Cross-cultural “Stuff”
Stamping Out Women Warriors–In A Good Way
In the course of doing the research for this book on women warriors, I’ve found plenty of attempts to write women warriors out of history.* It doesn’t make me happy,** but I expected it. What I didn’t expect were the number of women warriors whose countries later embraced them as national heroines and celebrated them…
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And speaking of camels….
A few weeks ago, or perhaps a few months ago, or at least recently enough that it has stayed in my head, one of the Marginalia asked me about camels. The short answer is simple: read Richard W. Bulliet’s The Camel and the Wheel. It’s a charming and well-illustrated book that explores the question of…
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Re-Inventing the Wheel
If English is your primary language, you know that “reinventing the wheel” is a standard phrase for, well, spinning your wheels–recreating something that already exists, usually at the expense of unnecessary time and effort.* The phrase rests on several assumptions: That the wheel is one of the foundational discoveries on which civilization was built. That…
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