The Lady Of The Engine Room: Victoria Drummond, Britain’s First Woman Marine Engineer
It is August 25, 1940, and the Panamanian ship Bonita, sailing alone in war-torn waters with its cargo of clay bound for the United States, is suddenly attacke...
Dale DeBakcsy
Chronicler Of The Path Untread: The 19th Century Journeys Of Isabella Bird
As Isabella Bird, in her seventieth year and in the middle of her last great adventure, sat across from Sultan at Marrakesh, telling him tales of her adve...
One Woman Against The Black Death: The Saga Of Dr. Edith Pechey-Phipson And The Fight For Medical Women in India
In 1896, the city of Bombay recorded its first case of bubonic plague, a disease which would grow to claim ten million lives over the following decade as the g...
Jeanne Baret: The Two Stories Of The World’s First Woman To Circumnavigate The Globe
Told one way, the story of Jeanne Baret is an essentially inspiring tale: a woman born a peasant, raised with the expectation of seeing nothing more in her lif...
Florence Bascom: The Many Facets Of Geology’s “Stone Lady”
There is a special poetry in rocks available to a select few and utterly incomprehensible to absolutely everybody else. While ninety-nine pairs of eyes o...
Paola Prestini And The Birth of Classical Music’s New Way Forward
Picture a composer.What you've probably brought to mind is an image of a tortured soul, locked away in a dim attic, quill in trembling hand, trying despera...
Gertrude Bell, Byzantine Archaeology, And The Founding Of Iraq
The art of Strenuous Living is one we usually associate with the generation of nervous over-achievers who grew up after the US Civil War, during the age that s...
Where Sex Begins: The Chromosomal Investigations Of Nettie Stevens
If you were to ask an ancient Greek how it is determined that a baby is born a boy or a girl, they would have had some interesting and very compelling theories...
The Many Wars Of Florence Nightingale
Though we think of her as the Lady With the Lamp, tirelessly patrolling the sick wards of the Crimean War offering solace and healing to soldiers who had been ...
Dale DeBakcsy
Dale DeBakcsy is the writer and artist of the Women In Science and Cartoon History of Humanism columns, and has, since 2007, co-written the webcomic Frederick the Great: A Most Lamentable Comedy with Geoffrey Schaeffer. He is also a regular contributor to The Freethinker, Philosophy Now, Free Inquiry, and Skeptical Inquirer. He studied intellectual history at Stanford and UC Berkeley before becoming a teacher of mathematics and drawer of historical frippery.