Innovation
From the Archives: The Fabric of Civilization
Another post from the past. This time from 2021. (I promise. New posts will be coming soon.) Two sentences early in Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World caught my imagination: “What we usually call the Stone Age could just as easily be called the String Age. The two prehistoric…
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The Exposition Flyer
I’ve been spending a lot of time in 1893 lately, and have come to the conclusion that all historical roads of the time led to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The exposition is hard to avoid if you’re a history nerd living in Chicago for more than a year or two, so I feel…
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Eliza Lucas Pinckney Gets the (Indigo) Blues
Let’s get this out of the way up front: Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793) owned enslaved people, and it was her exploitation of their labor that made her achievements as an agricultural innovator possible. Eliza Lucas was born on Antigua, which was then part of the British Leeward Islands, where she grew up on one of…
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