History
Anything to do with History
Rose
@Rose -
7 months ago
‘Backbone of the Nation’ by Robert Gildea review
Musicians the Flying Pickets join a picket line at Drax Power Station, North Yorkshire, in 1984. Virgil Lucky (CC BY-SA 4.0).In the UK, May and June 2022 were officially a ‘hot strike summer’, in which the context of the country’s cost of living crisis generated popular s...continued
6 minutes read
Mariano
@Mariano -
8 months ago
‘Plato of Athens’ by Robin Waterfield review
Head of the Greek philosopher Plato, worked for insertion into a Roman statue, mid-3rd century A.D. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California. Public Domain.Plato was so devoted to the memory of his teacher Socrates, who in his view had been unjustly ...continued
6 minutes read
Madalyn
@Madalyn -
about 2 years ago
Love Is Dead | History Today
Photographs and autographs of Baroness Mary Vetsera and Crown Prince Rudolf, 19th century. Alamy.Two gunshots echoed from Mayerling hunting lodge in the early hours of 30 January 1889, sending shockwaves through the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Crown Prince Rudolf was found d...continued
6 minutes read
Maureen
@Maureen -
about 2 years ago
Crossing Oceans | History Today
A clove tree, from Jacob van Maerlant’s Der naturen bloeme (The Flower of Nature), Flemish, early 14th century. British Library/Add MS 11390, f.79v.Considering their origins, cloves – dried blossom buds of a Southeast Asian tree, Syzygium aromaticum – appear remarkably fr...continued
6 minutes read
Muriel
@Muriel -
over 4 years ago
The End of British Communism
It is ironic that the closest communism came to establishing a mass movement in Britain was between 1935 and 1939, when its adherents abandoned revolutionism and emphasised the defence of bourgeois democracy. The policy attracted not the proletariat, but the left-wing int...continued
6 minutes read
Kraig
@Kraig -
over 1 year ago
This Great Stage of Fools
Study for King Lear (detail), 1897, by Edwin Austin Abbey. Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial Collection/Yale University Art Gallery.First aired in 2018, the HBO TV series Succession tells the story of Logan Roy, CEO of Waystar Royco, a vast media conglomerate. It begins with th...continued
6 minutes read
Anderson
@Anderson -
over 4 years ago
Our Graham Greene in Havana
In adolescence, Graham Greene found relief from ‘boredom’ by playing Russian roulette. In the 1950s, he sought distraction from his manic depression through multiple foreign trips to turbulent spots around the world. These trips provided the background to what critics hav...continued
6 minutes read
Allene
@Allene -
9 months ago
The Invention of Time
Joseph Priestley’s A New Chart of History, 1769. The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock PhotoFolded up, the heavy paper of Joseph Priestley’s 1785 timeline forms a cardboard-like wafer. It seems too slim to contain so much. The copy I studied was sewn into a book, sandwic...continued
6 minutes read
Maureen
@Maureen -
about 1 year ago
Toad Testicles, Foul-Beard and Broad-Arse
Edmund ‘Ironside’, from the Genealogical Chronicle of the English Kings, late 13th century © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images.If we were to visit Winchester in the latter years of the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042-66), we might have bumped...continued
6 minutes read
Abbie
@Abbie -
about 2 years ago
Choosing Sides | History Today
The 8th Texas Cavalry Regiment, popularly known as ‘Terry’s Texas Rangers’, c.1861. Alamy.On the US Western frontier in 1861, a dangerous hodge-podge of competing political interests created a bloody contest six years before the shots on Fort Sumter split the North from ...continued
6 minutes read
Assunta
@Assunta -
8 months ago
David Reubeni and Africa’s Lost Tribe of Israel
The Chafariz d’El-Rey (King’s Fountain), Lisbon. Unknown artist, Netherlands, 1570-80. The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock PhotoIn 1524 a Black man named David Reubeni arrived in Venice with a bold plan to save the Jews. No one doubted that the Jews needed saving. Over...continued
6 minutes read
Jerrold
@Jerrold -
almost 2 years ago
The Birth and Death of the Office
The Tetley Brewers’ headquarters, Leeds, 1968 © Worldwide Photography/Heritage Images/TopFoto.When lockdowns first started in 2020, many white-collar workers came home to find that their jobs were already there waiting for them. Technology had long attained sufficient im...continued
6 minutes read
Minnie
@Minnie -
almost 2 years ago
Absent Treasure | History Today
