History
Anything to do with History
Elliott @Elliott - over 2 years ago
A Racist Forgery is Revealed
Jewish people have been blamed for everything from the Black Death to the Russian Revolution. But rarely has such race hate found more notorious expression than in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The work purports to be the verbatim transcript of speeches made by a s...continued
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Marlon @Marlon - over 2 years ago
Hercules and Omphale | History Today
Hercules, or Heracles to the Greeks, is covered with due modesty in the silk robes of Omphale, Queen of Lydia. She, in turn, is draped in the skin of the Nemean Lion, a fearsome creature killed by Hercules in the first of his 12 Labours. It is an act of cross-dressing ill...continued
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Grayce @Grayce - about 3 years ago
Death of a Medieval Lover
From the beginning, their affair was hardly private. He joked about it in his lectures and wrote love songs that were sung far and wide. But they were both, in their own way, already famous.By the 1110s, Peter Abelard was in his thirties, with a fast-growing reputation as...continued
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Juliet @Juliet - over 2 years ago
‘A Socialist Romance’ | History Today
In the autumn of 1895 Edith Lanchester was 24. Born into a middle-class family, she had studied at the Birkbeck Institute and worked as a City clerk. She was also already a seasoned socialist campaigner; her ringing voice, it was said, could command the attention of the m...continued
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Pablo @Pablo - over 2 years ago
A Last Post | History Today
This is my final offering as editor of History Today, so allow me a few observations on history today and tomorrow, and what the discipline must do if it is to continue to prosper, to inform debate, at least in the English-speaking world.I have long subscribed to the mant...continued
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Teagan @Teagan - about 3 years ago
Time’s Changing Tempo | History Today
There has probably never been a better time to read long novels, or even a cycle of them, than the last 12 months – at least if you’re working from home, with a bit of space and free of such challenges as home schooling. Perceptions of time have changed a great deal over ...continued
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Rex @Rex - about 3 years ago
Fall of Africa’s Greatest Empire
The Songhay Empire would not be the first military power to set too much store by its cavalry. Founded in 1464 out of the ruins of the Malian Empire, Songhay was the largest of the indigenous empires in Africa. At its zenith, it covered around 540,000 square miles, stretc...continued
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Joe @Joe - over 2 years ago
Susanna and the Elders | History Today
Demonstrating brilliant technique and interpretative insight, Artemisia Gentileschi was just 17 when she first painted on a theme she would return to repeatedly. The biblical Apocrypha recounts the tale of Susanna, the beautiful wife of Joachim. She is bathing in their ga...continued
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Allene @Allene - about 3 years ago
My Back Pages | History Today
‘People who keep journals have life twice’, claimed the writer Jessamyn West – though it’s hard to imagine that anyone who has kept a diary over the last 12 months will be keen to relive it anytime soon. Diarists of 2020 will, however, be providing a service to historians...continued
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Zackery @Zackery - over 3 years ago
Birth of a Freedom Fighter
Nat Turner was born into slavery on a Virginia plantation on 2 October 1800. Convinced from an early age that he was a prophet, Turner taught himself to read and write. His spiritual path mirrors that of many other mystics: he maintained an austere life apart from the wid...continued
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Zackery @Zackery - over 2 years ago
Bonaparte’s Troops Crush Austrians at Battle of Rivoli
Rivoli marked a key stage in the Italian campaigns of the twenty-something Napoleon Bonaparte on behalf of France’s ruling Directorate – successes that brought France's youngest general to the notice of his countrymen and Europe. After the declaration of war against the n...continued
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Rose @Rose - over 3 years ago
Lesbian ‘Obscenity’ Suppressed | History Today
On 9 November 1928 Bow Street Magistrates Court was crowded. D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow had been successfully prosecuted for obscenity in the same courtroom 13 years earlier. Now it was the turn of The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. The perceived obscenity in Hall...continued
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Priscilla @Priscilla - almost 3 years ago
Into the Unknown Region | History Today
