Road Trip Through History: The Putnam Museum

My Own True Love and I make a point of visiting local historical museums whenever we’re on the road.* What a museum choses to focus on can tell you how a community or a region defines itself. Even a museum that seems at first glance to be an uncurated (or as autocorrect intriguingly suggests, uncharted)…

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1821: A Year in Review

As far as my mental timeline is concerned, 1821 means the beginning of the Greek War of Independence, which I first became aware of thanks to Lord Byron, the baddest of all the bad boys of Romantic poetry. (This does not make me unique. Byron also introduced many of his European contemporaries to Greek aspirations…

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When Women Ruled the World

For some reason, I resisted reading Kara Cooney’s When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt  the first  seven or eight times it crossed my path. I should have been all over that book. I’d been fascinated by ancient Egypt since I was about nine. Hatshepshut was the subject of the first adult biography…

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