Innovation
From the Archives: An Islamic Map for a Christian King
When we last left Sicily, the Roman Republic had taken Siracusa, which became the capital of Roman government in Sicily. The Romans held Sicily for 300 some years. The island was subsequently occupied by the Byzantine empire in 535 CE, Arabs from North Africa in 965 and the Normans in 1060. * Under the Normans,…
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Books Across The Seas
Rationing, food shortages, and the clever ways people got around them are major themes in books about the British home front in World War II, fiction and non-fiction alike. Packages from friends in the United States made life easier for a lucky few. (C.A.R.E. packages came after the war.) I recently learned that books from…
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From the Archives: Word with a Past–Parchment
One of these days I’m going to come out the other side of this book, honest. Luckily I have 10+ years of blog posts to draw on in the meantime. I had forgotten all about this one from 2013. ***** For hundreds of years papyrus was the principal material on which books (or at least…
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