Rejected Princesses

I’ve been following Jason Porath’s Tumblr Rejected Princesses (and the blog that followed it and the Facebook page) for two years and a bit.  The project began in a discussion with his Dreamworks’ co-workers over what historical woman was least likely to be the heroine of a children’s animated movie.  He discovered that few of…

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From The Archives: Tough Broads of the Civil War

Just to prove that I’ve been thinking about nurses and other women who played a role in the American Civil War for a while now, here’s a post that first appeared in the Margins in 2011: I’ve said it before:  If you hang out in Popular History Land, or even Book World these days, it’s…

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Female Samurai: Warriors and Otherwise

Female samurais are stock figures in modern anime, manga, western comic books, and fantasy novels:  hard-fighting, often hard-drinking, badasses with swords and bows.  The key word is fantasy. In medieval Japan, samurai was a class distinction as well as a job description.  Women who were born into the samurai class were samurais whether or not…

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