From the Archives: Rival Queens

    Nancy Goldstone has made a career of telling the often forgotten and always dramatic stories of powerful women in medieval Europe.*  In The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal That Ignited a Kingdom, Goldstone turns her attention to Renaissance France and its role in the growing…

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Ellen Church: “Sky Girl”

Ellen Church was born in 1904, a year after the Wright Brothers took their first flight at Kitty Hawk. As a young girl, she saw airplanes perform at the country fair near her hometown of Cesco, Iowa. She decided that she wanted to learn to fly. After graduating from high school, she moved to the…

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“The Blond Hans”

One of the ideas that appears over and over again in the statements made by her contemporaries about Sigrid Schultz is that she “knew everyone.” Working through her letters and draft memoirs, it certainly seemed to be true. I found correspondence from people like novelist Paul Gallico and dancer and choreographer Ted Shawn that made…

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