Posts by Pamela
The Birth of the Microphone
Recently, while reading a history of the German revolutions of 1918 and 1919,* I ran across this sentence about the events of November 10, 1918: “With the meeting interrupted, the soldiers going wild in the lower rows and the workers in the upper rows engaged in bewildered discussions with each other, there was feverish negotiation…
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The Puckle Gun (Not to be Confused with Pickleball)
Recently My Own True Love and I were discussing machine guns over breakfast. (What, you’ve never discussed armaments over an omelet and an order of hash browns?) In the course of settling the question of whether the Gatling gun or the Maxim gun was the first machine gun,* we discovered an ancestor of the machine…
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When Women Ruled the World
For some reason, I resisted reading Kara Cooney’s When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt the first seven or eight times it crossed my path. I should have been all over that book. I’d been fascinated by ancient Egypt since I was about nine. Hatshepshut was the subject of the first adult biography…
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