype dated November 22, 1963, announcing that President John F. Kennedy had just been shot in a Dallas motorcade. The scroll was donated by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat reporter who’d been alone in the wire room the day that it came in. The Globe was about to go to press, so he rushed to alert the city desk—where nearly everybody was away at lunch—and the subbing editor ran to the teletype machine. They assembled the story, and the reporter quietly kept that carbon copy of history.
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An Explosive Proposal
St. Louis Mercantile Library
Nearly forgotten in the recesses of the Mercantile Library is a red binder, an earnest proposal put forth seven decades ago to make St. Louis the new headquarters of the United Nations and “the Capital of the World.” The recommended site? “This fenced tract of nearly eighteen thousand acres at Weldon Spring, Missouri, which the United States Government has improved with facilities for water, power, communications, and transport” (meanwhile leaving a toxic nightmare nobody thought to mention). The proposal argued for Missouri as the crossroads of the nation: “Its history reflects the vigor of the pioneer as well as the cosmopolitan origin and development of America,” wrote the governor, and St. Louis’ mayor added that our fair city was “brought close to the capitals of the world by its highly developed transportation facilities.” Ahem.
Rescued Documents
Until the National Archives opened in 1934, bits of history wound up in the hands of the highest bidder. Realizing that the nation’s treasure was scattered all over the world, David Karpeles started collecting. Over the past four decades, he’s acquired more than 1 million original manuscripts—the world’s largest private collection. The Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum St. Louis opened last August at 3524 Russell, in the former Third Church of Christ, Scientist. Exhibits travel here from 13 other Karpeles museums across the country, but you can always see reproductions of the locally significant docs: the Great Soulard Discovery Map that steered Lewis and Clark, the French proclamation approving the Louisiana Purchase, Abe Lincoln’s praise of the St. Louis arsenal’s role in the Civil War, St. Louis’ application to the Baseball National League…
Books of Life & Death
Kevin A. Roberts
You can skim the latest thriller at downtown’s Central Library—or seek a different thrill by peering at its oldest “book,” a cuneiform tablet written in Sumerian around 2375 BCE. It’s a little dry—measures of fields and their owners’ occupations—so come forward a millennium and scan fragments from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. A blend of religion and magic, it offers spells to protect the dead person as he or she navigates the obstacles of the underworld to reach eternal life. That papyrus could come in handy.
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