History
Anything to do with History
Rahsaan
@Rahsaan -
almost 2 years 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 5 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
Priscilla
@Priscilla -
6 days ago
‘A Great Disorder’ by Richard Slotkin review
In 1938 the American literary critic Howard Mumford Jones published an article in The Atlantic titled ‘Patriotism – but How?’ As Europe teetered on the brink of war, Jones observed how fascist dictators were skilfully manipulating their nation’s myths to rally their popul...continued
5 minutes read
Elliott
@Elliott -
about 2 years 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 3 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 -
about 1 year 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 -
over 1 year 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 2 years 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 2 years 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 -
over 2 years 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
Adelia
@Adelia -
over 2 years ago
Caravaggio Lost at Sea | History Today
Self portrait by Louis Finson, 17th century. Jean Bernard/Bridgeman Images.In early July 1610 Caravaggio set sail from Naples, carrying several mysterious paintings. Some four years earlier he had been sentenced to death for killing a Roman nobleman in a duel and had been...continued
11 minutes read
Geovany
@Geovany -
over 1 year ago
Warsaw in Flames | History Today
Civilian prisoners captured during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 1943. Buyenlarge Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images.The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one of the events most readily associated with the history of the Holocaust, a focal point of Holocaust commemoration. Even as the wa...continued
10 minutes read
Zetta
@Zetta -
almost 2 years ago
The Computer in the Aegean
Mechanism of Antikythera, Fragment C. National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Wiki Commons/Zde.In April 1900 a startled telegraph operator based in Athens decoded a signal reporting the discovery of a vast treasure trove beneath the Aegean Sea. Government authorities di...continued
10 minutes read
Sandrine
@Sandrine -
over 5 years ago
A Hidden Chapter: Women of the Klan
The Ku Klux Klan has entered popular memory as a sometimes menacing, sometimes almost comical, group of angry men, clad in white robes with hooded faces, setting crosses alight, or thundering through Reconstruction-era American towns on horseback. This image, however, fai...continued
11 minutes read
Erik
@Erik -
about 5 years ago
A History of Chop Suey
On the night of 14 June 1904, New York’s Chinatown was plunged into a deep gloom. For the past 20 years, it had thrived off the city’s seemingly insatiable appetite for chop suey. Every night, restaurants along Moot and Pell were thronged with sophisticates clamouring for...continued
11 minutes read
Kraig
@Kraig -
about 5 years ago
The Triumphs and Tragedies of Judicial Politics
The United Kingdom Supreme Court has delivered a hugely significant verdict, the consequences of which will reverberate throughout the nation’s political life for generations to come. With one legal stroke, the Justices, whose opinion was presented by Baroness Hale on Tue...continued
11 minutes read
Adelia
@Adelia -
almost 3 years ago
How Father Christmas Found his Reindeer
Illustration for Robert L. May’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, 1949 © Getty Images.When I was a child, I could never have imagined Santa Claus without his reindeer. They were as much a part of his character as his bushy white beard, his red coat, or his sack of present...continued
11 minutes read
Elody
@Elody -
about 2 years ago
No Laughing Matter | History Today
Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart, by Frans Hals, 1623. Bridgeman Images.In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1983), laughter is no laughing matter. Set in 1327, the story follows William of Baskerville as he investigates a series of mysterious deaths at a Benedictine mona...continued
10 minutes read
Angus
@Angus -
about 5 years ago
A History of Börek | History Today
During the reign of Sultan Mehmet IV (r. 1648-87), the Dîvân-ı Hümâyûn (imperial council) would meet every other morning in a domed chamber of the Topkapi Palace. When the Grand Vizier and his ministers had dealt with affairs of state, they would sit down to a magnificent...continued
11 minutes read
Alexander
@Alexander -
about 5 years ago
The History of the Barbecue
Lockhart, Texas has plenty of reasons to feel proud. With its unique collection of 19th-century buildings, it is one of the prettiest towns in Caldwell County – and a favourite of Hollywood producers. More than 50 films have been made there, from Baby, the Rain Must Fall ...continued
11 minutes read
Americo
@Americo -
over 2 years ago
The Battle of the Gauges
Cartoon by Angus Reach, 1845 © Lordprice Collection/Alamy.Queen Victoria was definitely not amused. Whenever she travelled from her estate on the Isle of Wight to her castle at Balmoral, she encountered the inconvenience of twice changing trains, once at Basingstoke and a...continued
10 minutes read
Marie
@Marie -
almost 3 years ago
A Donkey’s Day in Court
The Trial of Bill Burns, by P. Mathews, 19th century. Alamy.There were gasps as the victim was led into court. Some laughed. Clerks whispered excitedly. The defendant, Bill Burns, was appalled. Putting his thumb to his nose, he blew a loud raspberry. But of the victim’s i...continued
11 minutes read
Jany
@Jany -
almost 2 years ago
Genes‘R’Us: Science and Ideology in the Lysenko Controversies
Trofim Lysenko measuring the growth of wheat on one of the kolkhoz fields near Odessa, Ukrainian SSR, c.1930s.Like many wealthy Americans in the first half of the 20th century, the self-made entrepreneur Roger Babson believed fervently in the power of genes. There are onl...continued
10 minutes read
Geovany
@Geovany -
almost 4 years ago
How did the Elephant get its Trunk?
‘In the High and Far off Times, the Elephant … had no trunk,’ wrote Rudyard Kipling. ‘He had just a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side.’ But there was one elephant’s child who was more curious than the rest. He wanted to ...continued
11 minutes read
Eleanora
@Eleanora -
over 3 years ago
Catullus and Lesbia’s Sparrow | History Today
No sparrow has provoked as much affection or controversy as that commemorated by the Roman poet Catullus (c.84-54 BC). The pet of an unnamed puella – presumably his beloved ‘Lesbia’ – the bird in question appears in two short verses, each written in charming hendecasyllab...continued
11 minutes read