History
Anything to do with History
Josiah
@Josiah -
2 days ago
On the Spot: Peter Carey
A colonial era market scene in the Dutch East Indies, Pierre Jean Apol (1886 - 1947). Rijksmuseum. Public Domain.Why are you a historian of Indonesia?To restore a lost history which the Dutch colonial state obliterated.What’s the most important lesson history has taught y...continued
2 minutes read
Patrick
@Patrick -
2 days ago
‘A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65’ by David Kynaston review
British rock group the Rolling Stones arrive in Norway, 1965. Arkivverket (National Archives of Norway). Public Domain.Since the 1990s three historians have entered the race to document as thickly as possible the postwar history of Britain. Peter Hennessy was the first st...continued
6 minutes read
Madalyn
@Madalyn -
over 1 year ago
The Roma Holocaust | History Today
Robert Ritter, head of the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit of Nazi Germany’s Criminal Police, conducting an interview with a Romani woman, 1936 © Galerie Bilderwelt/Hulton Getty Images. In 1944, I was deported to the concentration camp in Terezín, whe...continued
18 minutes read
Kraig
@Kraig -
about 4 years ago
Doctoring the Ladies | History Today
One might assume that an account of how 18th-century women participated in the life of the English universities (at that point restricted to Oxford and Cambridge) would be a very short one. After all, women’s colleges only began to open their doors at end of the Victorian...continued
18 minutes read
Izaiah
@Izaiah -
8 months ago
Heirs and Spares | History Today
Louis XIV and his brother Philippe d’Orléans with their governess, the marquise de Lansac, French, 1643 © Akg-images.Rumours flew across Paris in the summer of 1658 that the 19-year-old Louis XIV was seriously ill, perhaps near death. Senior courtiers rushed to form a new...continued
18 minutes read
Raoul
@Raoul -
over 3 years ago
Removing That Little Knot | History Today
Using chloroform, scissors and a hot iron, the surgeon Isaac Baker Brown sought to cure the nervous conditions and emotional disorders of middle- and upper-class Victorian women. At his clinic in Notting Hill, west London, he excised the clitoris, an operation in which he...continued
18 minutes read
Eleanora
@Eleanora -
almost 4 years ago
Empire and Celebrity | History Today
On 7 November 1777, a letter in the London Morning Post described a ‘strange monster’ being driven in a phaeton along Fleet Street. Notwithstanding the creature cannot be old; its eyes looked something like those of a dead cod, – its mouth rather large, and it grinned not...continued
17 minutes read
Nelson
@Nelson -
almost 4 years ago
Beyond Bletchley: GCHQ and British Intelligence
This year, the UK’s signals intelligence, cyber and security agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), marks its centenary. Formed in 1919, GCHQ – the largest, yet least understood, of Britain’s intelligence agencies – has been at the forefront of securit...continued
17 minutes read
George
@George -
almost 4 years ago
Misery in the Head | History Today
Migraine affects one in seven of the world’s population – approximately a billion people. The World Health Organisation calculates it to be the seventh most disabling among all global diseases, more prevalent than diabetes, epilepsy and asthma combined. Virtually everyone...continued
17 minutes read
Minnie
@Minnie -
5 months ago
The King Who Wasn't There
Prester John on his throne in Ethiopia, from a map of East Africa in the Queen Mary Atlas, by Diogo Homem, Portuguese, 1558. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images.Early in 1145, worried about the growing threat of Muslim forces intent on reconqueri...continued
14 minutes read
Alvah
@Alvah -
about 4 years ago
Beyond Good and Evil | History Today
It was not the front, but the journey to the front that was the worst: ‘There was some shit in people’s pants, I tell you.’ Two years into the war, Otto Dix had seen it all. In 1914 he had signed up enthusiastically to the field artillery. Back then, people had assumed th...continued
17 minutes read
Garnet
@Garnet -
11 months ago
‘The Vote is of the People’
The MCP’s Livro de Leitura para Adultos, 1960s. Courtesy of Courtney J. Campbell.In 1960 Norma Porto Carreiro and Germano Coelho – a couple from the northeastern state of Pernambuco – created a social movement designed to teach Brazil’s poorest people to read. The Popular...continued
15 minutes read
Sandrine
@Sandrine -
about 4 years ago
Life on the Mississippi | History Today
