History
Anything to do with History
Maureen
@Maureen -
9 months ago
Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age by Tom Holland
The Colossi of Memnon, illustration from Wonders of the Past, 1910. © Look and Learn/Bridgeman ImagesHalfway up the inside of a church tower in central Italy, upside-down, is an epitaph of a ‘T. Flavius Clymenus’. A freedman of the imperial household, a former slave, his ...continued
5 minutes read
Alexandro
@Alexandro -
over 1 year ago
An Eggless Christmas | History Today
Detail from the Ministry of Food’s ‘Christmas Recipes’, December 1945. LSHTM Library & Archives Service.Before the Second World War, 70 per cent of Britain’s food was imported, including 50 per cent of meat, 91 per cent of butter and 70 per cent of cheese and sugar. W...continued
5 minutes read
Hank
@Hank -
6 months ago
Adelaide Casely Hayford’s African Education
In theory, education was a key benefit bestowed by European colonial governments and missionaries. But it was also increasingly seen – from India to Africa to the West Indies – as detrimental. Norman Manley, later the first prime minister of Jamaica, was fond of quoting a...continued
6 minutes read
George
@George -
about 1 year ago
Codes and Crowns | History Today
Cipher used between Mary, Queen of Scots and Guillaume de l’Aubespine, Mauvissière’s replacement as ambassador, late 16th century. The National Archives.Mary, Queen of Scots was a prolific letter-writer. Thousands of her letters survive in collections across the world, in...continued
5 minutes read
Assunta
@Assunta -
about 4 years ago
The Magic is Gone | History Today
Most of the intended readers of Michael Hunter’s provocative and enjoyably readable new study will instantly recognise the allusion in its title. In 1971 – and it is to be hoped that someone is already thinking about ways to mark the almost-imminent 50th anniversary of it...continued
5 minutes read
Kristina
@Kristina -
over 2 years ago
Loveless Letters | History Today
‘Kolkhoz’ [collective farm] women working in a field, 1930s © Hulton Getty Images.The Soviet project claimed to have dismantled the causes of oppression and, by the construction of socialism, the emancipation of women and drives to imbue the populace with grammatical and ...continued
5 minutes read
Roger
@Roger -
11 months ago
A Delicate Diagnosis | History Today
President Woodrow Wilson with his war cabinet, 1918. Wikimedia Commons.Americans revel in analysing the state of their president’s mind, especially when it helps score political points. Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson recently ‘diagnosed’ Joe Biden with ‘cognitive d...continued
5 minutes read
Jany
@Jany -
almost 4 years ago
On the Home Front | History Today
In the summer of 1745, Jemima, Marchioness Grey – handsome, clever and rich – had very little to distress or vex her. Then 23 years old, she was mistress of Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, happily married into a rising political family and surrounded by a lively intellectual ...continued
6 minutes read
Oren
@Oren -
over 1 year ago
Women, Life, Freedom | History Today
Women protest during the Iranian Revolution, Tehran, 1978. Getty Images.On 16 September 2022 Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman from Saqqez in Iran’s Kurdistan Province, died in a Tehran hospital. Three days earlier she had been arrested by Iran’s Guidance Patrol, or ‘moral...continued
5 minutes read
Casper
@Casper -
11 months ago
Does History Have an Expiry Date?