Gold mask of Kofi Karikari, 19th century. Photo 12/Alamy.A game-changing exhibition has been on view in Cotonou in Benin since February of this year. Titled Restitution – Revelation, the display includes ancient and monumental royal statues and thrones, removed by the Fre...continued
5 minutes read
Ismael
@Ismael -
10 months ago
Crowning Triumph | History Today
Visionary: Henry III and the facade of Westminster Abbey, from the Chronicle of England, by Peter Langtoft, 1307-27. incamerastock/Alamy Stock PhotoWe owe Westminster Abbey to one of the lesser-known kings of England, Henry III. Henry, the son of King John, was nine when ...continued
6 minutes read
Alexzander
@Alexzander -
over 1 year ago
‘Because they were German’ | History Today
Austria becomes German: entry of the German police in Imst (Tyrol), Austria, March 1938. National Archives at College Park.‘Germany must strive to become a leading power’ and accept ‘military force as a legitimate political tool’, Lars Klingbeil, co-leader of Germany’s ru...continued
6 minutes read
Hulda
@Hulda -
over 4 years ago
The Land of Frustrated Revolutions
‘A frustrated revolution’ is how Eric Hobsbawm described the anarchic conflict in the Colombian countryside in the 1940s and 1950s, known simply as la Violencia. But this appraisal also describes the history of left-wing insurrections across all of Latin America. Latin Am...continued
6 minutes read
Hulda
@Hulda -
over 1 year ago
Utopian Dreams, Earthly Realities | History Today
Vera Pragnell, early 20th century. Courtesy the Author.The dream of escaping to the country retains a powerful hold on our imagination. It had a particular purchase during the interwar era, as demonstrated by the rise across Europe of a back-to-nature philosophy that embr...continued
5 minutes read
Garnet
@Garnet -
about 1 year ago
Literary Heroine | History Today
Marija Jurić Zagorka, mid-20th century. Courtesy Memorial Apartment of Marija Jurić Zagorka/Center for Women’s Studies.Marija Jurić Zagorka has always had plenty of readers, both during her lifetime and now, 150 years after her birth. However, in the last 15 years, thanks...continued
6 minutes read
Mariano
@Mariano -
9 months ago
Long Live the Ancien Régime!
Edward the Confessor, enthroned, in the opening scene of the Bayeux Tapestry. Wikimedia CommonsNone of the pleasures afforded to historians fortunate enough to live in the only extant ancien régime can match that of witnessing the coronation of the monarch, as we were all...continued
6 minutes read
Jarod
@Jarod -
7 months ago
‘Fool’ by Peter K. Andersson review
Somer’s day: page from the Psalter of Henry VIII showing Henry with William Somer, by Jean Maillart (or Mallard), c.1540. Bridgeman Images.Was there anything, aside from consanguinity, that united the Tudor dynasty as it lurched back and forth from Catholicism to Protesta...continued
6 minutes read
Nelson
@Nelson -
over 1 year ago
In Bed with the Tudors
The nightmare of Henry I in 1130, from the Worcester Chronicle, c.1130-40. Courtesy of British Museum Images.History is the ‘shipwreck of time’. Innumerable examples of domestic furniture from early modern England have been lost because of natural wastage, changing fashio...continued
6 minutes read
Anderson
@Anderson -
11 months ago
Springtime for Europe | History Today
On the barricades on the Rue Soufflot, Paris, 1848, by Horace Vernet. Wikimedia Commons.One afternoon in January 1848, in the Sicilian city of Palermo, the streets began to fill with crowds. What brought people out of their homes en masse, or what they wanted, no one was ...continued
6 minutes read
Alexzander
@Alexzander -
over 1 year ago
It’s Not Easy Being Green
The Fiat 147 production line, 5 July 1979. Image: Fiat/Stellantis.Moving away from petrol-powered vehicles is possible, as Brazil has proven. The country’s history of sugar-ethanol production provides both an inspiring vision of what a rapid shift away from petroleum migh...continued
5 minutes read
Nestor
@Nestor -
8 months ago
Behind Closed Doors: Women and the Inquisition
Chamber of horrors: An imagined depiction of ‘The Inquisition in Session’ from The Story of Our Christianity, by Frederic M. Bird, 1893. © The Holbarn Archive / Bridgeman ImagesIt is a familiar image: a woman in distress, surrounded by men examining her soul in a dimly li...continued
6 minutes read
Dayton
@Dayton -
almost 5 years ago
What Have the Romans Done for Us?
Rabbits hit the headlines earlier this year. A fragment of tibia, unearthed in the 1960s during an archaeological dig at Fishbourne Roman Palace in West Sussex, was radiocarbon dated by researchers at the University of Exeter. The analysis showed it to be almost 2,000 yea...continued
6 minutes read