The American Revolution from Another Perspective

It’s the Fourth of July weekend here in the United States:  a holiday that expands and contracts depending on where in the week it falls.  It’s a good time to think about the complexity of revolutions in general, and the American Revolution in particular. In Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution,…

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Sir Richard Burton: Not the Actor, the Other One

Recently I had cause to pull a biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) off my to-be-read shelf, where it has sat since 1990. I originally bought it because I was writing my dissertation on the way the definition of the Orient changed over time with increasing exposure to the non-Western world and Burton was…

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