Historiography
The Hunt for History
I am not a collector of anything in any meaningful sense of the word.* I am certainly not a collector of historical ephemera. Which means that I had my doubts when my stack of books to consider for review for Shelf Awareness for Readers included The Hunt for History: On the Trail of the World’s…
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The Question of the Queen Mother
Speaking of the linguistic booby traps that await the unwary in the pursuit of global history, as I believe we were, I offer you the example of the Queen Mother. In English, the term “Queen Mother” generally refers to the widow of a king* who is the mother of a reigning monarch. The term has…
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The Umbrella vs the Crown
In the course of writing Women Warriors, I wrote a lot of variations on the sentence “inherited the throne/crown” . (Or in several instances, “seized the throne/crown”. Because transfer of power is often not a bloodless event.) Eventually it dawned on me that while throne and crown can be actual objects, they are also metaphors…
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