Noted.

AHEAD OF HER TIME: Dorothy Sterling, who died December 1 at 95, never taught at a college or university. But she had a greater impact on how we think about the American past than most academic historians. Obituaries described Sterling as a writer of children's literature, which is fair enough, since most of her thirty-odd books were historical works for young readers. Many were about then virtually unknown figures in the struggle for racial justice, including Underground Railroad heroine Harriet Tubman; Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott; and Robert Smalls, a black Congressman from South Carolina after the Civil War.

But this description fails to do justice to the scholarly contribution of this remarkable woman, especially her pioneering work in gathering and publishing documents about the black past. The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction (1976) and We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (1984) helped to transform our understanding of African-American and women's history. Sterling's biography of Abby Kelley, Ahead of Her Time (1991), rescued from obscurity a pivotal figure in the struggle against slavery and for women's rights. The title is an apt description not only of the book's subject but also its author.   ERIC FONER

CANADIAN FREEZE: Representative democracy was issued a "timeout" in Canada on December 4, when Governor General Michaëlle Jean agreed to suspend Parliament for eight weeks, rescuing Prime Minister Stephen Harper's minority government from imminent defeat.

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