Big History and Big Buts

Several years ago, when I was working on a Big Project, I stumbled across the concept of Big History.* It’s basically the opposite of the academic mantra “not my field.”  Proponents of Big History integrate many scholarly disciplines in order to look at human history as a tiny part of the history of the cosmos. …

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Bernard Cornwell on Waterloo

Bernard Cornwell writes historical fiction.  Really vivid, well-researched historical fiction with a military bent and complicated main characters. Now Cornwell makes his first foray into historical nonfiction with Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles. Published in time for the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, Cornwell’s account features the…

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Daughters of the Samurai

In Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West, Janice P. Nimura tells the story of three young girls, ages eleven, ten and six, whom the Japanese government sent to the United States in 1871 as part of the westernizing reforms of the Meiji Restoration that transformed Japan in the mid-nineteenth century. The…

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