Domesday Book, from Historic Byways and Highways of Old England, by William Andrews, 1900. Wikimedia Commons.Recently, I was instructed to revise the bibliography for a paper over which I had just assumed responsibility – on medieval British history. It is a tedious chore...continued
5 minutes read
Maureen
@Maureen -
about 4 years ago
A House Divided | History Today
Shortly after 10am on Sunday 4 April 1920, a cinematographer set up his camera near the entrance to the Christian suq inside Jerusalem’s walled Old City to film Muslim pilgrims gathering near the Jaffa Gate at the start of the festival of Nebi Musa. According to local leg...continued
5 minutes read
Bart
@Bart -
about 1 year ago
All Among the Watchtowers | History Today
The Berlin Wall, November 1989.Perhaps more than any former Eastern Bloc state, East Germany continues to exude a strange fascination for many. Images of the Berlin Wall with its barbed wire, watch towers and ‘death strip’, as well as stories of the all-seeing, all-knowin...continued
6 minutes read
Meggie
@Meggie -
almost 5 years ago
A Painter Fit for a Queen
It is July 1571 and Elizabeth I is sitting for a portrait in ‘the open ally of a goodly garden’, almost certainly at Hampton Court. The portrait is ‘in little’ – what we would now call a watercolour miniature, although the latter term didn’t enter English until Sir Philip...continued
6 minutes read
Hulda
@Hulda -
over 1 year ago
For the Love of Manuscripts
A scribe (probably Bede) writing, from Life and Miracles of Saint Cuthbert by Bede, 12th century. Bridgeman Images.The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club is a logical sequel to Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (2016), in which he introduc...continued
5 minutes read
Kari
@Kari -
over 4 years ago
Beyond Profit | History Today
The Dutch contribution to the transatlantic slave trade has long been thought to have marginal significance. But this depends on how one characterises significance. I suggest that the Dutch slave trade was not just significant, but crucial in shaping the transatlantic sla...continued
6 minutes read
Assunta
@Assunta -
about 4 years ago
Making Medieval Ireland English | History Today
In October 1171, Henry II of England landed at Waterford with an army, claiming to be ‘Lord of Ireland’ and changing forever the course of Irish history. Officially, Henry’s justification for invading Ireland was religious: the ‘reformation’ of the Irish church (although ...continued
6 minutes read
Grayce
@Grayce -
almost 5 years ago
The Hitlers in Our Own Country
Martin Luther King delivered his celebrated ‘I Have a Dream’ speech on 28 August 1963 at the March on Washington. Less well known is that one of the other speakers that day was Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a political émigré who had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s. His presence at...continued
5 minutes read
Pablo
@Pablo -
almost 4 years ago
Safe as Houses? | History Today
Seventy years ago, a government-appointed committee published a report into the future of Britain’s country house heritage. The report is not as well known as the other achievements of the 1945-51 Labour government, such as the creation of the National Health Service or t...continued
5 minutes read
Emmie
@Emmie -
over 3 years ago
Sink or Swim | History Today
In Thomas Shadwell’s play The Virtuoso (1676), the natural philosopher Sir Nicholas Gimcrack is discovered in his laboratory, lying flat on his belly, with a length of packthread clamped between his teeth. The thread terminates in a ligature around the lower parts of a fr...continued
6 minutes read
Elian
@Elian -
over 3 years ago
Harold Moody’s Fight for Racial Equality
Despite his pioneering role in the struggle for racial equality and justice in Britain, Harold Moody remains relatively unknown. It is now 70 years since the publication of the last substantial biography of his life and career. Yet Moody’s story is significant, not least ...continued
5 minutes read
Immanuel
@Immanuel -
almost 4 years ago
Breathing Easily | History Today
The ancient workplace was extremely hazardous, its conditions causing health problems from callouses and scars to permanent deformities or other, less immediately visible, issues, such as breathing problems. Despite the absence of the modern understanding of health and sa...continued
5 minutes read
Immanuel
@Immanuel -
over 1 year ago
The Baltic Question | History Today
Alexander Rittikh’s map of the Baltic provinces by confession, 1873. Courtesy National Library of Estonia.In 1873 Alexander Fedorovich Rittikh, one of the Russian Empire’s most eminent cartographers, published two maps of the Baltic provinces depicting the ethnographic an...continued
5 minutes read
Jarod
@Jarod -
about 1 year ago
Boudica Lite | History Today
Boudica depicted in John Cassell's Illustrated History of England, 1857.Duncan Mackay’s Echolands is difficult to summarise. The subtitle doesn’t really do it: the book is less about finding Boudica and more an exploration of the layers of material her escapades left behi...continued
6 minutes read
Iva
@Iva -
about 2 years ago
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution | History Today
The second of the Sherlock Holmes novels, The Sign of Four, published in 1890, begins with the great detective unpacking a hypodermic syringe from its neat leather case, rolling up his sleeve and preparing to give himself an injection. ‘It is cocaine’, he says to the curi...continued
6 minutes read
Torey
@Torey -
about 4 years ago
Learning Arabic | History Today
When Oxford University’s Bodleian Library opened in 1602, its Arabic holdings amounted to a single copy of the Quran. A century and a half later, such was the reputation of Arabic at the university that a young Edward Gibbon, then an unhappy student at Magdalen, could c...continued
5 minutes read