From Smithsonian Magazine:
Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom
The Great Dismal Swamp was once a thriving refuge for runaways
The worse it gets, as I wade and stumble through the Great Dismal Swamp, the better […] Continue Reading…
My friend Jerry Hales shared a YouTube video of a recent anti-lockdown protest in Montreal. Check out the flags on display!
A horizontal tricolour of green, white, and red, in a Canadian context, represents the Patriote movement of the 1830s.* […] Continue Reading…
From the New York Times:
Stephen F. Cohen, Influential Historian of Russia, Dies at 81
He chronicled Stalin’s tyrannies and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he was an enthusiastic admirer of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Stephen F. Cohen, an eminent historian whose […] Continue Reading…
I was pleased to note a historically accurate Canadian red ensign flag in Season 11, Episode 16 of the Canadian television series Murdoch Mysteries, in contrast to an earlier appearance. The plot of this episode (“Game of Kings”) revolves […] Continue Reading…
A review of Alan Mikhail, God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World (Liveright, 2020) in Cyber Review of Modern Historiography. Excerpt:
Mikhail’s book is part of an unfortunate trend by which “global history” […] Continue Reading…
Who doesn’t love a good “Middle Aged” joke? (Hat tip: Chris Good).
In the October 2020 edition of The Atlantic, Judith Shulevitz reviews Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous:
Around 597 A.D., Pope Gregory I dispatched an expedition to England to […] Continue Reading…
Sean McGlynn reviews Lesley Coote’s Storyworlds of Robin Hood: The Origins of a Medieval Outlaw (2020) in the Spectator:
Not such a hero: the tarnished legend of Robin Hood
Far from being a selfless righter of wrongs, the outlaw was a […] Continue Reading…
From The Waterloo Region Record (hat tip: Bruce Patterson), notice of an event from the same era that brought us Liberty Cabbage (i.e. sauerkraut) or prompted the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod to switch its liturgical language from German to English.
KITCHENER […] Continue Reading…
August 15, 1945 was V-J Day, when Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allies; September 2 marked the formal end of the war, when the Japanese signed the instrument of surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Something I did not know: […] Continue Reading…