Joan Vos MacDonald

A well-chaperoned Grand Tour of Europe offered wealthy Victorian women a way to safely admire civilization’s wonders, but such travel held little interest for Dutch heiress Alexine Tinné. Having studied books on geography, archaeology, and botany at the Royal Library in the Hague, Tinné longed to explore uncharted regions. Her travels would bring her along the White Nile and later, deep within the Sahara Desert.

COVID-19 restrictions have resulted in more time spent at home, sometimes binge-watching fun escapist TV fare, such as the Korean drama Crash Landing On You, which stars actress Son Ye-jin.

As a girl, Alaqai Beki mastered horseback riding and archery, the skills expected of a Mongol woman during the 12th and 13th centuries. By her teens, she was skilled enough to follow her father into battle, but as the ruler of an allied nation, she played an even larger role in his success, providing troops and strategic support for his campaign of military conquests.

Song Ji-hyo’s busy year has offered her more than one opportunity to reflect on the meaning of family. The Korean actress played a mysterious long-lost sister in the film Intruder and now plays a single mom struggling to raise her daughter in the TV drama Was it Love?

Since the 1950s, about 180,000 South Korean children have been sent to orphanages and adopted around the world. While inter-country adoptions provided these children with a new family and home, for many the pain of abandonment lingered, a sense of loss buried deep within, only to resurface years later.

When Time To Hunt begins, Lee Je-hoon’s character is leaving jail, but his friends don’t offer him tofu, the traditional Korean get-out-of-jail gift that symbolizes starting over. It’s just as well. His character Joon-seok has no intention of following a different path.

Actress Hwang Jung-eum decided that she really loved acting while playing an English tutor in the 2009 k-drama High Kick Through The Roof. Since then, her love of acting has only grown, along with her resume of high-profile roles in genres ranging from comedy to melodrama.

Hyun Bin’s latest drama, Crash Landing On You, is the story of star-crossed lovers who are separated by the 38th parallel. The storyline so intrigued viewers that it became the highest rated tvN drama and the third-highest-rated drama in Korean cable TV history.

The French graphic novel 'Le Transperceneige,' published in 1982, presented a dystopian future that continues to stimulate the imagination, having inspired the 2013 film 'Snowpiercer,' directed by Academy-Award-winning South Korean director Bong Joon-ho, and most recently a television series.

The last year has been a blur of film festivals and award ceremonies for director and screenwriter Bora Kim. Her film, House of Hummingbird, debuted at the Busan Film Festival in late 2018. Since then the film has garnered 50 film awards, both domestic and international, in festivals from Busan to Beijing to Berlin.

Landscape designer and author Jan Johnsen describes the Hudson Valley as a stone-lover’s dream.

Although Bae Doona’s character in the drama Kingdom is brave enough to pulverize zombies, the actress says that in real life she would probably faint if she saw one. Bae can’t even watch horror films because she gets so easily scared.

When artist Matthew Pleva staged a one-day show at Kingston’s Arcane Video store, it took time for some visitors to realize exactly where to look. Displayed on shelves housing the store’s video cassette collection, were Pleva’s creations — an assortment of beta max cassettes, each embedded with a miniature scene of the film they contained.

Although the Hudson Valley is home to several cities, the region remains largely rural, dotted with thousands of farms, mostly family farms, and community Main Streets supported by small businesses. The valley is rich in resources and yet many communities continue to face economic challenges.

With Parasite winning Best Picture at the 92nd Academy Awards and BTS breaking music records around the world, the wave of Korean pop culture known as the Hallyu has become a global sea swell. As well as influencing international pop culture, Korean content is also shaping academia, with the Hallyu becoming the topic of a growing number of academic papers and dissertations.