Kepler’s Mother: A Scary Story for Halloween

The seventeenth century was a period of scientific revolution. Astronomers, like Galileo, worked out the motions of the planets and stars in the sky, and overturned the concept that the earth stood at the center of the cosmos.* Galileo, Newton and others created a new science of mechanics that applied the laws of mathematics to…

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Harriet Tubman’s Civil War

Harriet Tubman is famous for leading slaves north to freedom in the decade prior to the American Civil War: acts that required courage, daring, stealth, and organizational skills.* After the Civil War began in 1861, she used the skills she developed as conductor on the Underground Railroad on behalf of the Union Army. In the…

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Fighting the Roman Empire

Back many moons ago when I was writing the proposal for this book I’m writing,* one of the first women I wrote about was Boudica, the Celtic woman who led an uprising against the Romans and almost kicked them out of Britain in 60 BCE. One of key elements in her story, at least from…

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