For over 2,000 miles, the Mississippi River snakes through the heart of America along the course it has followed more or less since the last Ice Age, drawing in most of the water between the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains. It is a contrary river, too, shifting its delta ...continued
16 minutes read
Geovany
@Geovany -
over 3 years ago
The Great Rabbit Hoax | History Today
On a Friday two weeks before Christmas 1726 news reached Exeter of a curious theatrical performance which had taken place in London the previous Saturday night, on 10 December. An Exeter newspaper reported that, at the end of the main play at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields thea...continued
15 minutes read
Casper
@Casper -
4 months ago
Friends to Friends, Enemies to Enemies
The Battle of Nájera, fought by King Peter against Henry Trastámara, 3 April 1367, from a 15th-century manuscript of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles. Bridgeman Images.The allure of the alliance shows no sign of abating. In recent years we have NATO’s collective support for Uk...continued
13 minutes read
Grayce
@Grayce -
almost 4 years ago
Books of the Year 2019
Toby Green As questions of colonial history and identity become central to framing debate, Jonny Pitts’ Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (Allen Lane) is a must read. A personal, humane and searingly insightful journey through African communities in Europe, this book is t...continued
11 minutes read
Rahsaan
@Rahsaan -
10 months ago
Books of the Year 2022
This article contains affiliate links to bookshop.org: we may earn a commission on these, or you can choose to support your local bookshop.‘Tracing colonial officials who left utterly dislocated societies in their wake’R.J.B. Bosworth, Author of Politics, Murder and Love ...continued
9 minutes read
Americo
@Americo -
almost 4 years ago
In Praise of Older Women
Sex is not just the preserve of the young. Large-scale studies of 18th-century sexuality have not, however, been attuned to this fact and have positioned young people at the centre of historical narratives which claim to speak for ‘society’ at large. This lack of historio...continued
11 minutes read
Elliott
@Elliott -
about 1 year ago
Knobs or Points? | History Today
Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, by Benjamin West, c.1816. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.Like all long-awaited events, Benjamin Wilson’s big day arrived at last. After years of bitter in-fighting, in 1777 the fashionable artist staged a spe...continued
11 minutes read
Angus
@Angus -
almost 2 years ago
Books of the Year 2021
This article contains affiliate links to bookshop.org: we may earn a commission on these, or you can choose to support your local bookshop.‘Previously invisible threads of causality and consequence’Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor ...continued
9 minutes read
Madalyn
@Madalyn -
29 days ago
Old English Names: Cæd, Bæd and Dangerous to Know
Saint Guthlac being tormented by demons, the Life of Saint Guthlac, Crowland, Lincolnshire, 1175-1215. Guthlac’s name represented a shift away from older naming conventions towards a recognisably English one. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images.I...continued
11 minutes read
Liliane
@Liliane -
7 months ago
Glory or Gravity? | History Today
‘Newton after William Blake’, statue by Eduardo Paolozzi, London, 1995. Photo: Wikimedia/Creative Commons/British Library.Thanks to funding from the football pools, Eduardo Paolozzi’s massive bronze statue of Isaac Newton looms over the courtyard of the British Library. S...continued
11 minutes read
Hannah
@Hannah -
over 1 year ago
The Rise of the Newts
Cover for War with the Newts, c.1940. Alamy.When Mr Povondra’s son spots a newt in the River Vlatava, he knows that the end is nigh. Soon, what remains of Europe will sink beneath the waves and his beloved Czechoslovakia will be no more. Povondra’s only hope is that his c...continued
11 minutes read
Priscilla
@Priscilla -
over 1 year ago
A Worthy Cause? | History Today
At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 Mr Frederick Gonner Worth was a junior business partner in the wine merchants Messrs. Delattre and Worth. Based in Canon Street, he was responsible for the London side of the business, while his associate, Monsieur Delatt...continued
11 minutes read
Jimmy
@Jimmy -
about 1 year ago
Professor Ptthmllnsprts Versus Old Bones
Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley Inspecting a Water-Baby. Illustration by Linley Sambourne, from The Water-Babies, 1885. Alamy. Born into an illustrious scientific family, the future biologist Julian Huxley was a precocious child. At the age of five he came across a c...continued
11 minutes read