Iconography
A tour of the icons - real and imagined - that define our sense of a place and that are defined by that place in turn. Season 1: England, Season 2: New England
The Ghost Stories of M.R. James
You never know what your legacy is going to be.
There once was a scholar at Cambridge who dedicated probably 90% of his adult waking hours to scholarship - cataloging dusty old manuscripts, caring for fragile old artifacts, studying creaky old churches. He never married, never had children, never retired. In the other 10% of his time, for kicks, he wrote and recited stories… stories about bachelor scholars went looking for dusty old manuscripts, found fragile old artifacts, and poked around creaky old churches, and oh yeah, these things were all cursed and studying them meant confronting unspeakable horrors.
M.R. James is iconic because of what he did in those rare moments he wasn’t giving his heart and soul to academia - those nights and weekends when he smirked and wondered “How can I scare the crap out of my friends?”
More episodes from Iconography
Plymouth Rock: A Pageant
Visitors to Plymouth Rock tend to find the icon... underwhelming - a small, scarred rock in a cage.
Maybe the reason Plymouth Rock is so frequently seen as underwhelming is because all the …
Mayflower II
In the 1950s, something must have been in the water, because all of a sudden, there was a movement afoot to put a replica of the Mayflower in the water. For one man to become obsessed with …
The Mayflower
The Mayflower is a foundational icon of the United States, but it was a British ship carrying British subjects to a British colony. So how does the …
The First Thanksgiving
Sarah Josepha Hale, editress of Godey's Lady's Book, dedicated years of her life to the crusade to make Thanksgiving a national holiday - she was …
The Crucible of Modern Salem
The Witchfinder General of Salem, Eric Dwinnells leads us on a Halloween journey to the heart of Salem, Massachusetts. Find it questionable that the Salem Witch Trials and The Crucible …
The Witch Hunt
Can a witch hunt narrative be effective if it includes actual witches? In part one of a two part series on Salem and its Witch Trials, Iconography uses Hocus Pocus, Scooby Doo, and The …
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