Odd Bits
In which I offer, and ask for, book recommendations
I recently received an email from a young, smart history bugg and aspiring writer of my acquaintance asking me if I could recommend a history book or two that had impressed me or influenced my writing.* I quickly put together a short list of books, focusing for the most part on books I had read…
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Madame Lenormand’s Fortune Telling Cards
Back in February I spoke at the Civil War Museum at Kenosha, Wisconsin, as part of their annual Civil War medicine weekend. I was a featured speaker, but the heart of the weekend was the 17th Corps Field Hospital–a Civil War reenactment unit from the Midwest that “heals the sick and treats the wounded ‘Under…
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Oracle Bones
Historical texts sometimes take surprising forms. The earliest Chinese written records for instance are the “oracle bones” that were used in used in the art of “scapulimancy”, or bone divination, in Shang dynasty China (ca. 1600 -1046 BCE). The language used on the oracle bones was rediscovered in 1899 by a Chinese scholar named Wang,…
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