Allison C Meier

Joined: Jul 11, 2016

Allison C. Meier is a writer and editor focused on visual culture and overlooked history. She is the former senior editor at Atlas Obscura, and more recently a staff writer at Hyperallergic. She has contributed to the New York Times, Public Domain Review, Wellcome Collection, JSTOR Daily, CityLab, Narratively, and other illustrious publications. She moonlights as a cemetery tour guide in New York City.

The Parthenon sits atop Athens’s Acropolis.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is one of the institutions fooled by an expert art forger.

Notre-Dame de Paris in a 19th-century illustration.

Charlemagne surrounded by his principal officers by Jules Laure.

The horse rings in Portland, Oregon, have a new use.

You can still find reminders of the days when horse-drawn transportation reigned.

Not everyone is buried six feet under the verdant grass of a cemetery. Some choose to spend eternity at the bottom of the ocean or the top of a high rise.

There are tons of online genealogy sources at your fingertips—but the sheer amount of information might seem intimidating. Here's how to get started tracing your family tree.

Beneath a parking lot, archeologists uncovered the ruins of a chapel in which Henry VIII prayed.

Sometimes deliberately, often unintentionally, countless artifacts have been buried—and then rediscovered—under parking lots.

A self-portrait of Vincent Van Gogh is displayed on a screen in Rome in 2016

Vincent van Gogh's paintings of night skies, sunflowers, and Provence are among the world's most recognizable artworks—but his story is a complex one.