History
Anything to do with History
Cameron
@Cameron -
over 5 years ago
Classics for the Working Masses
The study of Classics has long been associated with expensive schools and elite universities. But this is not the whole picture. With Henry Stead, I am writing a book on ways in which, from the 18th century onwards, working-class Britons embraced ancient Greece and Rome....continued
4 minutes read
Madalyn
@Madalyn -
almost 5 years ago
Catching Fuchs | History Today
Klaus Fuchs, a brilliant German nuclear physicist, was condemned by a British court to 14 years in prison on 1 March 1950. He had confessed to the British security service, MI5, that for seven years he had handed the Soviets everything he knew about the British and Americ...continued
4 minutes read
Torey
@Torey -
almost 4 years ago
Unsettled Legacy | History Today
The southern writer Robert Penn Warren claimed that the Civil War was the United States’ ‘only “felt” history – history lived in the national imagination’. If ongoing debates about the management of Confederate statuary teach us anything, it is that its reverberations con...continued
4 minutes read
Americo
@Americo -
over 1 year ago
Reflecting on the Past | History Today
Clio, Greek Muse of History, by Hendrick Goltzius, Dutch, 1558-1617. Alamy.In the last ten years, I’ve written some 50-odd columns for this magazine – enough words to fill a small book. They add up to a manifesto of how I think we should do history, the value of history i...continued
4 minutes read
Alvah
@Alvah -
over 5 years ago
Heads Turned by Treasure | History Today
As a medievalist who works mostly with books, I confess that I sometimes envy archaeologists. The work they do is long, difficult and painstaking, but the reward – at least in terms of public interest and enthusiasm for their findings – is incredible, far surpassing anyt...continued
4 minutes read
Colin
@Colin -
over 2 years ago
All That Is Not Good
Stained glass window showing Julian of Norwich, Norwich Cathedral. Alamy.When the news is full of images of suffering, it feels difficult – almost wrong – to concentrate on anything else. How can ordinary work, meetings, emails, teaching or writing matter, when the world ...continued
4 minutes read
Kraig
@Kraig -
3 days ago
On the Spot: Gina Anne Tam
Why are you a historian of China? China is a critical part of the world. We cannot understand the modern world if we neglect China.What’s the most important lesson history has taught you? That the future is unknowable but malleable.Which history book has had the greatest ...continued
2 minutes read
Alexzander
@Alexzander -
almost 5 years ago
Lies, Damned Lies and History
Post-truth politics, and the way it is reshaping the public sphere, poses an existential threat to the study of the past. On 27 January 2020 we mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The existence of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps and, s...continued
4 minutes read
Alvah
@Alvah -
over 2 years ago
Object Lesson | History Today
Conscientious objector Sidney Spencer on his way to plead his case at Liverpool tribunal, 25 March 1941. Alamy.On 6 April 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, the Queen made a speech invoking the spirit of the Second World War. Asking the British public to ‘remain united a...continued
4 minutes read
Alexie
@Alexie -
about 4 years ago
The Lives of Others | History Today
‘One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other’, says the heroine of Jane Austen’s Emma, playfully trying to reassure her ever-anxious father that other people can enjoy amusements he would never himself like. In Austen’s novel, Emma is often wrong, b...continued
4 minutes read
Elian
@Elian -
over 5 years ago
For Argument’s Sake | History Today
The coming of spring, for medieval poets, usually means the chance of something exciting happening. Once flowers, birdsong and sunshine tempt a poet to roam outdoors, spring may be the time for encounters with fairies, lovers and all kinds of marvellous adventures. The 13...continued
4 minutes read
Jeffrey
@Jeffrey -
over 4 years ago
Memento Mori | History Today
The past and the present talk to each other continually. As a historian, I tend to obsess over this communication. Two weeks of broken central heating in winter a few years back was uncomfortable but, at least, an insight into how people lived historically. For me, then, ...continued
