History
Anything to do with History
Leda
@Leda -
almost 5 years ago
A Usable Past | History Today
On Saturday 16 August 1919 a centenary procession formed at Albert Square in central Manchester. Marchers held banners aloft in the afternoon sun. ‘Labour is the Source of All Wealth’, said one; another ‘Peterloo, 1819: Labourloo, 1919’. Processing south, the crowd headed...continued
6 minutes read
Rowan
@Rowan -
about 2 years ago
A Shared Culture | History Today
German postcard depicting the German-leased area of Qingdao, 1914 © akg-images.Although the German colonial period was relatively short, beginning in the early 1880s and ending with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, German colonialism shared many characteristics with othe...continued
6 minutes read
Arvid
@Arvid -
about 1 year ago
Empire in the Everyday | History Today
A woman raises silkworms, Korea, early 20th century. Japanese postcard produced to showcase the changes to agriculture under colonial rule. National Folk Museum of KoreaIn 1919, the Korean gentleman farmer Yu Yŏnghŭi (1890-1960) wrote in his diary: Fourth month, eighth da...continued
6 minutes read
Elliott
@Elliott -
over 4 years ago
Policing the Windrush Generation | History Today
On 2 June 1959, a meeting was held in the office of the Home Secretary, R.A. Butler, to discuss the anti-black rioting in Notting Hill the previous summer. Yet, rather than focusing on the white thugs who had perpetrated the violence, the participants discussed what they ...continued
6 minutes read
Nestor
@Nestor -
over 2 years ago
All Too Graphic | History Today
Brothers in arms?: a British soldier lights a cigarette for a Dyak colleague, Malaya, 1950 © Haywood Magee/Getty Images.On 28 April 1952 a photograph of a British soldier exhibiting the head of an alleged communist insurgent was published on the front page of the Daily Wo...continued
6 minutes read
Jimmy
@Jimmy -
over 2 years ago
The Young Crusaders | History Today
Boy Scouts in Barnet, 1930. Hulton Getty Images.The doors of the Queen’s Hall, London, opened at 7.15pm on 16 April 1930. The evening featured a performance from Ambrose’s band – the largest jazz band in the country, with 33 musicians – as well as ‘up to the minute’ commu...continued
6 minutes read
Bobby
@Bobby -
over 3 years ago
The Case of the Cursed Charter
In a report for the Archaeological Survey of Ceylon from 1949, the epigraphist Senarath Paranavitana announced the discovery of the ‘most valuable historical document that Ceylon possesses – the oldest known Sinhalese copper-plate charter’. With this announcement, Parana...continued
6 minutes read
Adelia
@Adelia -
over 4 years ago
The Beard Maketh the Man
The stereotypical image of a Renaissance man wears a ruff, a doublet and hose perhaps, and, very probably, a beard. And with good reason. The 16th and early 17th centuries saw a remarkable and ubiquitous fashion for facial hair among men. Physicians wrote about them, Prot...continued
6 minutes read
Eleanora
@Eleanora -
8 months ago
Vladimir Putin the Historian
St. Vladimir of Kiev/Volodymyr of Kyiv on the Millennium of Russia monument in Veliky Novgorod, 2010. Дар Ветер (CC BY-SA 3.0)How many contemporary political leaders invoke early medieval history to justify their policies? My hunch is only one.In a much cited but, I suspe...continued
6 minutes read
Minnie
@Minnie -
over 1 year ago
Vile Verse and Desperate Doggerel
William McGonagall, 19th century © GL Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.Despite his long-running status as ‘the worst poet in history’, William McGonagall has hardly lacked appreciation in literary culture since his death in 1902. Raised in Dundee by a working-class family with d...continued
6 minutes read
Elvie
@Elvie -
almost 5 years ago
Native America: A New Narrative?
