A Light in the Northern Sea: A Q & A with Tim Brady

I am fascinated by stories of the resistance in World War II. (My guess is that comes to no surprise to those of you who have been hanging out here in the Margins for a while.) And I have slowly come to realize that the resistance took different forms in different places. All of which…

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From the Archives–Word with a Past: Gerrymander

This post originally ran in 2018.  Unfortunately, some stories never go out of date. If Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814) had played his cards right, he could have been a minor but respected figure in American history. He signed the Declaration of Independence, helped draft the Bill of Rights, served two terms in Congress, and was the…

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Word with a Past: Muckrakers

While I was writing about Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910), I started off thinking of her as a proto-muckraker, working a generation before people like Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946),* Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936), Ida Tarbell (1857-1944) and Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). But the closer I looked, the more I realized that the realism for which she was…

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