hellobeautifulcreatures

And if you were a nine-year-old girl at any point during the last 30 years, you are almost certainly familiar with American Girl. It very well may have been an essential part of your nine-year-old girldom. From the beginning, from the time it was a mere kernel of an idea scrawled on a postcard, American Girl was engineered for nine-year-old girls. It all began when Pleasant Rowland, who was working for an educational publishing company at the time, took a trip to Colonial Williamsburg. Rowland had had a varied career; she'd been an elementary school teacher , a TV news reporter , a textbook writer. History and education were her passions, and while she was in Virginia, inspiration struck. She sent a postcard detailing her plan to her friend Valerie Tripp , a children's author. As she recalled at American Girl's 25th anniversary celebration , it went something like this: "I've been down in Williamsburg this week and had an idea. What do you think of it? A series of...

Guinea trive members had never seen a white person before" /> New Guinea trive members had never seen a white person before ( ) Margaret Hastings " /> Margaret Hastings ( ) Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff Harper When Margaret Hastings found her best friend dead, all she could think about were her shoes. “I ought to have cried,” Hastings wrote in her diary. “I just sat there in shock, and all I could think was: ‘Now the shoes belong to me.’ ” That’s what paradise had done to the Women’s Army Corps corporal — stripped her of emotion, survival was the only imperative. If she was to make it out of the jungle alive, crying was a luxury. As World War II was drawing to a close, Hastings was part of a group of enlisted men and women who crashed in the middle of a “Shangri-La,” a hidden valley, untouched by the rest of the world, in Dutch New Guinea. But this Shangri-La was a far cry from the utopia coined by the 1933 novel “Lost Horizon.” Of the 24 passengers, only H...