It's only appropriate that my first substantial post in the renamed blog should be about Phil Paine. I have known Phil about as long as I've known anybody and we've always shared a great enthusiasm for a rather expansive view of history. We have bounced many an idea off the other, and occasionally collaborated.
While I was struggling with the migration of this blog from an FTP publishing format to the current one, Phil was reading my more recent posts, putting them together in his mind with his own reading, and coming up with a couple of essays that cover a lot of territory, but in the most interesting way. It all starts with the person whose portrait heads this post, Dorothea Thorpe...
