Posts by Pamela
City of Sedition
I keep thinking I’ll take a break from the American Civil War, but it just keeps shoving itself in my face. And so I keep shoving it in yours. I recently finished an extraordinary book. It had me writing notes to myself in the margins: “check what [someone else] has to say, “compare to X”,…
Read More
Contrabands
Over the course of the last year I became familiar with the use of the term “contrabands” to describe escaped slaves in the American Civil War. Like many terms of the period, it seemed self-explanatory, in an ugly way. A symptom of the racism that was fundamental in the Union as well as in the…
Read More
Poor Tipu
Several weeks ago, I realized that I had never written a post about Tipu Sultan here on the Margins and I promised to rectify that shortly. This is me keeping that promise. Tipu Sultan, the self-proclaimed “Tiger of Mysore”, played an important role in my development as a historian. When I first heard his story…
Read More