From the Archives: Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor

Yesterday I was walking home from the library with a bag of research books, considering how to spend the long Labor Day weekend.  I am working on building the habit of taking Sundays off.  (Radical, I know.) And I was musing over whether I could stretch my developing time-off-muscles to include Labor Day.  After all,…

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Nancy Marie Brown and The Real Valkyrie

If you’ve been hanging out here in the Margins for a while, you know that I am fascinated by the continuing archaeological discoveries of ancient women warriors. Sometimes they are genuinely new discoveries. Sometimes they are a result of someone taking a closer look or asking new questions about existing. remains. This trend started in…

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When Fence Lines Were Phone Lines

One story we learned at the Legacy of the Plains Museum caught my attention so thoroughly that I think it deserves its own blog post. The first commercial telephone company opened on January 28, 1878 in New Haven, Connecticut. It had 21 subscribers. (I wonder who they were and how they expected to use it.)…

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