Early Modern
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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1624: The Year in Review
In 2013, I wrote my first A Year in Review post: for some reason that I no longer remember I had been spending a lot of time thinking/reading/writing about 1913 and wanted to share some of the highlights. Over the next few years, Year in Review posts became a standard part of December here on…
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From the Archives: City of Fortune
I am deep in reviewing the index for The Dragon from Chicago, which has turned out to be a much harder and more fiddly task than I anticipated.* Nonetheless, I full intended to give you a new blog post today. I really tried, but after an hour I was forced to admit that the idea…
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