History
Anything to do with History
Priscilla
@Priscilla -
over 2 years ago
A Worthy Cause? | History Today
At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 Mr Frederick Gonner Worth was a junior business partner in the wine merchants Messrs. Delattre and Worth. Based in Canon Street, he was responsible for the London side of the business, while his associate, Monsieur Delatt...continued
11 minutes read
Jimmy
@Jimmy -
over 2 years ago
Professor Ptthmllnsprts Versus Old Bones
Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley Inspecting a Water-Baby. Illustration by Linley Sambourne, from The Water-Babies, 1885. Alamy. Born into an illustrious scientific family, the future biologist Julian Huxley was a precocious child. At the age of five he came across a c...continued
11 minutes read
Adelia
@Adelia -
over 2 years ago
Caravaggio Lost at Sea | History Today
Self portrait by Louis Finson, 17th century. Jean Bernard/Bridgeman Images.In early July 1610 Caravaggio set sail from Naples, carrying several mysterious paintings. Some four years earlier he had been sentenced to death for killing a Roman nobleman in a duel and had been...continued
11 minutes read
Geovany
@Geovany -
over 1 year ago
Warsaw in Flames | History Today
Civilian prisoners captured during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 1943. Buyenlarge Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images.The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one of the events most readily associated with the history of the Holocaust, a focal point of Holocaust commemoration. Even as the wa...continued
10 minutes read
Zetta
@Zetta -
about 2 years ago
The Computer in the Aegean
Mechanism of Antikythera, Fragment C. National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Wiki Commons/Zde.In April 1900 a startled telegraph operator based in Athens decoded a signal reporting the discovery of a vast treasure trove beneath the Aegean Sea. Government authorities di...continued
10 minutes read
Sandrine
@Sandrine -
over 5 years ago
A Hidden Chapter: Women of the Klan
The Ku Klux Klan has entered popular memory as a sometimes menacing, sometimes almost comical, group of angry men, clad in white robes with hooded faces, setting crosses alight, or thundering through Reconstruction-era American towns on horseback. This image, however, fai...continued
11 minutes read
Erik
@Erik -
about 5 years ago
A History of Chop Suey
On the night of 14 June 1904, New York’s Chinatown was plunged into a deep gloom. For the past 20 years, it had thrived off the city’s seemingly insatiable appetite for chop suey. Every night, restaurants along Moot and Pell were thronged with sophisticates clamouring for...continued
11 minutes read
Kraig
@Kraig -
about 5 years ago
The Triumphs and Tragedies of Judicial Politics
The United Kingdom Supreme Court has delivered a hugely significant verdict, the consequences of which will reverberate throughout the nation’s political life for generations to come. With one legal stroke, the Justices, whose opinion was presented by Baroness Hale on Tue...continued
11 minutes read
Adelia
@Adelia -
almost 3 years ago
How Father Christmas Found his Reindeer
Illustration for Robert L. May’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, 1949 © Getty Images.When I was a child, I could never have imagined Santa Claus without his reindeer. They were as much a part of his character as his bushy white beard, his red coat, or his sack of present...continued
11 minutes read
Elody
@Elody -
about 2 years ago
No Laughing Matter | History Today
Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart, by Frans Hals, 1623. Bridgeman Images.In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1983), laughter is no laughing matter. Set in 1327, the story follows William of Baskerville as he investigates a series of mysterious deaths at a Benedictine mona...continued
10 minutes read
Angus
@Angus -
about 5 years ago
A History of Börek | History Today
During the reign of Sultan Mehmet IV (r. 1648-87), the Dîvân-ı Hümâyûn (imperial council) would meet every other morning in a domed chamber of the Topkapi Palace. When the Grand Vizier and his ministers had dealt with affairs of state, they would sit down to a magnificent...continued
11 minutes read
Alexander
@Alexander -
over 5 years ago
The History of the Barbecue
Lockhart, Texas has plenty of reasons to feel proud. With its unique collection of 19th-century buildings, it is one of the prettiest towns in Caldwell County – and a favourite of Hollywood producers. More than 50 films have been made there, from Baby, the Rain Must Fall ...continued
11 minutes read
Americo
@Americo -
over 2 years ago
The Battle of the Gauges
Cartoon by Angus Reach, 1845 © Lordprice Collection/Alamy.Queen Victoria was definitely not amused. Whenever she travelled from her estate on the Isle of Wight to her castle at Balmoral, she encountered the inconvenience of twice changing trains, once at Basingstoke and a...continued
10 minutes read
Marie
@Marie -
about 3 years ago
A Donkey’s Day in Court
The Trial of Bill Burns, by P. Mathews, 19th century. Alamy.There were gasps as the victim was led into court. Some laughed. Clerks whispered excitedly. The defendant, Bill Burns, was appalled. Putting his thumb to his nose, he blew a loud raspberry. But of the victim’s i...continued
11 minutes read
Jany
@Jany -
almost 2 years ago
Genes‘R’Us: Science and Ideology in the Lysenko Controversies
Trofim Lysenko measuring the growth of wheat on one of the kolkhoz fields near Odessa, Ukrainian SSR, c.1930s.Like many wealthy Americans in the first half of the 20th century, the self-made entrepreneur Roger Babson believed fervently in the power of genes. There are onl...continued
10 minutes read
Geovany
@Geovany -
almost 4 years ago
How did the Elephant get its Trunk?
