History lovers rarely stay neutral for long. Sooner or later, we all choose sides. Which historical hill are you willing to die on? 🗃️ https://tinyurl.com/yc8dztyn

Every old photograph tells at least two stories. The one the photographer intended... ...and the one hiding in the background. I've learned to spend as much time looking at the edges as the center. 🗃️

When the same historical figure keeps turning up in your reading, it's usually worth paying attention. Lately, that's been Mary Heaton Vorse. 🗃️ More: https://tinyurl.com/2tseuabd

Writing history isn't just about finding information. It's about deciding what to leave out. Every fascinating detail can't make the final page. Every rabbit hole can't become a chapter. (Though some of them try very hard.) That's the challenge—and the joy—of being a historian.

Rabbit Hole #1 I thought I was finished researching women journalists after The Dragon From Chicago. Apparently history had other plans. Every time I answer one question, another forgotten reporter appears. I'm beginning to think the story is much bigger than we were taught. 🗃️

Sometimes the best writing day is the one where you admit defeat and open the archives. This week I revisited my review of Endpapers by Alexander Wolff. 🗃️ More: https://tinyurl.com/5ns6t6nj

The best part of finishing a history book? All the new questions. Every project leaves me with a list of stories I didn't have room to tell. That's one reason I never really stop researching.

I started writing a review of Deborah Lipstadt's Beyond Belief… …only to discover I'd already reviewed it several years ago. Since it was worth rediscovering, I'm resharing it.🗃️ More: https://tinyurl.com/nhea53vp

For years, women warriors were treated as exceptions. Then I started putting their stories side by side. That's when the pattern appeared. 🗃️ Sometimes history doesn't need another example. It needs a bigger frame.

Remembering isn't passive. Museums choose artifacts. Authors choose stories. Families choose photographs. History isn't just preserved. It's curated. That makes one question especially important: What have we forgotten?

I recently visited Americans and the Holocaust. It's a small exhibition that asks very big questions about what Americans knew, what they believed, and what they chose to do. It has stayed with me. https://tinyurl.com/423kkk7y

We thought we could drive the Great River Road in 3 weeks. It took us 10 years. Somewhere between the historical markers, tiny museums, and a few wrong turns, I realized that landscapes tell stories, too. History isn't just in archives. Sometimes it's waiting around the next bend in the river.

Museums aren't just places that tell us history. The best ones teach us how to look at history. They slow us down, ask better questions, and remind us that the past was lived by real people making difficult choices in real time. 🗃️ Sometimes that's where discovery begins.

First tomato of the season: no bigger than the end of my thumb. There’s hope!

One of history's biggest problems isn't that we forget individual women. It's that our stories become too small. When the narrative narrows, whole categories of people disappear from view. Widen the frame, and history becomes richer—and more accurate. #History #WomensHistory

Resistance is not always loud. Sometimes it’s a woman under surveillance, insisting on accuracy, protecting sources, and continuing to report the story anyway. Sigrid Schultz understood that long before most people realized what was happening around them. 🗃️ More: https://tinyurl.com/4shxemmr

The Fourth of July is about more than fireworks and cookouts. It's a chance to remember the ideals that have shaped this country—and the people who fought to keep those ideals alive, even when America fell short of them. Happy Fourth of July.

What if Molly Pitcher wasn't one woman? The deeper I dug, the more I found several women whose courage became one legend. Sometimes history doesn't erase women—it merges their stories together. 🗃️ Women Warriors: https://tinyurl.com/ynyfdzfx

One of the pleasures of being a historian is discovering the gaps in your own knowledge. I've been following In Pursuit for America 250—and learning just how little I knew about many of America's first ladies.🗃️ More: https://tinyurl.com/3hywu2bx

One of the challenges of writing women's history is that women are often missing from the story. They survive as footnotes, warnings, or side characters in someone else's narrative. The archive is rarely neutral.🗃️ Neither is history. https://tinyurl.com/2r7dk9ch

Every historian knows that memory is fragile. Stories disappear, lost, forgotten. For decades, Opal Lee worked to keep the story of Juneteenth alive because she believed it mattered. She reminds us that preserving memory is an act of leadership—and sometimes a story can change a nation.

What if the American Revolution wasn't just a story about thirteen colonies? I'm revisiting Independence Lost by Kathleen DuVal, a book that explores the Revolution from a very different perspective. 🗃️ More: https://tinyurl.com/3d6yz8fe

Before Isabella Stewart Gardner built a museum, she built a museum in her mind.🗃️ I loved Natalie Dykstra's Chasing Beauty and wrote a few thoughts about Gardner, collecting, and curiosity on the blog More: https://tinyurl.com/576p8bbd

Chicago friends— I hope you'll join me this Saturday, June 13, for a conversation about The Dragon from Chicago and the remarkable life of Sigrid Schultz. I would love to see you there. Women's History Center Fine Arts Building - Little Theater 410 S. Michigan Ave, Suite 403 Chicago, IL 60605

I was supposed to be working on a book proposal. Instead, I fell down a rabbit hole about James Montgomery Flagg, the artist behind the Uncle Sam poster. History rewards procrastination more often than it should. 🗃️ More: https://tinyurl.com/msp3jn35

A book kept coming up in conversation recently, and every time my response was the same: "I love that book." So I'm resharing my review of Stranger in the Shogun's City, which remains one of my favorite works of social history.🗃️ Read more here: https://tinyurl.com/b93e9v9s

A research rabbit hole sent me back to a book I first read while writing my dissertation. The book was the same. The reader was not. 🗃️ More here: https://tinyurl.com/4kwb3hpv

Every couple of weeks I send out a newsletter about history, books, overlooked lives, and whatever historical rabbit hole has captured my attention lately. If you enjoy history from the edges rather than the center, you might enjoy it too. Subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/dIft-b🗃️

Every Memorial Day, My Own True Love and I find a way to honor the fallen. One year we were in Normandy, visiting the American Cemetery near Omaha Beach. What I remember most is the sound of a lone bugle playing “Taps” across the cemetery. 🗃️ Read more here: https://tinyurl.com/mpwjbxsf

Turns out my kitchen owes a debt to Lillian Moller Gilbreth, who helped redesign the modern kitchen despite admitting she couldn’t cook. History is full of complicated people. She was certainly one of them. 🗃️ Read more here: https://tinyurl.com/yc8jd64r