Posts by Pamela
Asia’s Inland Trade, or How the Spice Trade Worked
The way we learn the story in elementary school in the United States, European trading companies sailed East in search of spices and other luxury goods. What those merchants took with them to trade is generally left unmentioned–perhaps because it makes it clear that Europe was a backwater in the global marketplace until well into…
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Imprisoned
In 1979, at the age of 56, Italian writer and artist Arturo Benvenuti and his wife drove across Europe in a motor home in search of former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. He saw the journey as a secular Via Crucis—a pilgrimage in which the Stations of the Cross were Auschwitz, Terezin, Mauthausen and Buchenwald.…
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From the Archives. Déjà Ve All Over Again: Closing the Boarders
If you’ve been hanging out here in the Margins for a while, you probably have a pretty good idea about where I stand on political issues in general even though I try not to shove my opinions in your face because this is a history blog, not a political blog. One thing I feel strongly…
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