Posts by Pamela
A Good Place to Hide
In A Good Place To Hide: How One French Village Saved Thousands of Lives During World War II, Peter Grose describes how a population with its own experience of religious persecution and two charismatic pastors with unlikely international connections turned isolated community in the upper Loire Valley into a haven for Jews and other refugees…
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“Closing” Japan
In 1853 , Commodore Matthew Perry and his squadron of four “black ships of evil mien” opened Japanese ports to trade with the United States, a literal example of “gunboat diplomacy”. * Most historically literate Americans are aware of Perry’s expedition in broad terms, even if they don’t know any of the details. Western accounts…
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In which I consider the nature of primary sources, with a little despair
My primary academic home is the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,* periods in which primary sources and material artifacts are relatively abundant. As a result, the question of whether something counts as a primary source is generally clear–at least in terms of a given sources’s temporal relationship to the event/period in question.** (How we…
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