History

Anything to do with History

Jarod @Jarod - about 3 years ago

Inventor of Jigsaw Puzzle Dies

Thanks to lockdown, UK sales of jigsaw puzzles grew nearly 40 per cent in 2020 and are now worth £100 million. It’s a far cry from their humble origin in a printmaker’s shop off London’s Drury Lane.Children’s publishing emerged slowly across the 18th century. In the early...continued

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Moises @Moises - about 3 years ago

Discovery of the Periodic Table

It came to him in a dream, Dmitri Mendeleev told a friend. He hadn’t slept for three days worrying how to classify the elements. Exhausted, he fell asleep and the answer came.Sadly, this may not be true. To begin with, Mendeleev – born in Siberia in 1834 – had been think...continued

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Madalyn @Madalyn - about 2 years ago

Birth of an Ottoman Traveller

Evliya Çelebi was born in Istanbul on 25 March 1611. He is best known in the Anglophone world through the 19th-century translations of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall and, more recently, Robert Dankoff. His ten-volume Seyahatname is perhaps the longest piece of travel writing...continued

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Alexie @Alexie - about 3 years ago

The Edict of Thessalonica | History Today

Emperor Constantine the Great authorised Christianity across the Roman Empire in 313, but it was Theodosius I, half a century later, who put the brute force of the imperial state behind the faith.Policy had vacillated through the fourth century. The emperor Julian had bee...continued

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Manley @Manley - over 3 years ago

Baptism of Leo Africanus | History Today

For the first English translation of his most influential work, The Description of Africa, he is John Leo. His baptismal name was Joannes Leone de Medici, although he preferred its Arabic form, Yuhannah al-Asad. His birth name was al-Hasan Ibn Muhammad Ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan...continued

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Grayce @Grayce - over 3 years ago

Execution of a Feminist | History Today

The year before Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, another writer, Olympe de Gouges, published a comparable call for equality during the turmoil of revolutionary France.De Gouges’ Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, publishe...continued

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Madalyn @Madalyn - almost 3 years ago

The Battle of Cannae | History Today

By 216 BC, Hannibal’s Carthaginian army had already won victories against the Romans in the Second Punic War at Ticinus, Trebia and Lake Trasimene. But then came Cannae.According to Polybius, the Senate, terrified by Hannibal’s successes, sent eight legions against him. I...continued

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Angus @Angus - almost 2 years ago

France’s Kyivan Queen | History Today

Ukraine has been part of European history since before the Norman Conquest. Remarkably, in the middle of the 11th century, the queens of Norway, Hungary, France and Poland were all Kyivan Rus princesses. The first three were daughters of Yaroslav, Grand Prince of Kyiv and...continued

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Teagan @Teagan - over 3 years ago

The First Performance of ‘Silent Night’

Silent Night, or Stille Nacht in its original German, is one of the best known songs in the world, but few know anything of its authors.Its lyrics were written in 1816 by a somewhat loose-living Austrian priest named Joseph Mohr. On Christmas Eve 1818, Mohr – then at St N...continued

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Rex @Rex - over 2 years ago

Battle of Hastings | History Today

It is strange to think that after Harold died at Hastings the English crown might have gone to a man born in Hungary. Edgar Ætheling was the son of Edward, nephew of Edward the Confessor, who had been driven into distant exile by Cnut. ‘Ætheling’ was an honorific bestowed...continued

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Sandrine @Sandrine - 5 months ago

Saint Nicholas Becomes a Myth

Saint Nicholas was dead, to begin with. On 6 December 343, to be precise, in Myra, in present-day Turkey. But, as is the way with saints, death was no hindrance to miracles. Indeed it was an accelerator. Myrrh flowed from his tomb from the moment of interment. Solving pro...continued

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George @George - over 3 years ago

The Burning of a British Library

The British Library’s manuscript collection is founded on that amassed by the antiquarian Robert Cotton in the early 17th century. Gifted to the nation in 1701, it was stored at Essex House on the Strand for several years before safety concerns led it to be moved somewher...continued

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Marjory @Marjory - 16 days ago

