The Long Eighteenth Century
The Puckle Gun (Not to be Confused with Pickleball)
Recently My Own True Love and I were discussing machine guns over breakfast. (What, you’ve never discussed armaments over an omelet and an order of hash browns?) In the course of settling the question of whether the Gatling gun or the Maxim gun was the first machine gun,* we discovered an ancestor of the machine…
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Russia, Siberia, and the Fur Trade
And speaking of the fur trade, as I believe we were, the Russian fur trade did not begin in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest of North America. At the same time that French and British (and to a lesser extent, Dutch, and Swedish) fur traders were exploring the virgin forests of North America in the…
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In which I review (okay, squeal about) Wake by Rebecca Hall
Back in January, I pre-ordered Rebecca Hall’s Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts for reasons that will be clear to anyone who has followed this blog for a while. (Hint: Women warriors!) It came in the mail last week on its publication date.* I started reading it that afternoon. I was caught immediately…
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