History
Anything to do with History
Jeffrey
@Jeffrey -
over 4 years ago
White Gold | History Today
‘I am not yet so infected with the contagion of China-fancy’, wrote Samuel Johnson in a letter in September 1777, ‘as to like any thing at that rate which can so easily be broken’. At the time, the craze for Chinese export porcelain – ceramics mass-produced in China for f...continued
5 minutes read
Cameron
@Cameron -
about 5 years ago
Lewis Namier's Unfinished Business | History Today
Some biographies approach in style the character of their subjects. It is true of this biography of Lewis Namier, a leading British historian of the mid-20th century. David Hayton on Namier, like Namier, is precise, yet ready to wield an ethical pen: wide ranging, but abl...continued
5 minutes read
Alexandro
@Alexandro -
almost 2 years ago
Powerful Inversion | History Today
Yanktonai, Nakota, Sioux buckskin shirt for a chief’s war dress, collected at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, 19th century. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum/Creative Commons.Big, successful popular histories generally tell their audience something they would like to hear. This one is n...continued
4 minutes read
Maida
@Maida -
about 2 years ago
Second the Best | History Today
Black Sabbath, 1970. Bridgeman Images.Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery was home to an exhibition in 2019 far removed from the Pre-Raphaelite paintings and Victorian tea rooms for which it is famous. Black Sabbath: 50 Years celebrated the once derided, now lauded, quartet...continued
5 minutes read
Patrick
@Patrick -
about 5 years ago
The Primogeniture Blues | History Today
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a younger son in possession of no fortune must be in want of a job, so Jane Austen might have written. This book is a fascinating study of the effects of the British tradition of primogeniture on Regency society, which ruled tha...continued
5 minutes read
Hannah
@Hannah -
over 1 year ago
Bombs for Peace | History Today
Lee A. Merlin is crowned Miss Atomic Bomb, Las Vegas, 1950. Prismatic Pictures/Bridgeman ImagesIn 1969, North Yorkshire was unknowingly under siege. The market towns of Pickering and Whitby faced a looming existential threat: a nuclear bomb. Due to be detonated in North Y...continued
5 minutes read
Hank
@Hank -
over 4 years ago
A Painting Tells a Thousand Words
The naval battle of La Hogue is not much remembered now, but Winston Churchill described it as ‘the 17th-century Trafalgar’. Had the French defeated the Royal Navy, the exiled James II – who watched from the French shore – may well have reclaimed his throne, undone the ‘G...continued
5 minutes read
Marjory
@Marjory -
over 2 years ago
Bad Dreams | History Today
Detail of a map of Aberfan shown at the inquest, depicting the extent of the spoil spill. Ordnance Survey/Wiki Commons.At quarter past nine on the morning of 21 October 1966, teachers were settling their pupils down for the day’s lessons at Pantglas Junior School in the W...continued
5 minutes read
Emmie
@Emmie -
almost 2 years ago
Horror for Horror | History Today
Lieutenant Robert R Rogers and Erich Pinkau from the German criminal police inspect the Konsum-Genossenschaftsbäckerei bakery in Nuremberg, 1946. Wiki Commons.Nakam is the Hebrew for ‘revenge’, and the 50 men and women who planned mass poisonings of Germans in the immedia...continued
5 minutes read
Marie
@Marie -
over 2 years ago
Mare Nostrum? | History Today
View of the Italian peninsula looking south from the Alps, 19th century. Bridgeman Images.For Fernand Braudel, the Mediterranean’s most famous biographer, the Adriatic was ‘perhaps the most unified of all the regions of the Mediterranean Sea’. But it still posed ‘all the ...continued
5 minutes read
Abbie
@Abbie -
over 1 year ago
Hot Gossip | History Today
D.W. Griffith, c.1918 © Granger/Bridgeman Images.‘This is the true story of Hollywood. The most cruel, most despicable town in the world.’ That’s the opinion of Ridgeway Callow, who worked as assistant director on dozens of Hollywood films and TV programmes, writer and pr...continued
5 minutes read
Rose
@Rose -
over 4 years ago
Around the Other Pond | History Today
As historical postscripts go, it is difficult to beat the last years of Hannibal of Carthage. After drenching Apulian farmland with Roman blood at Cannae, then suffering defeat in his African homeland at Zama in 202 BC, Rome’s arch nemesis fled east, where he found a meas...continued
5 minutes read
Torey
@Torey -
almost 2 years ago
Why Europe? Y. Pestis? | History Today
