History
Anything to do with History
Patrick
@Patrick -
8 days ago
Fear, Friendship and the Channel Tunnel
At 8.23am on the morning of 14 November 1994, crowds cheered as the first Eurostar train carrying fare-paying passengers under the English Channel left London’s Waterloo Station. Its journey was punctuated by cheers from those on board as the train entered the tunnel at F...continued
8 minutes read
Madalyn
@Madalyn -
almost 3 years ago
The Roma Holocaust | History Today
Robert Ritter, head of the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit of Nazi Germany’s Criminal Police, conducting an interview with a Romani woman, 1936 © Galerie Bilderwelt/Hulton Getty Images. In 1944, I was deported to the concentration camp in Terezín, whe...continued
18 minutes read
Kraig
@Kraig -
over 5 years ago
Doctoring the Ladies | History Today
One might assume that an account of how 18th-century women participated in the life of the English universities (at that point restricted to Oxford and Cambridge) would be a very short one. After all, women’s colleges only began to open their doors at end of the Victorian...continued
18 minutes read
Assunta
@Assunta -
about 1 year ago
Why Egypt Went to War in 1973
Anwar Sadat raises the Egyptian flag over Sinai, 26 May 1979. William Karel/Getty Images.Fifty years ago, on 6 October 1973, 32,000 Egyptian soldiers crossed the Suez Canal to hoist Egypt’s flag over the Sinai Peninsula, following six years of Israeli occupation. The surp...continued
17 minutes read
Izaiah
@Izaiah -
almost 2 years ago
Heirs and Spares | History Today
Louis XIV and his brother Philippe d’Orléans with their governess, the marquise de Lansac, French, 1643 © Akg-images.Rumours flew across Paris in the summer of 1658 that the 19-year-old Louis XIV was seriously ill, perhaps near death. Senior courtiers rushed to form a new...continued
18 minutes read
Raoul
@Raoul -
almost 5 years ago
Removing That Little Knot | History Today
Using chloroform, scissors and a hot iron, the surgeon Isaac Baker Brown sought to cure the nervous conditions and emotional disorders of middle- and upper-class Victorian women. At his clinic in Notting Hill, west London, he excised the clitoris, an operation in which he...continued
18 minutes read
Eleanora
@Eleanora -
about 5 years ago
Empire and Celebrity | History Today
On 7 November 1777, a letter in the London Morning Post described a ‘strange monster’ being driven in a phaeton along Fleet Street. Notwithstanding the creature cannot be old; its eyes looked something like those of a dead cod, – its mouth rather large, and it grinned not...continued
17 minutes read
Nelson
@Nelson -
about 5 years ago
Beyond Bletchley: GCHQ and British Intelligence
This year, the UK’s signals intelligence, cyber and security agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), marks its centenary. Formed in 1919, GCHQ – the largest, yet least understood, of Britain’s intelligence agencies – has been at the forefront of securit...continued
17 minutes read
George
@George -
almost 5 years ago
Misery in the Head | History Today
Migraine affects one in seven of the world’s population – approximately a billion people. The World Health Organisation calculates it to be the seventh most disabling among all global diseases, more prevalent than diabetes, epilepsy and asthma combined. Virtually everyone...continued
17 minutes read
Minnie
@Minnie -
over 1 year ago
The King Who Wasn't There
Prester John on his throne in Ethiopia, from a map of East Africa in the Queen Mary Atlas, by Diogo Homem, Portuguese, 1558. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images.Early in 1145, worried about the growing threat of Muslim forces intent on reconqueri...continued
14 minutes read
Alvah
@Alvah -
about 5 years ago
Beyond Good and Evil | History Today
It was not the front, but the journey to the front that was the worst: ‘There was some shit in people’s pants, I tell you.’ Two years into the war, Otto Dix had seen it all. In 1914 he had signed up enthusiastically to the field artillery. Back then, people had assumed th...continued
17 minutes read
Garnet
@Garnet -
about 2 years ago
‘The Vote is of the People’
The MCP’s Livro de Leitura para Adultos, 1960s. Courtesy of Courtney J. Campbell.In 1960 Norma Porto Carreiro and Germano Coelho – a couple from the northeastern state of Pernambuco – created a social movement designed to teach Brazil’s poorest people to read. The Popular...continued
15 minutes read
Sandrine
@Sandrine -
over 5 years ago
Life on the Mississippi | History Today
