Box of delight

The free, downloadable adult coloring books that the New York Academy of Medicine solicits from museums and university and state libraries for its #ColorOurCollections celebration each February enliven our month far more than any Valentine or Presidents Day sale.

They’re not just a great way to while away winter’s last gasp. They’re also a wonderful portal for discovering cultural institutions that have thusfar flown beneath our radar, owing to size, geography, and/or field of study.

We would do well to recover the sense of awe and wonder outer space used to inspire in us---sublime feelings that can motivate us not only to explore the seemingly limitless resources of space but to conserve and preserve our own on Earth. Hopefully you can find your own slice of the sublime in this massive photo archive.

Turkey is a geographical and cultural bridge between the east and the west,” writes Istanbul University’s Gönül Bakay. This was so long before Constantinople became Istanbul, but after the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the region took on a particular significance for Christian Europe. “The Turk” became a threatening and exotic figure in the European imagination, “shaped by a considerable body of literature, stretching from Christopher Marlowe to Thomas Carlyle.” Images of Ottoman Turkey were long drawn from a “mixture of fact, fantasy and fear.