History

Anything to do with History

C83c832ac4865208bba7331dd2976162 Izaiah @Izaiah - over 3 years ago
On the Spot: Ruth Scurr
Why are you a historian of the early modern period?I am an early modernist when the French Revolution is included in that period.What’s the most important lesson history has taught you? That timing is everything. Which history book has had greatest influence on you?Robert...continued
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7094e9deddcf03241ed9894017ba09bc Rose @Rose - over 3 years ago
On the Spot: Katja Hoyer
Why are you a historian of Germany?I am a confused German trying to make sense of my country’s past and its place in Europe and the world.What’s the most important lesson history has taught you? Human nature always remains the same. Which history book has had greatest inf...continued
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B32a14d6694cf7df7a187f69ad01ace5 Patrick @Patrick - over 3 years ago
On the Spot: Eleanor Robson
Why are you a historian of the ancient Middle East?I wanted to start at the beginning of the history of mathematics and numeracy. Thirty years later, I’m still not done with cuneiform culture.What’s the most important lesson history has taught you?  That ‘the past is now’...continued
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192059156a7075f96be3d979645bdbcc Zackery @Zackery - over 2 years ago
On the Spot: Marjoleine Kars
Why are you a historian of early America?As an immigrant, I wanted to understand the roots of my adopted country.What’s the most important lesson history has taught you? That nothing ever repeats itself.Which history book has had greatest influence on you?The World Turned...continued
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498be12662c1d913d0cbee6108a66520 Torey @Torey - almost 3 years ago
On the Spot: Barry Cunliffe
Why are you an archaeologist? Because from an early age I couldn’t conceive of life without being an archaeologist.What’s the most important lesson history has taught you? That humans are amazingly adaptable. Which history book has had greatest influence on you?Grahame Cl...continued
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Ac7d6ae4836b778c0e45d9f73deed0cb Delia @Delia - about 3 years ago
Ulysses and the Sirens | History Today
A passage from book 12 of The Odyssey, in Emily Wilson’s acclaimed translation of Homer’s epic, sees the hero Odysseus, known in Latin as Ulysses, warn his men of an impending challenge:She [Circe] said we must avoid the voices of the otherworldy Sirens; steer past their ...continued
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E5a600388a4be6ed5b515081737d8445 Angus @Angus - over 3 years ago
On the Spot: Shadi Bartsch
Why are you a Classicist?I want to understand the conceptual roots of the way I think.What’s the most important lesson history has taught you? That when it repeats itself, no one notices. Which history book has had greatest influence on you?A History of Science in World C...continued
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192059156a7075f96be3d979645bdbcc Zackery @Zackery - about 4 years ago
On the Spot: Susan-Mary Grant
Why are you a historian of the United States?It seemed fresh and exciting when I was an undergraduate, and the lecturers at Edinburgh, especially George Shepperson, were very inspiring. What’s the most important lesson history has taught you? That there’s always someone m...continued
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34392094b518c79e322481ceb0004cbf Colin @Colin - over 3 years ago
Venus and Mars | History Today
Sir William Boxall, Director of the National Gallery in London, was accompanied by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli, to a sale at Christie’s auction house in June 1874. The collection of the dealer Alexander Barker was up for sale and Disraeli wanted to ...continued
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24f317f89bef5f8cefa430eec1cd2f6d Nestor @Nestor - about 5 years ago
Orpheus and Eurydice | History Today
Orpheus and Eurydice, hand in hand, walk away from the fiery underworld and its deities, Pluto and Proserpine. Orpheus, singer, musician and poet, carrying a lyre on his shoulder, had recently married Eurydice, but on the day of their wedding, ‘in the very bloom of her li...continued
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9c02f74a2060b9a7d8d9cd41fd6c26ed Clarissa @Clarissa - 10 days ago
The Rebirth of Chivalry is Rained Off
It began as a joke. There were grumbles of conservative discontent about the lack of ceremony at the coronation of Queen Victoria in June 1838. Where was the ceremonial banquet? Where was the Royal Champion? They called it the ‘Penny Crowning’, a tawdry, cheap shadow of t...continued
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C0c3cfe5664cc7e6deb04e9e150ccd98 Devin @Devin - 4 months ago
The Death of a Mnemonist
Solomon Shereshevsky dreamt of being a hero. He spent his life waiting for ‘something fine, something grand’. Born in the 1880s in the small Russian town of Rezhitsa, now Rēzekne in Latvia, he was a sometime music student, efficiency expert and broker.By the late 1920s, h...continued
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725ac8c62bcc32f06195cf20b372a31a Muriel @Muriel - 6 months ago
The Birth of Ovid | History Today
Ovid was with a friend on Elba in the autumn of eight AD when the crisis hit. A summons arrived for him from the emperor, Augustus. Were the rumours true, his friend asked. Ovid equivocated – half confessing, half denying.Two millennia later, we still don’t know what Ovid...continued
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769b45cbbba62f6d3aa67bb11e7a293f Raoul @Raoul - over 3 years ago
Laocoön | History Today
‘Don’t trust the horse, my people. Even when they bring gifts, I fear the Greeks.’These are among the most famous lines of the classical world, uttered by Laocoön, the Trojan priest of Poseidon (the Roman god Neptune), in the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid, written in the...continued
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Ac7d6ae4836b778c0e45d9f73deed0cb Delia @Delia - 5 months ago
The Death of Little Jack the Boy Missionary
‘What more pleasing to a Christian parent whose heart yearns over his children [than] to see them thus engaged in the best of all causes, even the extension of the Redeemer’s kingdom’, wrote Joseph Blake in The Day of Small Things, his 1849 tract promoting missionary zeal...continued
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1f7b605070774dac8bb3c859143de9d2 Jeffrey @Jeffrey - 3 months ago
The Publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four
His first published work, a poem, appeared in the autumn of 1914. ‘Awake! Young Men of England’ was a call to arms for a nation newly at war. He was 11 years old and his name was Eric Blair.He took up the pen-name George Orwell in 1932 for his first book. (Other names con...continued
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B32a14d6694cf7df7a187f69ad01ace5 Patrick @Patrick - over 3 years ago
A Tyrant goes on Trial
The idea that leaders and their functionaries might be held to account did not begin with the Nuremberg Trials that followed the Second World War. Precedents cited in the trials themselves included the Imperial Diet at Regensburg, which followed Frederick II’s invasion of...continued
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C1e15b7459468dc79542fc656b7a9fa2 Madalyn @Madalyn - about 5 years ago
The Death of Caesar | History Today
A huddle of conspirators walks away from the lifeless, bloodied body of Julius Caesar, having stabbed the great Roman general and statesman 23 times on the Ides, or 15th, of March, 44 BC.Caesar had recently been declared dictator perpetuo by a Senate fearful of its rumour...continued
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A6c0c46e61817f7ae594dd513e06b21d Elliott @Elliott - about 3 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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B2e1b8b378e5e7660ec2a2923ad69789 Marlon @Marlon - almost 3 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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422f200971248def7ffc1673a54fa3cb Grayce @Grayce - over 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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70753e5e348bf454161ee0bcc63fed8d Juliet @Juliet - almost 3 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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1a4d3a462311ba36d913731c2e16402c 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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25dc49998970e9ad413d98493dfe5d6c Teagan @Teagan - over 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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6b970372434ca9c9def5abb121107916 Rex @Rex - over 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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