Shin-Kickers From History: Gaston Madru Secretly Films Occupied Paris

Today I stumbled across an unexpected story–or at least a part of a story. Talking to a reporter about her experiences as a war correspondent Sigrid Schultz mentioned “our French colleague Gaston Madru who had been killed by German soldiers when they caught him alone in his car near Leipzig on April 19, 1945. Because…

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From the Archives: Shin Kickers From History: Margaret Chase Smith

My Own True Love recently reminded me about this post, which originally ran in 2018.  It seems like a good time to run it again, for reasons that I think need no explanation.   A blog post about Senator Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995) could easily consist of nothing more than a collection of the trenchant…

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Shin-Kickers From History:Celebrate People’s History

The Celebrate People’s History project began in 1998. In the dead of the night, activist Josh MacPhee, aided by a half-dozen co-conspirators, pasted images of Malcolm X on boarded-up storefronts in Chicago’s West Side. Ten minutes after they started, they had attracted a small crowd of neighborhood residents. Some of them helped put up posters.…

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