Posts by Pamela
From the Archives: The Peasants Are Revolting
2017 is the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, commemorated in Big Fat History Books and innumerable posts by history bloggers. (I did my bit here and here.) There has been a certain somber tone to such commemorations, since the Revolution is tied in our historical memory with Stalinism, gulags in Siberia, the Cold War,…
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Kepler’s Mother: A Scary Story for Halloween
The seventeenth century was a period of scientific revolution. Astronomers, like Galileo, worked out the motions of the planets and stars in the sky, and overturned the concept that the earth stood at the center of the cosmos.* Galileo, Newton and others created a new science of mechanics that applied the laws of mathematics to…
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Harriet Tubman’s Civil War
Harriet Tubman is famous for leading slaves north to freedom in the decade prior to the American Civil War: acts that required courage, daring, stealth, and organizational skills.* After the Civil War began in 1861, she used the skills she developed as conductor on the Underground Railroad on behalf of the Union Army. In the…
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