Carolyn Wilson, From Fashion Reporter to War Correspondent

When I was writing Women Warriors I kept stumbling across women I’d never heard of.* I did not expect to have the same experience with women who served as foreign correspondents and/or war correspondents. After all, I’m writing about one particular woman, not a history about women journalists as a whole. And yet, women I’ve…

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Bessie Beatty and The Red Heart of Russia

I was recently digging about in the history of women’s magazines in the early twentieth century when I came across a familiar name: Bessie Beatty. I knew Beatty’s work from her reporting on Russia’s Women’s Battalion of Death,  which I wrote about in Women Warriors. At the time, I was totally engrossed in the women…

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Aethelflaed, Saxons, Danes, and The Last Kingdom

Over the last few weeks, it seemed like almost everyone I knew was watching or had watched The Last Kingdom: a British television series based on Bernard Cornwell’s historical novels The Saxon Stories. It is set in Britain in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, when Alfred the Great* (and his adult children) defended…

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