Seventeenth Century Europe
From the Archives: Kepler’s Mother (A Scary Story for Halloween)
Sometimes life makes it impossible to write blog posts on a dependable basis. This is one of the those times. For the next little while, I’m going to run pieces from years past. I hope you enjoy them, and I’ll be back as soon as I can. Next up, a post from October, 2017: …
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Russia, Siberia, and the Fur Trade
And speaking of the fur trade, as I believe we were, the Russian fur trade did not begin in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest of North America. At the same time that French and British (and to a lesser extent, Dutch, and Swedish) fur traders were exploring the virgin forests of North America in the…
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The Enemy of All Mankind
Several years ago, I read Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. I never reviewed it here on the Margins, though a large sticky note on the inside cover listing a number of thought-provoking questions suggests that I intended to.* As…
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