The Triumph of Death, by Pieter Bruegel, 1526 © Antiquarian Images/Alamy Stock Photo.The Black Death is back in fashion. At the turn of the 21st century, Anglophone historians tended to downplay its impact, which first hit Europe in the winter of 1347-48 and recurred freq...continued
5 minutes read
Muriel
@Muriel -
about 2 years ago
New Heights | History Today
Detail from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Bridgeman Images.The Sistine Chapel is the most important sacred space of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, where the College of Cardinals meets to elect each new pope. Its dimensions reflect those of Solomon’s lost temple...continued
4 minutes read
Kristina
@Kristina -
over 3 years ago
A Radical Pocket Book | History Today
Picture the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War-era executive order that changed the legal status of enslaved African Americans in secessionist states, and you might imagine a large broadside, perhaps nailed to a tree or held aloft by Abraham Lincoln. But one of the ...continued
4 minutes read
Americo
@Americo -
about 2 years ago
Appease Yourself | History Today
David Lloyd George meets Adolf Hitler at the Berghof, 1936. Bridgeman Images.Like much else, the Russo-Ukrainian war and its build-up have drawn comparisons with the Nazi period. With other historical analogies seemingly lacking, some have cast 1989 and the subsequent col...continued
5 minutes read
Dayton
@Dayton -
almost 2 years ago
Classical Dinosaur | History Today
Bust of Marcus Licinius Crassus, fifth century AD. Bridgeman Images.Shakespeare gave us an abiding image of Caesar. Pompey promoted himself as the second coming of Alexander the Great. But when it comes to the mysterious third man who pulled the strings and turned the gea...continued
4 minutes read
Americo
@Americo -
almost 2 years ago
No Silver Bullet | History Today
Citadelle Laferrière, c.1963 © Granger/Bridgeman Images.The life of Henry Christophe – King of Haiti from 1811 until his death in 1820 – is crying out for a modern dramatisation. It follows a steep and spectacular arc, intersecting with explosive historical events. Paul C...continued
5 minutes read
Jarod
@Jarod -
almost 2 years ago
Are you Experienced? | History Today
The Wife of Bath, the Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, c.1410 © Granger/Bridgeman Images.Gap-toothed and garrulous, the Wife of Bath is probably the most memorable of the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. As Marion Turner shows in this ‘biography’...continued
5 minutes read
Bobby
@Bobby -
over 2 years ago
Cuban Perestroika | History Today
Revolutionary mural, Havana, 20th century. Bridgeman Images.In 2010 Fidel Castro told a US journalist: ‘The [Cuban] model doesn’t even work for us anymore.’ Castro, who had retired two years earlier, was admitting that the government needed to loosen its strict control ov...continued
4 minutes read
Dayton
@Dayton -
about 2 years ago
Easy as ABC | History Today
A fragment of text inscribed on the Mesha Stele, c.840 BC. Louvre/Wiki Commons.Few technologies are as important to our daily lives as the alphabet. But, as Johanna Drucker argues, we rarely give its history any thought at all. Despite its title, her book is not about the...continued
5 minutes read
Izaiah
@Izaiah -
over 2 years ago
The Underground Library | History Today
Book sale in the Łódź Ghetto, 1940 © Collection Walter Genewein/akg-images.When the Nazis occupied Warsaw in September 1939, anti-Jewish laws were immediately promulgated. Among them were laws limiting access to books. Lending libraries were closed in the Jewish quarter a...continued
4 minutes read
Hannah
@Hannah -
over 4 years ago
In the Eye of the Voter
American political consultants have a dictum: ‘Washington is Hollywood for the ugly.’ It’s funny and it points to an important similarity between the two towns: in politics, as in entertainment, appearances matter. That’s why – whether campaigning or governing – politici...continued
5 minutes read
Josiah
@Josiah -
over 2 years ago
Behind Closed Doors | History Today
Mrs William Morris in a Blue Silk Dress, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1868. Bridgeman.The marriage of William Morris, designer-businessman, and Jane Burden, stableman’s uneducated daughter, has long been the subject of curiosity. Not so much for its cross-class features, wh...continued
4 minutes read
Juliet
@Juliet -
over 4 years ago
Class Dismissed | History Today
The Classics have never escaped the tyranny of their name. Originally used by the Roman antiquarian Aulus Gellius to refer to the best grouping (classis) of Latin authors, ‘classical’ literature has always flaunted supreme confidence in its canon. While most societies una...continued
4 minutes read