Every artifact is a story.
Harvey Rachlin gathers more than fifty of history's most storied physical objects into a single volume and tells the story behind each one. The mounted hide of Stonewall Jackson's battle horse. The Black Obelisk. The Rosetta Stone. George Washington's false teeth. Vice Admiral Lord Nelson's uniform coat. The skeleton of the Elephant Man. The bed on which Lincoln died.
For each artifact, Rachlin traces how it came to be, how it survived, and where it sits today. The book moves across centuries and continents, weaving together seemingly disparate histories into a sustained meditation on human endeavor and what we choose to preserve.
Readers of narrative history, museum and artifact studies, biography, archaeology, material culture, and nonfiction that follows objects across time will find a deep, browsable companion in Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, and Einstein's Brain.
“Entertaining and enlightening . . . a pageant of human aspiration, achievement, obsession and belief.”