History
Anything to do with History
Jany
@Jany -
over 4 years ago
On the Home Front | History Today
In the summer of 1745, Jemima, Marchioness Grey – handsome, clever and rich – had very little to distress or vex her. Then 23 years old, she was mistress of Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, happily married into a rising political family and surrounded by a lively intellectual ...continued
6 minutes read
Oren
@Oren -
about 2 years ago
Women, Life, Freedom | History Today
Women protest during the Iranian Revolution, Tehran, 1978. Getty Images.On 16 September 2022 Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman from Saqqez in Iran’s Kurdistan Province, died in a Tehran hospital. Three days earlier she had been arrested by Iran’s Guidance Patrol, or ‘moral...continued
5 minutes read
Casper
@Casper -
over 1 year ago
Does History Have an Expiry Date?
Domesday Book, from Historic Byways and Highways of Old England, by William Andrews, 1900. Wikimedia Commons.Recently, I was instructed to revise the bibliography for a paper over which I had just assumed responsibility – on medieval British history. It is a tedious chore...continued
5 minutes read
Maureen
@Maureen -
over 4 years ago
A House Divided | History Today
Shortly after 10am on Sunday 4 April 1920, a cinematographer set up his camera near the entrance to the Christian suq inside Jerusalem’s walled Old City to film Muslim pilgrims gathering near the Jaffa Gate at the start of the festival of Nebi Musa. According to local leg...continued
5 minutes read
Bart
@Bart -
over 1 year ago
All Among the Watchtowers | History Today
The Berlin Wall, November 1989.Perhaps more than any former Eastern Bloc state, East Germany continues to exude a strange fascination for many. Images of the Berlin Wall with its barbed wire, watch towers and ‘death strip’, as well as stories of the all-seeing, all-knowin...continued
6 minutes read
Meggie
@Meggie -
over 5 years ago
A Painter Fit for a Queen
It is July 1571 and Elizabeth I is sitting for a portrait in ‘the open ally of a goodly garden’, almost certainly at Hampton Court. The portrait is ‘in little’ – what we would now call a watercolour miniature, although the latter term didn’t enter English until Sir Philip...continued
6 minutes read
Hulda
@Hulda -
about 2 years ago
For the Love of Manuscripts
A scribe (probably Bede) writing, from Life and Miracles of Saint Cuthbert by Bede, 12th century. Bridgeman Images.The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club is a logical sequel to Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (2016), in which he introduc...continued
5 minutes read
Kari
@Kari -
almost 5 years ago
Beyond Profit | History Today
The Dutch contribution to the transatlantic slave trade has long been thought to have marginal significance. But this depends on how one characterises significance. I suggest that the Dutch slave trade was not just significant, but crucial in shaping the transatlantic sla...continued
6 minutes read
Assunta
@Assunta -
over 4 years ago
Making Medieval Ireland English | History Today
In October 1171, Henry II of England landed at Waterford with an army, claiming to be ‘Lord of Ireland’ and changing forever the course of Irish history. Officially, Henry’s justification for invading Ireland was religious: the ‘reformation’ of the Irish church (although ...continued
6 minutes read
Grayce
@Grayce -
over 5 years ago
The Hitlers in Our Own Country
Martin Luther King delivered his celebrated ‘I Have a Dream’ speech on 28 August 1963 at the March on Washington. Less well known is that one of the other speakers that day was Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a political émigré who had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s. His presence at...continued
5 minutes read
Pablo
@Pablo -
over 4 years ago
Safe as Houses? | History Today
Seventy years ago, a government-appointed committee published a report into the future of Britain’s country house heritage. The report is not as well known as the other achievements of the 1945-51 Labour government, such as the creation of the National Health Service or t...continued
5 minutes read
Emmie
@Emmie -
over 4 years ago
Sink or Swim | History Today
In Thomas Shadwell’s play The Virtuoso (1676), the natural philosopher Sir Nicholas Gimcrack is discovered in his laboratory, lying flat on his belly, with a length of packthread clamped between his teeth. The thread terminates in a ligature around the lower parts of a fr...continued
6 minutes read
Elian
@Elian -
almost 4 years ago
Harold Moody’s Fight for Racial Equality