International travel has been off the agenda for most during the pandemic, even the brief city breaks that are so easy to take in such a well-connected, diverse and compact continent as Europe. Yet, though some claim to have experienced a revelatory new relationship with ...continued
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Giovanni @Giovanni - over 3 years ago
All of History is There
The Trinidadian-born Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul was at his most provocative in The Middle Passage (1962), in which he related his travels through the Caribbean. ‘History is built around achievement and creation’, he wrote, ‘and nothing was created in the West Indies.’ A ...continued
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Sandrine @Sandrine - over 3 years ago
A Holy Trinity | History Today
With travel restricted and holidays on hold, many will have explored their localities anew during lockdown. Lucky are those with access to rural expanse, though urbanites can find rewards, too, in cityscapes altered, for better and worse, by the pandemic.The City of Londo...continued
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Elaina @Elaina - over 3 years ago
The Future of the Past
With this issue, History Today reaches its biblical three score years and ten, vigorous and sprightly. Anyone looking back over a sample of the 840 issues of History Today published since its founding in 1951 will notice some striking changes over time. There has been a c...continued
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Cameron @Cameron - over 3 years ago
The First Svengali | History Today
Whenever Dominic Cummings makes the headlines, commentators reach for the same word to describe his relationship with the prime minister: he is Boris Johnson’s Svengali. But who was the original Svengali? Svengali is one of those rare literary creations that becomes short...continued
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Iva @Iva - over 2 years ago
Death of a Swordmaster | History Today
When change came, it was swift. Until the turn of the 1570s, Edmund Howes writes in his continuation of John Stow’s Annales, ‘the auncient English fight of sword and buckler was onely had in use’. Bucklers – small shields – were to be bought in any haberdasher. But ‘short...continued
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Manley @Manley - 5 months ago
The Death of Caspar Hauser
Who was Caspar Hauser? No one knew. He stepped into the world in Nuremberg on Whit Monday in 1828 towards the end of the afternoon. A shoemaker in the Unschlitt Platz – named for the city’s nearby store of fat and tallow – saw Hauser first, a young man, perhaps 17, seemin...continued
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Garnet @Garnet - about 3 years ago
Raise Your Words | History Today
It is now 20 years since the publication of Jonathan Rose’s majestic and moving study, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Having sifted through more than 2,000 memoirs, Rose painted a vivid, sometimes barely believeable, portrait of men and women over t...continued
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Hank @Hank - over 2 years ago
The Dust of Kabul | History Today
Afghanistan’s ancient Buddhist legacy is defined to the world by an absence: the vacant niches that, until 2001, were graced by the gigantic Bamiyan Buddhas. The Chinese monk Xuanzong passed by them in the early seventh century ad, a century after their erection, and reco...continued
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Bart @Bart - almost 3 years ago
Vikings Attack Lindisfarne | History Today
The northern diaspora we call the age of the Vikings is testament to the mobility of early medieval Europe. So, too, is the fact that the best contemporary account we have of the Viking raid on Lindisfarne, off the Northumbrian coast, on 8 June 793 comes from the court of...continued
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Joe @Joe - about 3 years ago
Publication of the Futurist Manifesto
‘In my own village’, the film-maker Luis Buñuel said of his birthplace in rural Spain, ‘the Middle Ages lasted until the First World War.’ Buñuel would escape the dead hand of the past through surrealism. But the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti went one better: h...continued
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Allene @Allene - almost 3 years ago
What’s in a Name? | History Today
Auschwitz Memorial is a Twitter feed I was introduced to by the novelist and critic Linda Grant, which is run by staff at the Auschwitz Museum. Each entry – and at least one is posted daily – starts with a date, usually that of the person’s birth: ‘9 April 1938: Jewish tw...continued
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George @George - over 2 years ago
Hidden in Plain Sight | History Today
Michael Carter, a properties historian at English Heritage and the man who oversees, among others, the ruins of Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, is troubled by the effect that Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy has had on the public imagination. The Dissolution of the Monaste...continued
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