A few weeks ago, I got into an email back-and-forth about racism with a male acquaintance who lives in Romania—I’ll call him Alex. We were in the middle of an otherwise pleasant conversation when he quoted the following saying, “You give a Gypsy a finger, and he takes the whole hand.” It was one of…
Category: Medieval History
A Killer Detail: You Don’t Belong Here
You don’t need to be an immigrant or a minority to know what it feels like to be rejected by a desirable group, or any group for that matter, even a group that didn’t seem to exist until you walked up to it and the circle closed to exclude you. You just need to remember…
The Pursuit of Happiness
Years ago, while studying for my US citizenship exam, I paused over the words “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. Because I grew up in Europe during the time of popular uprisings against communist regimes, I was used to words such as freedom and justice and equality in revolutionary speech, so the pursuit of happiness…
Fact or Fiction? Part 2 (Umberto Eco)
Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum and the rewriting of history Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco is one of my favorite novels. I read it first in high school, in Romanian, and then spent countless hours discussing it with my desk-mate and fellow-bookworm Iuliana. I read the novel again in English during my MFA program at…
Looking for Vlad (15th Century CE)
“Did you know,” my brother asked me one day, “that an impaled person could live for days up there, on a stake? If the executioner went along the spine, sparing all the vital organs…” “Wow… so, there were people who were experts at that?” I said. “Imagine the practice you needed to become an expert…
The Last Plantagenet King (1485 CE)
Richard III of the House of York was the last English king to die in battle—on August 22, 1485, at Bosworth Field. Now that the archeologists at University of Leicester have found his twisted remains under a parking lot, there is much revisiting of his story. Recent forensic tests revealed that the king had not been the…