Imperialism
Why was Chief Mkwawa’s skull an issue in the Treaty of Versailles?
First, let me make it clear that this story is NOT an April Fool’s joke. Even if I enjoyed prank stories as a way to celebrate foolishness on April 1st—and I don’t*—over the last few years we have seen so many unbelievable true stories that it is sometimes are to tell the real articles from…
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In which I finally finish reading The Three-Cornered War
My last blog post was pulled from the History in the Margins archives: a piece on the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, an early event in the wars between the United States government and the Plains Indian nations that ended at the Battle of Wounded Knee. In the course of reviewing the piece before I…
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Champion’s Day: The End of Old Shanghai
I will admit that I approached historian James Carter’s book Champion’s Day: The End of Old Shanghai with seriously mixed feelings. On the one hand, I spent some time last year reading about the International Settlement in Shanghai in the 1930s while I was working on a piece on self-styled “girl reporter” Peggy Hull I…
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