For over 2,000 miles, the Mississippi River snakes through the heart of America along the course it has followed more or less since the last Ice Age, drawing in most of the water between the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains. It is a contrary river, too, shifting its delta ...continued
16 minutes read
Ryleigh
@Ryleigh -
12 months ago
Best New History Books of 2023
‘This is how economic history should be done’Peter Brown is Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Emeritus at Princeton University and author of Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton, 2023)Meticulously researched and written with flair, Ekaterina Pr...continued
11 minutes read
Geovany
@Geovany -
over 4 years ago
The Great Rabbit Hoax | History Today
On a Friday two weeks before Christmas 1726 news reached Exeter of a curious theatrical performance which had taken place in London the previous Saturday night, on 10 December. An Exeter newspaper reported that, at the end of the main play at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields thea...continued
15 minutes read
Casper
@Casper -
over 1 year ago
Friends to Friends, Enemies to Enemies
The Battle of Nájera, fought by King Peter against Henry Trastámara, 3 April 1367, from a 15th-century manuscript of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles. Bridgeman Images.The allure of the alliance shows no sign of abating. In recent years we have NATO’s collective support for Uk...continued
13 minutes read
Grayce
@Grayce -
almost 5 years ago
Books of the Year 2019
Toby Green As questions of colonial history and identity become central to framing debate, Jonny Pitts’ Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (Allen Lane) is a must read. A personal, humane and searingly insightful journey through African communities in Europe, this book is t...continued
11 minutes read
Rahsaan
@Rahsaan -
almost 2 years ago
Books of the Year 2022
This article contains affiliate links to bookshop.org: we may earn a commission on these, or you can choose to support your local bookshop.‘Tracing colonial officials who left utterly dislocated societies in their wake’R.J.B. Bosworth, Author of Politics, Murder and Love ...continued
9 minutes read
Americo
@Americo -
about 5 years ago
In Praise of Older Women
Sex is not just the preserve of the young. Large-scale studies of 18th-century sexuality have not, however, been attuned to this fact and have positioned young people at the centre of historical narratives which claim to speak for ‘society’ at large. This lack of historio...continued
11 minutes read
Elliott
@Elliott -
about 2 years ago
Knobs or Points? | History Today
Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, by Benjamin West, c.1816. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.Like all long-awaited events, Benjamin Wilson’s big day arrived at last. After years of bitter in-fighting, in 1777 the fashionable artist staged a spe...continued
11 minutes read
Angus
@Angus -
almost 3 years ago
Books of the Year 2021
This article contains affiliate links to bookshop.org: we may earn a commission on these, or you can choose to support your local bookshop.‘Previously invisible threads of causality and consequence’Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor ...continued
9 minutes read
Madalyn
@Madalyn -
about 1 year ago
Old English Names: Cæd, Bæd and Dangerous to Know
Saint Guthlac being tormented by demons, the Life of Saint Guthlac, Crowland, Lincolnshire, 1175-1215. Guthlac’s name represented a shift away from older naming conventions towards a recognisably English one. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images.I...continued
11 minutes read
Liliane
@Liliane -
over 1 year ago
Glory or Gravity? | History Today
‘Newton after William Blake’, statue by Eduardo Paolozzi, London, 1995. Photo: Wikimedia/Creative Commons/British Library.Thanks to funding from the football pools, Eduardo Paolozzi’s massive bronze statue of Isaac Newton looms over the courtyard of the British Library. S...continued
11 minutes read
Hannah
@Hannah -
almost 3 years ago
The Rise of the Newts
Cover for War with the Newts, c.1940. Alamy.When Mr Povondra’s son spots a newt in the River Vlatava, he knows that the end is nigh. Soon, what remains of Europe will sink beneath the waves and his beloved Czechoslovakia will be no more. Povondra’s only hope is that his c...continued
11 minutes read
Wilmer
@Wilmer -
about 12 hours ago
Why Do Religions Decline? | History Today
‘Subjects followed their rulers, leaving no trace of spiritual agonies over the religious revolution’Diarmaid MacCulloch is author of Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (Allen Lane, 2024)The apparently simple word religion describes myriad beliefs, a...continued
8 minutes read