women warriors
Edith Cavell: “Patriotism Is Not Enough”
Not all the heroes of the First World War fought in the trenches. Forty-nine year old British nurse Edith Cavell was the director of the first nurses’ training school in Belgium. When Germany occupied Brussels in the first month of the war, Cavell refused to leave. She turned her clinic into a Red Cross hospital…
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Shin-Kickers From History: The Trung Sisters of Vietnam
In 39 CE, two young women led Vietnam in its first rebellion against the Chinese empire, which had then ruled the country for 150 years. Trung Trac and Trung Nhi were born in a small town in north Vietnam around 14 CE, the daughters of a Vietnamese lord who served as a prefect under the…
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Tough Broads of the Civil War
I’ve said it before: If you hang out in Popular History Land, or even Book World these days, it’s impossible to ignore the American Civil War and its sesquicentennial. Civil War references are everywhere. The most recent bit of Civil War “stuff” to start my brain churning was a review of a new book by…
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