Posts by Pamela
From the Archives: Slouching Toward Jerusalem
I really meant to have a brand new blog post for you all today, but the one I was working expanded in all directions (six asterisked footnotes at last count) and finally turned into a tangled mess. The footnotes are currently the only readable part. Rather than leaving you without a Friday post, I’m sharing…
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The Secret Behind the Gibson Girl’s Shape
The Gibson Girl, as I previously mentioned, had a distinctive silhouette: a small waist, an ample bosom, and a graceful sway to her back that thrust the aforementioned bosom forward and the bum backward. In some ways she was similar in shape to a Barbie doll, and, like Barbie, her figure was difficult for the…
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From the Archives: A Word with a Past: Kidnap
In the mid-seventeenth century, the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean were suffering from a labor shortage. The colonies had originally attracted Britain’s surplus population: dreamers, fortune-hunters, religious nuts, younger sons, prisoners of war, political failures, vagrants, criminals, the homeless, and the desperate. Some came with a small financial stake. Many came as…
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