The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse Henry-Lepaute first-order Fresnel lens is the most historic lighthouse illuminating apparatus in America. It is the oldest extant lens of its size and design in the nation. It is also the most-traveled, most publicly viewed, and most-abused lighthouse artifact in the nation. Yet the lens possesses an unparalleled potential to educate […]
Island Features | Full Article
Too excited to sleep, we set out in the middle of the night. Our heavy, steel-frame, 10-speed bikes were overloaded—tents, sleeping bags, and too many clothes. But despite the weight, the first few miles seemed effortless. Soon, the city’s streetlights receded and, without headlights, we rode down the dusky center line of the rural road […]
Island Features | Full Article
Daniel, Knight, Martin, Morgan, Beard, Howard, Caesar, Salter, and Robins are among the names of men whose lives swirled around one of colonial America’s most infamous figures, yet a man whose identity, remarkably, remains unproven to this day. Is it possible that the solution to one of our greatest mysteries has been hiding in plain […]
Island Features | Full Article
Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus. Crafted in France, admired by millions at a New York world’s fair, stolen from its lighthouse, buried during the Civil War, recaptured, returned and repaired at Paris, stolen again, and exhibited again: America’s most historic, most traveled, yet most disrespected lighthouse […]
Island Features | Full Article
In 1942, more than 65 German U-boats waged a withering campaign along the nation’s eastern seaboard against Allied merchant vessels and their military defenders to disrupt or entirely sever transatlantic supply lines fueling the war effort in Europe. In just half a year, 397 ships were sunk. Nearly 5,000 people, including many civilians, were burned […]
Island Features | Full Article
One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over…. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and an example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth. […]
Island Features | Full Article
Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus. Last of three parts “Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.” Who knows how many of General Ambrose Burnside’s more than 10,000 officers, soldiers and sailors could recite the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic 1798 poem, “The Rime of […]
Island Features | Full Article
Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus. Second of three parts “Never has any expedition in the history of the world had to pass through a severer ordeal; everything seemed to conspire against it —Nature with her storms, and human nature with her villainy.” So reported a correspondent […]
Island Features | Full Article
Coastal Review Online is featuring the research, findings and commentary of author Kevin Duffus. First of three parts It was not Shakespeare but Pythagoras who likely first imagined the world as a stage “whereon many play their parts.” No more often am I reminded of this proverb than when I am traveling across the inlet […]
Island Features | Full Article
Not unlike the time an earthquake rocked the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse “like a tree shaken by the wind,” there are subsurface rumblings on the Outer Banks that the National Park Service is considering taking back the historic but incomplete 1853 Fresnel lens from the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum and returning it to the top […]
Island Features | Full Article