Orkney’s Saga: the Islands between Kingdoms

In July 2023 the Orkney Islands, lying just off the northeast coast of Scotland, made headlines around the world after the local council voted to explore ‘alternative forms of governance’. One option under consideration, it was widely reported, was for Orkney to secede fr...continued

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Kari @Kari - over 3 years ago

Death of a Medieval Polymath

The visions began when Hildegard of Bingen was young – perhaps just three. The visions did not come in dreams or ecstatic states; ecstasy, she thought, was a defect. They came like a cloud of light inside her, on which forms and shadows moved while her eyes were open and ...continued

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Adelia @Adelia - 5 months ago

An Uyghur Chieftain in China’s Civil War

Taipei’s largest Muslim cemetery is in a residential neighbourhood not far from the central business district and the Taipei 101 skyscraper. Most of the headstones, with their golden Arabic script alongside Chinese characters, are well maintained, but just off the main ro...continued

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Webster @Webster - 4 months ago

A History of Phantom Pain

The 16th-century surgeon Ambroise Paré was used to difficult cases. Having honed his skills on the battlefields of his native France, he had seen many men lose arms and legs, and had pioneered new ways to treat and rehabilitate amputees. But in his long practice there was...continued

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Ericka @Ericka - about 2 months ago

How Mexico Fought Franco | History Today

In 1937 a boat carrying 450 Spanish children, aged between five and 15, docked at the sultry tropical port of Veracruz on Mexico’s Atlantic coast. The children – not, in most cases, orphans, but refugees whose families had sent them across the world to escape the civil wa...continued

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Assunta @Assunta - 5 months ago

The KGB After Stalin | History Today

In the years following Stalin’s death in March 1953, the Soviet Union changed. Relations with the US remained characterised by rivalry and mistrust, but were less openly hostile than before. Ties with Communist China shifted from declarations of eternal friendship to incr...continued

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Iva @Iva - 3 months ago

André Rigaud: Napoleon’s Man in Haiti

In 1893 the Black American playwright William Edgar Easton published Dessalines, a Dramatic Tale: A Single Chapter From Haiti’s History, a play about the Haitian Revolution. Ostensibly a biopic of independent Haiti’s founder General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the play promi...continued

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Maida @Maida - 4 months ago

The Search for the Historical Buddha

We are familiar with the story of the Indian prince who, in the fifth century BC, devoted his life to finding the solution to the problem of human suffering and to teaching others the path to freedom from it. And yet, remarkably, the story of the Buddha and the religion h...continued

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Jeffrey @Jeffrey - 6 months ago

The 50 Years that Made America

It was the evening of 16 December 1773. At Boston’s Old South Meeting House, more than 5,000 people awaited word from the governor of Massachusetts Bay, Thomas Hutchinson. Had the governor finally given in to their demand to send back to England the three ships laden with...continued

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Grayce @Grayce - almost 3 years ago

Et in Arcadia Ego | History Today

Three Sicilian shepherds and a woman gather around a tomb in Arcadia. An ancient district of Greece, made inaccessible by mountains, Arcadia has come to mean an unspoilt land populated by innocent rustics. It is the very exemplar of the pastoral, a word derived from the L...continued

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Dayton @Dayton - about 2 months ago

Spycraft and the Glorious Revolution

The events which led to the deposition of James II and VII in November 1688 were not deemed ‘Glorious’ at the time. Fears surrounding James’ Catholicism were exacerbated by the king’s personal blunders in promoting his religion in a strongly Protestant nation, by his poli...continued

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Elliott @Elliott - 6 months ago

Archbishop Wulfstan: England’s Forgotten Lawmaker

The meeting of England’s royal council at York on 16 February 1014 must have been a very glum affair. Ostensibly, its purpose was to consecrate a new bishop of London, yet none present could ignore the numerous catastrophes that had devastated the kingdom over the last te...continued

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Angus @Angus - 17 days ago

The Prophecies of Merlin | History Today

Prophecy is an inherent and integral part of medieval history; any book of history written in Western Europe during that period will almost certainly include some sort of prophetic content. The Bible, together with various pagan traditions of prophecy, provided the main s...continued

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