A beach made of Blitz rubble and 6 more of our most-read stories this month

Route 66's "throw zone," Ohio's "Big Basket" building, and more. Email not displaying correctly? View in your browser. November 30, 2019 America’s First Banned Book Published in 1637, Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan mounted a harsh and heretical critique of Puritan customs and power structures. The tell-all book went far beyond what most New English settlers could accept. So the Puritans banned it, making it likely the first book explicitly banned in what is now the United States. Read More → Atlas Obscura Trips Art of Joshua Tree and the Mojave Desert Join us next year for a four-day trip through Joshua Tree and the Mojave Desert, landscapes that have both supported generations of creative endeavors. Along the way, we’ll visit colorful man-made mountains, glimpse mysteriously marked rocks, and experience soothing sound baths. Learn more → Blitz Rubble Beach The rubble scattered across Liverpool’s Crosby Beach isn’t exactly a secret; it had been discovered countless times before by locals and visitors, but the long stretch of beach has never been officially recognized for what it is: archaeologically valuable wreckage from World War II. Now one undergraduate archaeologist is trying to change that. Read more → Welcome to the ‘Throw Zone’ Though Route 66 is out of commission, you can still visit portions of its old path, and if you look closely in Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park, you'll find evidence of the drivers and passengers of decades past—in the form of garbage they chucked out their windows. Read more → Empty Photographs When John Beasley Greene photographed early European archaeology in Egypt, he paid little attention to those who lived there. One of the first photographers to be trained in archaeology, he focused mainly on the monumental structures, sweeping swaths of desert, and the go-on-forever sky. Read more → Ohio’s ‘Big Basket’ Building When Big Basket opened its doors for a tour in October, people were so happy they wept. The seven-story, basket-shaped building in east Newark, Ohio, was once the main office of the now-defunct Longaberger Company, but sat vacant since it closed in 2016. The current interior of the Big Basket also has a limited amount of time on Earth, but luckily the building is scheduled to reopen in 2020 as a luxury hotel. Read more → March of the Shipwrecks For years, a 20th-century iron boat sat lodged about 650 feet from the Canadian shore on the upper Niagara River, exactly where its two-person crew had abandoned it in August 1918. Then suddenly, this past Halloween, it moved. Read more → Ancient Gate, Modern Paint When an international team of archaeologists analyzed paint samples from Pharaoh Apries’ palace gate in the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis, they were surprised. Part of the gate was painted with two unexpectedly “new” yellow pigments that have never before been identified in Egyptian antiquity art. Read more → Visit AtlasObscura.com · View in Browser · Unsubscribe · See All Newsletters 61 Greenpoint Ave #622, Brooklyn, NY 11222