Tracking the Great War
Historical tourism is big business. While U.S. citizens have tended to travel to Normandy and sites associated with the Second World War, it became obvious to me during my travels that folks from… Continue reading
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The Butcher’s Son
Activity in England’s dockyards reached intense levels during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The Royal Navy Dockyard at Chatham in Kent was no exception. During the first decade of the 19th century… Continue reading
Caroline Warfield interviews Fred Wheatly from The Reluctant Wife
Source: Caroline Warfield interviews Fred Wheatly from The Reluctant Wife
The Desert Queen
Among the colorful personalities of the late Georgian/Early Victorian world of the 1830s Lady Hester Stanhope stands out for her brilliance, independence, and sheer brazen disregard for social mores. If ladies rode sidesaddle;… Continue reading
The Stargazer Who Counted
Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet may have been a stargazer, a musician, and even a poet, but he was no dreamer. His work regarding the collection and quantification of data influenced science and social… Continue reading
The Cosmetic Huckster
This week’s Victorian character impresses as more than just colorful. Madame Rachel, notorious con artist and flamboyant celebrity, made a fortune off the vanity and gullibility of high society. She may have been… Continue reading
The Bridge Builder
Victorian England, as I pointed out in my earlier post, The Pastry Chef, produced a bumper crop of genuine characters: rogues, villains, explorers, heroes, geniuses, entrepreneurs, and colorful eccentrics. This week I highlight a… Continue reading
After the Bonnie Prince—the Jacobite Succession
…lonely cairns are o’er the men, Who fought and died for Charlie! Sound the Pibroch, traditional ballad If the men who fell at Culloden lie under lonely cairns, where is Bonnie Prince… Continue reading
The Pastry Chef
As England slipped from the Georgian era into the Victorian and the sun no longer set on the British Empire, the country produced a bumper crop of interesting people: rogues, villains, explorers, heroes,… Continue reading
Where the Roads of Imagination Lead
If fiction fuels the mind, historical fiction poured jet fuel into mine from early on. It created a lifelong fascination with history and pushed me to question everything I read. Why question? At… Continue reading