History

Anything to do with History

A83b4d2292ad0135445fc0a7644d14c3 Joe @Joe - about 3 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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F8901f0cff3b25b34627127dbc99fb89 Allene @Allene - over 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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192059156a7075f96be3d979645bdbcc Zackery @Zackery - almost 4 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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192059156a7075f96be3d979645bdbcc Zackery @Zackery - almost 3 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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7094e9deddcf03241ed9894017ba09bc Rose @Rose - almost 4 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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3fb9059c39d0a39c0a9f0cf17b7858fc Priscilla @Priscilla - about 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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7bcb1d07c0ef7a8d3ef21a145cb66a5c Giovanni @Giovanni - almost 4 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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1a914154cd263fa68f1b8d6529ef63dd Sandrine @Sandrine - almost 4 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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125f097c91a427394e6d36ae98c72376 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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3917a54ef2e71f0b2d57dd0d63e0f2fb Cameron @Cameron - about 4 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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96d2c0ccb7cce03f75db3297b9a8af04 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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367ec04c80b95de4cfdf036599b35350 Garnet @Garnet - over 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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62b830bbc5092803336a4f6bb9370281 Manley @Manley - 9 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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Abe69d7aacc9c6d89b2d1ff5e9ac6ef4 Hank @Hank - almost 3 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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394b4c0c4dd468b433ba43c77bdbb708 Bart @Bart - over 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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A83b4d2292ad0135445fc0a7644d14c3 Joe @Joe - over 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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F8901f0cff3b25b34627127dbc99fb89 Allene @Allene - over 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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56a34dc91390858efd1999c86a89c348 George @George - almost 3 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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367ec04c80b95de4cfdf036599b35350 Garnet @Garnet - over 3 years ago
There’s a World Out There
Both producers and consumers of history tend to divide roughly into two camps. There are those who seek to find the present in the past, using examples from history to confirm their current prejudices. And there are those  who engage with the past on its own terms, howeve...continued
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656f443bf945c1d489be8648db415f13 Cynthia @Cynthia - about 3 years ago
Lucy and Lucretius | History Today
Sometime in the 1650s Lucy Hutchinson began her verse translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, ‘On the Nature of the Universe’. Written in the first century bc, and rediscovered in 1417 by the Italian humanist Poggio Baracciolini, Lucretius’ masterpiece was a sensual, w...continued
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24f317f89bef5f8cefa430eec1cd2f6d Nestor @Nestor - over 3 years ago
Execution of the Tailor-King | History Today
Today, the spire of the church of St Lambert in Münster still has three unusual adornments: cages. They were first hung on 22 January 1536 to hold the mutilated bodies of Jan Bockelson and two other leaders of the Anabaptist sect that had ruled the north-west German city ...continued
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3c59b35923f7f5e6a11c533088a15138 Jessika @Jessika - almost 4 years ago
Birth of an Imperial Historian
Few, if any, historians have been so high born as Anna Komnene, eldest daughter of Byzantine emperor Alexios I, who came into the world on 1 December 1083.Alexios had seized the imperial throne and, on his death in 1118, Komnene herself plotted to take power instead of he...continued
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69ab36bf73ce82cc3579c8f2504f3bac Gregoria @Gregoria - about 3 years ago
Saint for All Seasons | History Today
James Comey, former director of the FBI, was questioned in June 2017 at a hearing of the US Senate Intelligence Committee by Senator Angus King. At issue was President Trump’s requests for Comey to drop an investigation into National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and his...continued
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725ac8c62bcc32f06195cf20b372a31a Muriel @Muriel - over 2 years ago
Medusa | History Today
The Greek myth of Perseus decapitating Medusa is probably over 3,000 years old. Although Medusa is first mentioned in Greek literature in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, it is the fuller narrative, as told in Hesiod’s Theogony, that is portrayed in this limestone metope – a re...continued
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37ec91099450fc2fc637c77e78953759 Anderson @Anderson - almost 3 years ago
Birth of ‘Typhoid Mary’ | History Today
The way George Soper told it, it might have been a case for Sherlock Holmes. ‘The typhoid epidemic that broke out in the summer home of Mr George Thompson at Oyster Bay was a puzzling affair’, he told the New York Times. It was 1906 and typhoid was rampant in the city; ne...continued
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