Posts by Pamela
Game of Queens
Several years ago, historian Sarah Gristwood’s Blood Sisters held me enrapt. She described the well-known events of the Wars of the Roses and the rise of the Tudor dynasty through the lives of the Plantagenet women. It was women’s history at its best* in that it not only told the story of often forgotten or…
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Mr. Eiffel Built More Than a Tower
Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, the engineer who designed the Eiffel Tower, reportedly said “I ought to be jealous of the tower. It is more famous than I am.” It’s probably true. Eiffel was a world-famous engineer before he made the tower that bears his name, but not for the kind of things that make a man a…
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McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Part 2: Attacking “Communists”, and Anyone Else Who Got In His Way
If you’re coming in late to the party, you may want to read the previous post. Here’s the short version: in 1948 Joseph McCarthy won a seat in the US Senate with a dirty campaign and began his senatorial career with a press conference calling for striking miners to be drafted, court-martialed, and then shot.…
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