History

Anything to do with History

422f200971248def7ffc1673a54fa3cb Grayce @Grayce - almost 4 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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C1e15b7459468dc79542fc656b7a9fa2 Madalyn @Madalyn - about 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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E5a600388a4be6ed5b515081737d8445 Angus @Angus - over 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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25dc49998970e9ad413d98493dfe5d6c 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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6b970372434ca9c9def5abb121107916 Rex @Rex - almost 3 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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1a914154cd263fa68f1b8d6529ef63dd Sandrine @Sandrine - 9 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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56a34dc91390858efd1999c86a89c348 George @George - almost 4 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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3830cba028d7333d81fee686fab573c8 Kari @Kari - almost 4 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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Cc9f6ece4882994c85a7dc0305a4b841 Marjory @Marjory - 5 months 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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0dc07c0d4e39afa6eb19dda76eb11879 Kristina @Kristina - 3 months ago
How the Lisbon Earthquake Shook the Enlightenment
On the morning of 1 November 1755, at around 9.30am, a violent earthquake devastated the capital of Portugal. It was the greatest cataclysm to have struck Western Europe. A series of tremors transformed Lisbon into a heap of ruins. A tsunami soon engulfed the riverbank wh...continued
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E156d09edb938373e3543d1b385a51d4 Felicita @Felicita - 3 months ago
Highwaymen: The Road to Infamy
To use the highway in 17th-century England was to risk armed robbery: highwaymen were endemic. As the century wore on, the public grew particularly concerned with the alarming number of dastardly robbers who would stop travellers on England’s roads and demand that they ‘s...continued
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0a3d7829480267a63997ae3c91bb2ebe Adelia @Adelia - 9 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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B4a2c9b63fd68a080a47d2a35293e167 Webster @Webster - 8 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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6232f8a636fcadbbec0b89d4f6ded6e2 Ericka @Ericka - 6 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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61d3ff630fa6a556085f59f9ba20938e Assunta @Assunta - 9 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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96d2c0ccb7cce03f75db3297b9a8af04 Iva @Iva - 7 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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F83221f06565aed5272a3e729d6efe18 Alexander @Alexander - 17 days ago
Gustav Vasa: The Father of Modern Sweden?
On 4 November 1520 Christian II of Denmark and Norway was crowned king of Sweden. In the decade preceding the coronation the so-called Kalmar Union, which since 1397 had joined the three kingdoms under a common monarchy, had been the cause of a series of rebellions raised...continued
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29d678841773a96cd144675798d50e70 Maida @Maida - 8 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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1f7b605070774dac8bb3c859143de9d2 Jeffrey @Jeffrey - 10 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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422f200971248def7ffc1673a54fa3cb Grayce @Grayce - over 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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151d593186e8e56663df3ed32962360f Dayton @Dayton - 6 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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A6c0c46e61817f7ae594dd513e06b21d Elliott @Elliott - 10 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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70753e5e348bf454161ee0bcc63fed8d Juliet @Juliet - 7 months ago
The Lost Tudor Domesday Book
New discoveries in the archives of Henry VIII’s reign are now rare. For years historians have searched behind and beyond the summaries in the calendars of state papers to reveal what their Victorian editors missed or prudishly preferred not to record. In the past decade t...continued
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B2ab4609b89b7e7c7408477bb01daf27 Jimmy @Jimmy - 6 months ago
The Capetians: Medieval France’s Greatest Dynasty
Sometime around the year 1015 a monk at the cathedral of Sens in northern France wrote a chronicle of the Frankish people. He was a little sketchy on the early centuries, though he knew that Charlemagne’s dynasty – the Carolingians – had taken the throne from their Merovi...continued
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E5a600388a4be6ed5b515081737d8445 Angus @Angus - 5 months 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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