Trading Empires and trade routes
Ottoman Dress and Design in the West
Those of you who have known me for a long, long time might remember that I once wrote a proposal for a book on how Islam influenced Western culture in fundamental ways.(1) Those of you who’ve known me even longer know that my dissertation was titled Building the Orient of the Imagination: Excess, Confusion…
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Road Trip Through History: Crow Wing State Park and the Red River Ox Cart Trail (with a brief aside on ghost towns)
My Own True Love and I almost didn’t stop at Crow Wing State Park. It was late on a dreary afternoon. We’d had a long history nerd day already. And it wasn’t entirely clear that there would be anything to see. But all the (very vague) descriptions of the park said it was the site…
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How the Trans-Saharan Trade Routes Work
In the eighth century CE, after camels were introduced into North Africa, Muslim merchants of North Africa began to organize regular camel caravans across the western Sahara. North African merchants carried luxury goods from across the Islamic world and salt purchased from the desert salt mines to the great trading cities of the Sudan: Timbuktu,…
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