History
Anything to do with History
Teagan
@Teagan -
over 4 years ago
Regulation and Reputation | History Today
Booms, with hindsight, may prove bubbles. So it is that Alan Greenspan, appointed Federal Reserve chairman by Ronald Reagan and hailed by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward as the ‘maestro’ of Wall Street’s extraordinary 1990s gains, has suffered a plummet in reputation s...continued
3 minutes read
Hulda
@Hulda -
about 4 years ago
A Strange Pantheon | History Today
After the mammoth effort of his magisterial biography of Winston Churchill, Andrew Roberts relaxes with this short collection of essays – possibly modelled on Churchill’s own ‘Great Contemporaries’ series. Originating as a lecture series, the volume gives the impression o...continued
4 minutes read
Elvie
@Elvie -
almost 5 years ago
Chaucer: The Poet in His World
It isn’t really possible to write a biography of Chaucer. Painstaking research over many decades has turned up a small number of documents related to his life, which between them give a patchy, at times perplexing, picture. This foremost medieval English poet – always the...continued
3 minutes read
Webster
@Webster -
almost 5 years ago
Can You Keep a Secret?
In February 1649 the Royalist newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus characterised ‘Parliament Jone’, aka Elizabeth Alkin, as ‘an old Bitch’ able to ‘smell out a Loyall-hearted man as soon as the best Blood-hound in the Army’. Elizabeth later claimed that during the Civil Wars sh...continued
3 minutes read
Kari
@Kari -
about 4 years ago
Friends in High Places | History Today
There has, over the last decade or so, been a growing interest in the personal behind the political as far as America’s 19th-century legislative landscape is concerned. This study of two of the nation’s most active politicians is a very fine example of the value in this a...continued
3 minutes read
Felicita
@Felicita -
over 4 years ago
A Sunny Place For Shady People
One of the funniest stories in this entertaining book is how the former Edward VIII, living at Château la Croë in the South of France following his abdication, appeared one hot August day as a Scottish laird about to go stalking. ‘Beautiful kilt, swords and all the aids. ...continued
4 minutes read
Rose
@Rose -
almost 4 years ago
The Cost of Cleanliness | History Today
In the midst of a global pandemic, with heightened new considerations of sanitation and hygiene, there has perhaps never been such an advantageous time to publish a work called The Clean Body. Timing aside, what Peter Ward manages to deftly show throughout this book is no...continued
4 minutes read
Moises
@Moises -
almost 5 years ago
The Future of God in 1943
Reading Alan Jacobs’ super little book is like prizing open the back of a watch to study the mechanism within: tiny cogs working in clever order, designed by a master craftsman. The cogs are several Christian thinkers whose lives and thoughts connected in 1943, a year whe...continued
4 minutes read
Jimmy
@Jimmy -
over 4 years ago
Beds and their Bedfellows | History Today
The average human spends around one third of their lives in bed. It is easy to imagine that the experience is universal, as our species could not continue without the two most obvious bed-related activities: sleep and sex. However, as Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani demonst...continued
4 minutes read
Clarissa
@Clarissa -
almost 5 years ago
A Well-Trodden Road | History Today
British politics on the eve of the Second World War remains a subject of enduring fascination. Recent years have witnessed the publication of a plethora of new books on the subject, from Daniel Todman’s Britain’s War to Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six Minutes in May as well as...continued
3 minutes read
Jerrold
@Jerrold -
over 4 years ago
Insurgency and Dissent on the Home Front
The debate about the British Empire can often fall into moral binarism. It was either good or bad, or some uneven admixture of the two. Even exemplary accounts of notable atrocities, such as the Amritsar Massacre, risk reducing the subjects of colonial rule to victimhood....continued
3 minutes read
Zetta
@Zetta -
almost 5 years ago
Stifled Screams | History Today
In spring 1589, Claude Rouveyrolle, a French woman living in the Protestant city of Nîmes, was violently attacked by two men. They had begun by shouting insults at her, before seizing her and cutting her dress from the bottom hem to her buttocks, calling her a whore. It w...continued
3 minutes read
Giovanni
@Giovanni -
over 4 years ago
The Black Legend Written in Silver
