History on Display: 1001 Inventions

Last year, a couple of months before I launched History in the Margins,  My Own True Love and I met up with one of my best history buddies to visit an exhibit at the New York Hall of Science:  1001 Inventions: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Civilization. Although the exhibit was obviously designed with children…

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Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Immigration Law of 1924

America has always been a nation of immigrants, fueled by a constant stream of those with the energy and imagination to leave the familiar in search of something more.  And it has always had people who wanted to keep out the immigrants who came a generation or two after they themselves arrived. Between 1880 and…

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City

Cultural historian P.D. Smith, author of Doomsday Men, argues that the city is humanity’s greatest creation. After reading City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, it’s easy to believe it’s true. City is not a simple chronological history of urban areas from their first appearance in ancient Mesopotamia to modern megacities. Instead, Smith organizes his…

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