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America’s Founding Fathers Offered an Escape from Guns

by David Tollen | Mar 3, 2013 | The Recent Modern Age, Legal History

America’s gun lobby says private ownership of firearms prevents tyranny. That’s why the Founding Fathers guaranteed the right to bear arms in the Second Amendment. The first part of that argument makes little sense and is easily put aside. I think the...
The “Entail,” Primogeniture, and Why Matthew Inherits Downton Abbey

The “Entail,” Primogeniture, and Why Matthew Inherits Downton Abbey

by David Tollen | Feb 28, 2013 | The Postclassical Age (Medieval History), The Recent Modern Age, Legal History

The Downton Abbey TV series begins with a predicament for the Earl of Grantham. Earl Robert has no sons, and an “entail” keeps any of his three daughters from inheriting his great estate and mansion: Downton Abbey. Robert’s heir is Matthew Crawley, a...

Cities, Creativity, and Why the World Will Never Be Flat

by David Tollen | Feb 12, 2013 | Writing About History

How have cities thrived and spread for the last five thousand years when they labor under such heavy burdens? In historic societies, city-dwellers lived shorter, less healthy lives than country-folk and produced too few children to maintain urban populations,...

Prehistory and the DNA of Lice

by David Tollen | Jan 29, 2013 | Human Origins & the Paleolithic

Anthropologists think they know when humans started wearing clothes. How could they possibly know that, you might ask, when clothes don’t fossilize? After all, we’re talking about a period before written records or even cave paintings. The answer comes...

Hand-Drawn Map of the Classical Mediterranean

by David Tollen | May 16, 2012 | Writing About History

Below is one of the three maps that will appear in The Jericho River. (You can see a version with better resolution here, at my Picasa album. Click on the magnifying glass in the upper right corner to expand the copy.) BTW, as some have pointed out, it’s been...
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