Rachel Laudan

  This is one of the family milking stools.  Yes, it’s as short as it looks, just about twleve inches high, just right to reach a cow’s udder. By the time I was growing up, no one milked by hand any more.  The cows lined up for the rank of Alfa-Laval milking machines.  The dairy [...]

He was just a little boy.  He lived in the country.  So why were brown spots spreading on his skin, why were his joints swollen and aching, why were his gums bleeding? No one knew.  Nobody had a cure. His mother ignored the nutritional advice of the day, advice that suggested that all that a [...]

This post is in honor of the flood of stories about English tea provoked by today’s wedding.  I don’t have anything to say about the latter, since I see the Royals as an anachronism and a very pricey one at that.  But I do think of myself as something of an expert on the history [...]