Archive for June 2017
National History Day
National History Day is almost upon us. It’s the sort of event that should make history buffs stand up and shout. Maybe even dance a conga line through the local library. I will admit, Natural History Day first came to my attention in a less than positive way. Several months ago, I began to receive…
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The Storied City
In 2013, Charlie English, then international news editor of The Guardian, became obsessed with the news coming out of Timbuktu. Jihadists were destroying the city’s religious monuments because they were not properly Islamic and librarians were smuggling medieval books out of the city in order to preserve them from the jihadists. He was not the…
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Warriors, Bishops and Long-Haired Kings
These days I’m not reading many Big Fat History Books that I’m prepared to recommend to the Marginalia. It’s not that I’m not reading. At the moment I have five different library cards on active rotation in my wallet and carefully segregated piles of books from three different libraries on my study floor. When I…
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