Cross-cultural “Stuff”
The Great Wall of China
When faced with a threat or simply with contact with what we learned in graduate school to call The Other, our natural instinct is to build a wall to keep Them out or to keep Us in. * The earliest cities that we know of, the tel culture in what is now Palestine, were built…
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Looking at the Atlantic Slave Trade From Another Perspective
I spent the eight weeks leading up to Christmas working on a short book on the trans-Atlantic slave trade for high school libraries. Quite frankly, it kicked my butt. I took the assignment because I wanted something to distract myself with while my agent took my proposal for Women Warriors out on submission.* I knew…
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Rejected Princesses
I’ve been following Jason Porath’s Tumblr Rejected Princesses (and the blog that followed it and the Facebook page) for two years and a bit. The project began in a discussion with his Dreamworks’ co-workers over what historical woman was least likely to be the heroine of a children’s animated movie. He discovered that few of…
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