David Treuer’s new book reaches the reader garlanded in praise from the world’s most revered arbiters of taste. It is a New York Times bestseller; the paper admires the way it ‘suggests the need for soul-searching’. Vanity Fair likes its ‘hopeful vision of the past and fu...continued
6 minutes read
Ezequiel
@Ezequiel -
about 2 years ago
The Other Boat Race | History Today
The Oxford College Servants’ Rowing Club beating Cambridge College Servants’ Rowing Club, 25 August 1926 © River & Rowing Museum, Henley on Thames, UK On 18 July 1850, a Thursday evening, domestic staff from Oxford and Cambridge universities sat down to dinner togeth...continued
6 minutes read
Sandrine
@Sandrine -
9 months ago
‘Wahhābism’ by Cole M. Bunzel review
King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and President Franklin D. Roosevelt converse on the deck of a U.S. warship in the Great Bitter Lake near Cairo, 14 February 1945. Ibn Saud ruled in accordance with Wahhābist ideology. Library of Congress. Public Domain.Fifty years on, it is s...continued
6 minutes read
Grayce
@Grayce -
6 months ago
The Yellow Trade in Counterfeit Coins
British overseas trade boomed during the 18th century. ‘There was never from the earliest ages a time in which trade so much engaged the attention of mankind’, declared Samuel Johnson in 1756. This was especially true of trade with Britain’s rapidly expanding colonial pos...continued
6 minutes read
Patrick
@Patrick -
8 months ago
‘A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65’ by David Kynaston review
British rock group the Rolling Stones arrive in Norway, 1965. Arkivverket (National Archives of Norway). Public Domain.Since the 1990s three historians have entered the race to document as thickly as possible the postwar history of Britain. Peter Hennessy was the first st...continued
6 minutes read
Erik
@Erik -
over 4 years ago
How Not to Prepare for Nuclear War
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Protect and Survive, the UK Home Office’s guide to surviving nuclear attack, being made available to the public. The embodiment of a government communications campaign gone wrong, the booklet has become a grim touchstone of British ...continued
6 minutes read
Elaina
@Elaina -
10 months ago
Checkin In: The Red Hotel by Alan Philips
The Red Hotel, Russia, c.1905. Wikimedia Commons‘In 1941 two characteristic traits of the Metropol’s history – its louche reputation and its role as a place to hoodwink influential foreigners – came together in its role as the wartime press centre’, Alan Philps tells the ...continued
6 minutes read
Zetta
@Zetta -
about 4 years ago
The Sauce of the Middle Ages
If the name Charles Dyson Perrins strikes a chord of recognition today, it is probably in connection with the Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce developed by his grandfather, which helped create the family’s fortune. In Worcestershire, Perrins’ name remains associated...continued
6 minutes read
Rose
@Rose -
9 months ago
‘Jane Eyre’ Goes to the Theatre
Minor house: the Victoria theatre in 1826, 22 years before Jane Eyre was staged and known at this date as the Coburg. The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman ImagesIn February 1848, Currer Bell wrote to her publishers in London. The author of Jane Eyre had learned of its produ...continued
5 minutes read
Dayton
@Dayton -
6 months ago
‘The Revolutionary Temper’ by Robert Darnton review
Throwing shade: Camille Desmoulins speaks at the Palais-Royal on 12 July 1789, two days before the taking of the Bastille, by Jean-Louis Prieur, c.1790. Alamy Stock Photo.The Tree of Cracow was a huge chestnut tree that stood in the northern part of the gardens of the Pa...continued
6 minutes read
Joe
@Joe -
2 months ago
The US Treasury’s Money Laundering Machine
In 1910, in the basement of the US Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing, a cacophonous and cumbersome money laundering machine was installed to solve the issue of deteriorating paper money. Instead of sending thousands of soiled dollar bills to th...continued
5 minutes read
Garnet
@Garnet -
over 1 year ago
Words and Deeds | History Today
Muhammad is visited by the Archangel Gabriel at Al-Masjid an-Nabawi, the Prophet’s Mosque, Medina. Turkish, 18th century. AISA/Bridgeman Images.In 1988 the publication of The Satanic Verses, a novel by the Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie, propelled an obscure an...continued
6 minutes read
Abbie
@Abbie -
over 4 years ago
The Unravelling of Sino-Japanese Relations
Ezra Vogel’s China and Japan, it is fair to say, is more than just the definitive book on Asia’s two great powers, the relationship between which he describes as ‘tense, dangerous, deep and complicated’. For Vogel, one of the pre-eminent scholars of east Asia for decades,...continued
6 minutes read
Rose
@Rose -
8 months ago
‘Backbone of the Nation’ by Robert Gildea review
Musicians the Flying Pickets join a picket line at Drax Power Station, North Yorkshire, in 1984. Virgil Lucky (CC BY-SA 4.0).In the UK, May and June 2022 were officially a ‘hot strike summer’, in which the context of the country’s cost of living crisis generated popular s...continued
6 minutes read
Mariano
@Mariano -
9 months ago
‘Plato of Athens’ by Robin Waterfield review
Head of the Greek philosopher Plato, worked for insertion into a Roman statue, mid-3rd century A.D. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California. Public Domain.Plato was so devoted to the memory of his teacher Socrates, who in his view had been unjustly ...continued
6 minutes read