Posts by Pamela
Vivandières
If you’ve spent any time here on the Margins in recent years, you know I’ve been thinking about women warriors. One thing I’ve learned in the process is that women have always been a part of war, whether or not they picked up a weapon or led a charge. From the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth…
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Sir Richard Burton: Not the Actor, the Other One
Recently I had cause to pull a biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) off my to-be-read shelf, where it has sat since 1990. I originally bought it because I was writing my dissertation on the way the definition of the Orient changed over time with increasing exposure to the non-Western world and Burton was…
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Shin-kickers From History: Margaret Chase Smith
A blog post about Senator Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995) could easily consist of nothing more than a collection of the trenchant remarks with which she skewered political opponents, reporters, and occasionally herself: Speaking against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s scare tactics: “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen…
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