A dry, cold, desolate mountain in the high Andes seems an unlikely location for a city that, at the end of the 16th century, had a population of 120,000 people and was three times the size of London. Located at 4,000 metres, Potosí’s phenomenal growth was based on vast de...continued
3 minutes read
Joe
@Joe -
over 4 years ago
Airy and Rational Animals | History Today
A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to hear legendary English folk singer Shirley Collins perform. One of the songs she sang was ‘Awake, Awake’, written by Thomas Deloney in 1580 but seemingly forgotten until Ralph Vaughan Williams heard it sung by an elderly Herefor...continued
3 minutes read
Bobby
@Bobby -
over 4 years ago
Bad Company? | History Today
This portrait of 18th-century India is, as one expects of its author, well written and exhaustively researched, told with copious endnotes remarkable for their reliance on indigenous Mughal sources. As William Dalrymple reminds us, such sources were far from impartial whe...continued
3 minutes read
Felicita
@Felicita -
about 4 years ago
The Communist’s Holiday | History Today
‘I’m literally a communist, you idiot!’ These were words uttered by the inexplicably omnipresent commentarian, Ash Sarkar, in a televised discussion with Piers Morgan, a man who is to civilised conversation what David Irving is to historical evidence. Allowing for the f...continued
3 minutes read
Ismael
@Ismael -
over 4 years ago
The Adventures of Number 45
On 6 October 1982, a 500-year-old Gutenberg Bible spends a night in the evidence locker of the University of California. There are 48 (possibly 49) known surviving copies of this rare book, printed c.1456 in Germany by moveable type pioneer Johann Gutenberg. Representing ...continued
3 minutes read
Kristina
@Kristina -
almost 4 years ago
Question Marx | History Today
Why should Karl Marx be included in Yale’s excellent Jewish Lives series when the subject of this fascinating book never referred to his Jewish origins? Shlomo Avineri, the eminent Israeli intellectual and academic, has attempted to unravel Marx’s connection to his Jewish...continued
3 minutes read
George
@George -
over 4 years ago
In Her Time | History Today
The new interest in women’s contribution to culture in the past has been unevenly conferred. This is by no means the first biography of Alma Mahler-Werfel and is unlikely to be the last. There are plenty of first-rank women artists and creative figures of her time who go ...continued
4 minutes read
Kristina
@Kristina -
over 4 years ago
Unravelling the History of Wool
In this historical travelogue, Esther Rutter follows a tradition established by the first historian of the fisherman’s Guernsey, Gladys Thompson. In Patterns for Guernseys, Jerseys & Arans (1955), the otherwise patrician Thompson spent an afternoon working as a toilet...continued
3 minutes read
Alvah
@Alvah -
over 4 years ago
Poisonous Ideas on Repeat | History Today
In August 2017, white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting ‘Jews will not replace us!’ They espoused a depressing, if familiar world view: that it is Jews who control the banks and the media, imposing their morality on ‘real’ Americans. In a new boo...continued
3 minutes read
Leda
@Leda -
almost 5 years ago
Retracing The Steps | History Today
Consider John Buchan’s output in the four and a half years of war between August 1914 and November 1918. He wrote thousands of communiques from the front, first as a jobbing journalist then as official army spokesman at GHQ. He wrote 24 volumes of Nelson’s History of the ...continued
4 minutes read
Zackery
@Zackery -
over 4 years ago
The Man The Allies Ignored
If historical reputations were based on merit, Witold Pilecki would be a household name. Yet, the Polish Army captain who volunteered to be sent to Auschwitz in 1940, to report on the Germans’ nefarious activities in the camp, is little known outside Poland. This state of...continued
3 minutes read
Delia
@Delia -
over 4 years ago
Travels Through Time: Stalemate on the Western Front
On the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916, 19,240 men serving in the British forces were killed and a further 38,000 were seriously wounded. At home, the public was initially unware of the death toll, conscious only of those in mourning clothes in their local communities...continued
3 minutes read
Madalyn
@Madalyn -
over 4 years ago
Travels Through Time: Sixth-Century Movers and Shakers
The Byzantine emperor Justinian I was highly intelligent, determined and hugely ambitious. In AD 529, he published the first edition of the Codex Justinianus, which would be adopted across Europe. The code revised and updated existing late Roman legislation alongside othe...continued
2 minutes read