Despite his pioneering role in the struggle for racial equality and justice in Britain, Harold Moody remains relatively unknown. It is now 70 years since the publication of the last substantial biography of his life and career. Yet Moody’s story is significant, not least ...continued
5 minutes read
Immanuel
@Immanuel -
over 4 years ago
Breathing Easily | History Today
The ancient workplace was extremely hazardous, its conditions causing health problems from callouses and scars to permanent deformities or other, less immediately visible, issues, such as breathing problems. Despite the absence of the modern understanding of health and sa...continued
5 minutes read
Immanuel
@Immanuel -
over 2 years ago
The Baltic Question | History Today
Alexander Rittikh’s map of the Baltic provinces by confession, 1873. Courtesy National Library of Estonia.In 1873 Alexander Fedorovich Rittikh, one of the Russian Empire’s most eminent cartographers, published two maps of the Baltic provinces depicting the ethnographic an...continued
5 minutes read
Jarod
@Jarod -
over 1 year ago
Boudica Lite | History Today
Boudica depicted in John Cassell's Illustrated History of England, 1857.Duncan Mackay’s Echolands is difficult to summarise. The subtitle doesn’t really do it: the book is less about finding Boudica and more an exploration of the layers of material her escapades left behi...continued
6 minutes read
Iva
@Iva -
almost 3 years ago
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution | History Today
The second of the Sherlock Holmes novels, The Sign of Four, published in 1890, begins with the great detective unpacking a hypodermic syringe from its neat leather case, rolling up his sleeve and preparing to give himself an injection. ‘It is cocaine’, he says to the curi...continued
6 minutes read
Torey
@Torey -
over 4 years ago
Learning Arabic | History Today
When Oxford University’s Bodleian Library opened in 1602, its Arabic holdings amounted to a single copy of the Quran. A century and a half later, such was the reputation of Arabic at the university that a young Edward Gibbon, then an unhappy student at Magdalen, could c...continued
5 minutes read
Rose
@Rose -
over 2 years ago
Noisy Neighbour | History Today
Old St Paul's Cathedral, from Early Christian Architecture by Francis Bond. Wiki Commons.St Paul’s Cathedral is London’s premier church. Dedicated to the City’s patron saint, from its elevated position on Ludgate Hill it has been the focal point of the City of London sinc...continued
5 minutes read
Devin
@Devin -
11 months ago
The True Knights Templar | History Today
The way in which the Templars have been judged – and how they are currently portrayed – has been indelibly coloured by the way in which the order came to its end.That end came in October 1307. Appropriately enough, it was Friday the 13th. As Philip IV’s fears over the Tem...continued
5 minutes read
Wilmer
@Wilmer -
about 2 years ago
‘Contradiction on Stilts’ | History Today
The BOCHK Bank of China Building under construction, 1988. Wiki Commons/Matthew Laird Acred.‘We have to give Hong Kong and its way of life the best chance of continuing as a free city after the handover.’ So wrote Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, in h...continued
5 minutes read
Minnie
@Minnie -
over 1 year ago
Bardolatry | History Today
Othello weeping over Desdemona's body, by William Salter, c.1857. Wikimedia CommonsOn the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio, many a new book on the subject is to be expected. To stand out is not easy, but both these works succeed in doing so. This may be beca...continued
5 minutes read
Leda
@Leda -
over 5 years ago
Lost in Translation | History Today
In early May 2019, the Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono travelled to Moscow to meet with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, to settle an old score. To this day, the Pacific powers have never signed a peace treaty following the Second World War. May’s meeting built...continued
5 minutes read
George
@George -
over 1 year ago
Ready, Set, Show!
Promotional photograph of Edward Payson Weston, New York, c.1860. Transcendental Graphics/Getty ImagesIn January 1876 one of the most spectacular sporting celebrities of the Victorian age first set foot in Britain. Edward Payson Weston was an American athlete who had made...continued
5 minutes read
Josiah
@Josiah -
over 2 years ago
The War in Words | History Today
The Ringgold Light Artillery Battery of the Union Army on drill, c.1860 © Courtesy Brady National Photographic Art Gallery Washington DC.The American Civil War burned itself into the American identity as the Union and Confederacy fought across large swathes of the country...continued
5 minutes read