Archive for June 2011
And Speaking of the Siege of Mafeking…
…as I believe we were just the other day, I was recently introduced to a vision of the siege that is very different from Lord Baden-Powell’s casually stiff upper lip. Sol T. Plaatje was a twenty-three-year-old African court interpreter for the Resident Magistrate when the Boers besieged Mafeking, and its African older sister, the adjacent…
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History on Display: The Horse
Now and then you stumble across history when you least expect it. Yesterday my friend Nancy and I visited Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. Sometimes you visit a museum because there’s an exhibit you want to see. Other times you visit a museum because you want to hang out, talk, laugh a little . …
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Word With a Past: Maffick
The Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) started badly from the British point of view. British troops, supposedly the best trained and best equipped in the world, suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of Boer farmers. (Anyone else hear echoes of another colonial war that pitted farmers against British regulars?) The only bright spot…
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