‘In the High and Far off Times, the Elephant … had no trunk,’ wrote Rudyard Kipling. ‘He had just a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side.’ But there was one elephant’s child who was more curious than the rest. He wanted to ...continued
11 minutes read
Eleanora
@Eleanora -
over 3 years ago
Catullus and Lesbia’s Sparrow | History Today
No sparrow has provoked as much affection or controversy as that commemorated by the Roman poet Catullus (c.84-54 BC). The pet of an unnamed puella – presumably his beloved ‘Lesbia’ – the bird in question appears in two short verses, each written in charming hendecasyllab...continued
11 minutes read
Giovanni
@Giovanni -
over 2 years ago
Weighing up the Evidence | History Today
Map of the universe according to the theories of Tycho Brahe, from Andreas Cellarius' Harmonia Macrocosmica, 1660 © Granger/Bridgeman Images.It is one of the most famous quotations that was never said: Eppur si muove (And yet it moves). Galileo Galilei’s muttered protest ...continued
10 minutes read
Ryleigh
@Ryleigh -
almost 5 years ago
A History of Monkeys | History Today
In 1562, an etching by Pieter van der Heyden turned the Dutch art world upside down. Modelled after a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, it depicted a well-known folk story. In the middle of the scene, a peddler lies sleeping beneath a tree. As he is slumbering, howeve...continued
10 minutes read
Marjory
@Marjory -
about 4 years ago
Bats: Out of Hell? | History Today
What would vampires be without bats? In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), locus classicus of the modern vampire, the two were inextricably linked. With his ‘sharp, white teeth’, pointed ears, ‘highly-arched nostrils’ and cloak ‘spreading out around him like great wings’, the ...continued
11 minutes read
Cynthia
@Cynthia -
almost 2 years ago
Armless Fun? | History Today
The Venus de Milo at the Louvre Museum, Paris, 1964. Photo © Gamma-Keystone, France via Getty Images.On 8 April 1820 Olivier Voutier was digging on the Greek island of Milos (or Melos) when he spotted something extraordinary. A 23-year-old ensign in the French navy, he ha...continued
11 minutes read
Mariano
@Mariano -
almost 2 years ago
The ‘Lost’ Emperor? | History Today
One of the alleged Sponsian coins featuring a bust of the emperor Sponsian, depicted wearing a radiate crown, c.260-70 © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow.Carl Gustav Heraeus was not the sort of man who got excited easily. A stiff Swedish-born scholar, he had risen fro...continued
11 minutes read
Juliet
@Juliet -
over 3 years ago
Placing the Platypus | History Today
On 29 August 1884 William Hay Caldwell sent the most important telegram ever written about a platypus. Then just 25 years old, he had spent four months searching for its eggs on the banks of the Burnett River in North Queensland – with little success. After much splashing...continued
10 minutes read
Ericka
@Ericka -
over 3 years ago
Dolphins of the Belfiore | History Today
Calliope, missing Muse of epic poetry? Or a lost Venus? Detail of a painting by Cosimo Tura, c.1455-60, National Gallery, London © Bridgeman Images.In the mid-15th century, Ferrara was one of the most glittering cities in Renaissance Italy. Under the rule of Leonello and ...continued
10 minutes read
Bobby
@Bobby -
over 4 years ago
Dürer’s Enduring Rhino | History Today
On 20 May 1515, the first Indian rhinoceros to set foot in Europe in more than 1,000 years arrived in Lisbon. A gift to Manuel I of Portugal from Alfonso de Albuquerque, who had himself received it from Sultan Muzafar I of Gujarat, it caused a sensation. News of the extra...continued
10 minutes read