Monday, February 22, 2016

Schiller and Lotte: postcard commemorating a poetic marriage, 1905

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Authors' marriages deserve to be a subject of study in their own right, if only because they tended to loom so large in the bourgeois li...
Sunday, February 21, 2016

21 February 1916: The Battle of Verdun Begins

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This month's artifact of the moment: A century ago began one of the fiercest battles of a war that has come to stand for unprecedented...
Friday, February 19, 2016

Japanese American Day of Remembrance, 2016 (and unintended consequences)

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Serendipity is an interesting thing. As noted in last night's post , a Minneapolis paper just ran an editorial about plans to restore hi...

Save the Fort: a textbook illustration of how historic preservation can link past and present

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It was a distinctive sight: early nineteenth-century fortifications overlooking the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers on what was once the fr...
Saturday, January 30, 2016

"a memorable 30 January": the Nazis come to power, 1933

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Although the Nazis, whose fascist ideology stressed militant action, presented their entry into the government as a “seizure of power” ( Mac...

A Budget. Dedicated to Amherst

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It cannot be often that a document as important yet prosaic as a municipal budget comes with a dedication, but such was this case this month...
Saturday, December 26, 2015

A Merry Christmas from Maximilien Robespierre (with a side-note on that Newton business)

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From the vaults via last year's Tumblr post: Understandably enough, we tend to think of December 25 primarily as Christmas, thereby ...
Friday, December 25, 2015

Traditions of Christmas Past: from boisterous to banned to bourgeois

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From the vaults, via last year's Tumblr post : “‘At Home’ in the Nursery, or The Masters and Misses Twoshoes Christmas Party,” ...
Thursday, December 24, 2015

Christmas greetings! (and two eighteenth-century prints of the nativity)

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Wishing a merry Christmas to all my readers who celebrate the holiday. From the vaults: Artifact of the Moment: Reflections on Nativi...
Saturday, December 12, 2015

Happy Hanukkah To My Readers (and a reminder of the legacy of the Jews from Arab countries)

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Wishing a happy Hanukkah to all my readers who celebrate the holiday! Israel Hanukkah coin, 1973 Nominal value: 5 Lirot [pounds]...