History
Anything to do with History
Emmie
@Emmie -
about 1 year ago
Power and Populism in Ancient Greek Courts
A rule of all modern constitutions is that courts should remain apolitical. In reality, however, separation of powers is an ideal, not a fact. Trials should not be popularity contests, nor should elections be litigated – but this can be a hard separation to achieve. While...continued
6 minutes read
Elvie
@Elvie -
about 5 years ago
Who’s Afraid of the Jazz Monsters?
Moral panic in 1920s’ America was expressed in headlines such as one from the Kansas City Kansan of 16 January 1922 that trumpeted the perils of ‘Vampires, Jazz, Joyrides [and] Turkish Immorality’. While ‘vamps’, motorcars and Eastern influences were favourite targets of ...continued
6 minutes read
Roger
@Roger -
almost 3 years ago
Britannia’s Black Spartacus | History Today
Toussaint Louverture, 19th-century engraving. Alamy.In June 1846, 13 years after slavery in the British Empire had been outlawed, and just at the moment when the Sugar Duties Act removed protective tariffs for plantation owners in British colonial possessions in the West ...continued
6 minutes read
Rex
@Rex -
over 2 years ago
We are Family | History Today
Louis IX carrying the Sceptre and the Hand of Justice, from Registre des Ordonnances de L’Hotel du Roi, c.1320. Bridgeman Images.Late in August 1179 the king of France, Louis VII, crossed the Channel and landed at Dover. There he was met by Henry II, the man now married t...continued
6 minutes read
Juliet
@Juliet -
over 1 year ago
Man Down
A British military map-reading class in Egypt, November 18th, 1941. Library of Congress. Public Domain.I was 14 when I began to notice that my relationship with war stories had a different bent from those of my male relatives. My fascination with uncontroversial classics ...continued
6 minutes read
Ryleigh
@Ryleigh -
about 1 year ago
‘Hunting the Falcon’ by John Guy and Julia Fox review
‘The Courtship of Anne Boleyn’ by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, c. 1846. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Public Domain.The life of Anne Boleyn life was utterly remarkable, but it was not destined to be so. Initially the future queen seemed set for a conventional life as an up...continued
6 minutes read
Meggie
@Meggie -
over 2 years ago
Upon Clouded Hills | History Today
Queen Elizabeth as ‘Jerusalem’ is sung at the AGM of the Women’s Institute, Albert Hall, May 1946. Shutterstock.‘Jerusalem’, the poem written by William Blake which was set to music by Charles Hubert Parry during the First World War, is usually assumed to be one of the mo...continued
6 minutes read
Myles
@Myles -
about 1 year ago
‘The Weimar Years’ by Frank McDonough review
Couples dancing in Weimar Republic Berlin by photographer Erich Salomon, c. 1930. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Public Domain.Who – or what – killed Weimar democracy? It’s an important question, without as obvious an answer as we might think. In The Weimar Years ...continued
5 minutes read
Jaydon
@Jaydon -
8 months ago
Political Graffiti in Georgian Britain
In December 1731 an anonymous author was preparing for the publication of the third edition of an odd little book that had already taken Britain by storm. The Merry thought, or Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany was a collection of graffiti – line after line transcribe...continued
6 minutes read
Wilmer
@Wilmer -
over 1 year ago
This Flammable Isle | History Today
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo.The Blazing World tells of how the people of England challenged the divine right of kings, toppled tyrants and rejected absolutism by resisting military mobilisation, petitioning and, where necessary, r...continued
6 minutes read
George
@George -
over 3 years ago
Zombies, Cannibals and Werewolves | History Today
Over the centuries, claims of cannibalism have been used repeatedly to justify slavery and imperialism. Indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans, it was said, were uncivilised and un-Christian people, whose savagery could be curbed only by European control.After the Atl...continued
6 minutes read
Hannah
@Hannah -
over 2 years ago
The Other 300 | History Today
19th-century drawing of the Battle of the Winwaed (655) between Mercia and Northumbria, by Patrick Nicolle © Look and Learn/Bridgeman Images.The Gododdin is a fascinating, but frustratingly elusive, piece of literature. Contained in an incomplete late 13th-century Welsh m...continued
5 minutes read
Erik
@Erik -
about 1 year ago
‘Psychonauts’ by Mike Jay review
