From the Archives: The Great Silence

Whether you know it as Armistice Day, Poppy Day, Remembrance Day or Veterans’ Day, November 11 is a time to honor those who died in war and thank those who served. The day of remembrance has its roots in the end of World War I. The war ended on November 11, 1918. When the word…

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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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