History
Anything to do with History
Minnie
@Minnie -
almost 2 years 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 -
over 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 -
over 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 -
about 1 year 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 -
12 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
Anderson
@Anderson -
about 1 month ago
The Ballad of the Inquisition’s Greatest Witch Trial
Like all legal institutions, the Spanish Inquisition recognised that justice needed not only to be done but also to be seen to be done. Its public judgments were solemn occasions, as befitted a religious body concerned with the salvation of souls. An auto de fe, or ‘act o...continued
6 minutes read
Patrick
@Patrick -
about 1 year 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 -
almost 5 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 -
over 1 year 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 -
over 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 -
about 1 year 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
Garnet
@Garnet -
about 2 years 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
Joe
@Joe -
8 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
Dayton
@Dayton -
about 1 year 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
Abbie
@Abbie -
about 5 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 -
about 1 year 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 -
about 1 year 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
Madalyn
@Madalyn -
almost 3 years ago
Love Is Dead | History Today
Photographs and autographs of Baroness Mary Vetsera and Crown Prince Rudolf, 19th century. Alamy.Two gunshots echoed from Mayerling hunting lodge in the early hours of 30 January 1889, sending shockwaves through the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Crown Prince Rudolf was found d...continued
6 minutes read
Maureen
@Maureen -
almost 3 years ago
Crossing Oceans | History Today
A clove tree, from Jacob van Maerlant’s Der naturen bloeme (The Flower of Nature), Flemish, early 14th century. British Library/Add MS 11390, f.79v.Considering their origins, cloves – dried blossom buds of a Southeast Asian tree, Syzygium aromaticum – appear remarkably fr...continued
6 minutes read
Muriel
@Muriel -
about 5 years ago
The End of British Communism
It is ironic that the closest communism came to establishing a mass movement in Britain was between 1935 and 1939, when its adherents abandoned revolutionism and emphasised the defence of bourgeois democracy. The policy attracted not the proletariat, but the left-wing int...continued
6 minutes read
Kraig
@Kraig -
about 2 years ago
This Great Stage of Fools
Study for King Lear (detail), 1897, by Edwin Austin Abbey. Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial Collection/Yale University Art Gallery.First aired in 2018, the HBO TV series Succession tells the story of Logan Roy, CEO of Waystar Royco, a vast media conglomerate. It begins with th...continued
6 minutes read
Anderson
@Anderson -
over 5 years ago
Our Graham Greene in Havana
In adolescence, Graham Greene found relief from ‘boredom’ by playing Russian roulette. In the 1950s, he sought distraction from his manic depression through multiple foreign trips to turbulent spots around the world. These trips provided the background to what critics hav...continued
6 minutes read
Allene
@Allene -
over 1 year ago
The Invention of Time
Joseph Priestley’s A New Chart of History, 1769. The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock PhotoFolded up, the heavy paper of Joseph Priestley’s 1785 timeline forms a cardboard-like wafer. It seems too slim to contain so much. The copy I studied was sewn into a book, sandwic...continued
6 minutes read
Maureen
@Maureen -
over 1 year ago
Toad Testicles, Foul-Beard and Broad-Arse
Edmund ‘Ironside’, from the Genealogical Chronicle of the English Kings, late 13th century © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images.If we were to visit Winchester in the latter years of the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042-66), we might have bumped...continued
6 minutes read
Abbie
@Abbie -
almost 3 years ago
Choosing Sides | History Today
The 8th Texas Cavalry Regiment, popularly known as ‘Terry’s Texas Rangers’, c.1861. Alamy.On the US Western frontier in 1861, a dangerous hodge-podge of competing political interests created a bloody contest six years before the shots on Fort Sumter split the North from ...continued
6 minutes read