Opium Smokers Served Fruit and Bread, c. 1750. blue-robed Sufi mystics, white-robed clerics, and nobles in Mughal India sit in various states of intoxication. The Cleveland Museum of Art (CC0 1.0). As early as the 1790s, doctors, scientists and other specialists sought to...continued
5 minutes read
Raoul
@Raoul -
11 days ago
The Death of Clive of India
In the days following the sudden death, aged 49, of Robert Clive – ‘Clive of India’ – on 22 November 1774, rumours as to how it had happened spread fast. Despite having previously received knowledge to the contrary, the writer Horace Walpole reported to the diplomat Sir H...continued
6 minutes read
Felicita
@Felicita -
about 5 years ago
Famine Within Reach | History Today
Between the winter of 1958 and the spring of 1961, it is variously estimated that between 16.5 and 45 million Chinese living in rural areas died of starvation and related illnesses, a cataclysm now known as the Great Famine. Its onset coincided with the start of Chairman ...continued
6 minutes read
Abbie
@Abbie -
over 1 year ago
Is Violence the Answer? | History Today
Demonstrators outside Leeds Crown Court on the first day of the trial of the Leeds Bonfire Night 12, June 1975. Photograph by Max Farrar © Max Farrer.‘We do not advocate unprovoked violence but if we are attacked then we are left with no alternative but to defend ourselve...continued
6 minutes read
Muriel
@Muriel -
over 1 year ago
‘Three Worlds’ by Avi Shlaim review
Jewish refugees in Iraq, April 1951. Wikimedia CommonsAvi Shlaim, a British historian of the Middle East, was forced to leave Baghdad with his family for Israel as a five-year-old by an Iraqi government that cared little for minorities. Some 110,000 Jews left Iraq in 1950...continued
6 minutes read
Rex
@Rex -
2 months ago
The Roman Catholic War on Wigs
A rather unusual petition from October 1716 is tucked away in the pope’s diocesan archives in the basilica of San Giovanni in Rome:Antonio Piervenanzi, parish priest of San Benedetto in Piscinola, has found himself in poor health since the month of September on account of...continued
5 minutes read
Cynthia
@Cynthia -
almost 5 years ago
Before the Mayflower | History Today
This year, the US looks back four centuries to an intrepid band of refugees making a perilous home in New England. The Mayflower pilgrims had been outlaws in England, members of an underground church known as the Brownists or Separatists. They believed church should be a ...continued
6 minutes read
Garnet
@Garnet -
over 5 years ago
Us and Them | History Today
In 1965 a new reservoir opened at Cwm Tryweryn in north-west Wales. It was created to provide Liverpool with water, but its construction involved the destruction of the Welsh-speaking village of Capel Celyn. The affair created significant ill-feeling and anger in Wales. A...continued
6 minutes read
Zackery
@Zackery -
over 1 year ago
No Edens | History Today
Mosaic depicting the Flood, Basilica di San Marco, Venice, 13th century. Bridgeman Images.There is a sense of achievement when you complete The Earth Transformed, which at times feels like reading the Testaments of the World, illustrated by the photographs of Sebastião Sa...continued
6 minutes read
Ericka
@Ericka -
over 1 year ago
Human Rites | History Today
A Block for the Wigs, by the caricaturist James Gillray, 1783. Wikimedia Commons.The Whig interpretation of history, wrote Herbert Butterfield in 1931, meant writing ‘to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification ...continued
5 minutes read
Kari
@Kari -
about 1 year ago
‘Homer and His Iliad’ by Robin Lane Fox review
Achilles tending to Patroclus’ wounds in a scene from Homer’s Iliad depicted on a vase, c. 500 BC. Altes Museum. Public Domain.Faced with a jumble of bewildering ruins, modern visitors to Hisarlik in northwest Turkey, the site of ancient Troy, may find themselves perplexe...continued
6 minutes read
Madalyn
@Madalyn -
over 4 years ago
Pause for Thought | History Today
Susan P. Mattern’s The Slow Moon Climbs opens with the 12th-century example of Hoelun, mother of Chinggis Khan, whose story is recounted in the The Secret History of the Mongols. Exiled and widowed, Hoelun and her seven children survived by cunning, plotting revenge and...continued
5 minutes read
Muriel
@Muriel -
over 2 years ago
An Acceptable Hero | History Today
Josephine Baker c.1930. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.On 30 November 2021 Josephine Baker, the African-American performer who took French citizenship, was inducted into the Pantheon. The Pantheon is France’s secular equivalent to Westminster Abbey, the hallowed home ...continued
5 minutes read