From the Archives: The Most Successful Pirate in History

Any guesses? Edward Teach, commonly known as Blackbeard? Captain Kidd? Captain Morgan?* Grace O Malley, aka the Pirate Queen? Sir Francis Drake?** None of them are even close, though Drake has the distinction of capturing what may well have been the largest prize taken in a single raid: the Spanish galleon Cacafuego. The title goes…

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And speaking of Queens Isabella…

My last blog post was about a queen named Isabella that you probably had never heard of.* Today I thought I’d talk a bit about an Isabella who you probably think you know a lot about: Isabella of Castile. Isabella is best known to American school children–and consequently to American adults–as the woman who funded…

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The Hello Girls of WWI

As I’ve mentioned before here in the Margins, now and then a bit of history begins to track me down. A name, event, or idea piques my interest and suddenly I stumble across it everywhere. Or at least in the footnotes to books on tangentially related subjects. Lately the “Hello Girls” of the first World…

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