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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In which I recommend a women’s history newsletter

I had planned to tell you another story from the Weimar Republic  in today’s post, but quite frankly the post is at the Hot Mess stage*, a regular part of my process for writing articles and books but one I usually manage to avoid in blog posts.  I’ve been working at it for the better…

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A Great Book About American Immigration Law

I have often complained that one of the failures of American history class as I experienced it in high school* was that everything after the civil war was taught as a series of legislation punctuated by two world wars. The world wars were taught as story, and subsequently stuck with me . But the history…

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