4 minutes read
Zackery
@Zackery -
about 5 years ago
The Cultured Women of Essex
‘It is asked of all who hear this work that they do not revile it because a woman translated it. That is no reason to despise it, nor to disregard the good in it.’ Many female writers have probably said, or wanted to say, something very like these words. They were written...continued
4 minutes read
Devin
@Devin -
about 5 years ago
All At Sea | History Today
The title of Australian historian Joy McCann’s chronicle of the Southern Ocean says it all: a sea wilder than any other, striated by latitudinal bands whose crescendo of nicknames (Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties, Screaming Sixties) give more than a hint of its character...continued
4 minutes read
Allene
@Allene -
over 2 years ago
Matters of Importance | History Today
Clockwise from top: Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Anne Boleyn, Catherine of Aragon, Kateryn Parr and Jane Seymour. Lithograph, c.1860. akg-images.For a long time – in the view of my publisher far too long a time – I’ve been writing a new history of the women who were ...continued
4 minutes read
Zackery
@Zackery -
about 2 years ago
Written in Heraldry | History Today
Henry VI on horseback with a coat of arms, 15th century. Bridgeman Images.In the largely illiterate 14th to 17th centuries, heraldry could be read by all. As Victor Hugo wrote: ‘For those who can decipher it, heraldry is an algebra, a language. The whole history of the se...continued
4 minutes read
Bobby
@Bobby -
over 4 years ago
How To Live Forever | History Today
A few years ago, on a grey and rainy day in April, I happened to be in Folkestone in Kent. Since there’s not much to do in a seaside town on a drizzly Sunday morning, a visit to a church seemed like the best idea. This church, dedicated to St Mary and St Eanswythe, is an ...continued
4 minutes read
Jimmy
@Jimmy -
over 2 years ago
Mind the Authority Gap | History Today
Choose wisely: Woman in a Bookshop, cover design for the quarterly magazine, ‘The Yellow Book’, by Aubrey Beardsley, c.1895. The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images.This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Wolfson History Prize, the UK’s most prestigious prize for hi...continued
4 minutes read
Rex
@Rex -
almost 5 years ago
Don’t Dismiss Damsels | History Today
One day in 1420, the East Anglian mystic Margery Kempe visited a church in Norwich. In her extraordinary Book, a frank, personal and deeply engaging narrative of her life that has a claim to be the first autobiography in the English language, Kempe tells of many such visi...continued
4 minutes read
Priscilla
@Priscilla -
almost 5 years ago
Gossiping with the Dead | History Today
It says something of my previous ignorance about the state of motherhood that, before giving birth, I agreed to be a judge on a literary prize in the months that followed. As we reach the end of the year, however, it does mean that I have read an enormous number of biogra...continued
4 minutes read
Jarod
@Jarod -
about 5 years ago
The Lure of the Local
I recently visited a local history museum in a small English town. It does not exactly matter where; there are some features that all such museums have in common. If you think of one you know, you are probably imagining a place much like this. As I wandered through the qu...continued
4 minutes read
Marie
@Marie -
almost 2 years ago
Historical Omertà | History Today
Katherine of Aragon, by Lucas Horenbout, c.1525 © Philip Mould Ltd, London/Bridgeman Images.Mariella Frostrup, Kate Codrington, Davina McCall and others have recently been on a mission to end present-day silence around the menopause. But the omertà is deeply historical. T...continued
4 minutes read
Oren
@Oren -
over 4 years ago
The Devil by the Deep Blue Sea
Do all cities have individual characters? Or do only the greatest ones grow a personality? Accost a few pedestrians on the Canebière, the now-shabby thoroughfare that runs up from Marseille’s Vieux Port, and the mean temperature of chat is bluff, hearty, a little cynical....continued
4 minutes read
Raoul
@Raoul -
about 1 year ago
‘The Bone Chest’ by Cat Jarman review
A nursing mother in ‘The Third Class Carriage’ by Honoré Daumier, c. 1862-64. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.Most people who have studied 19th-century Britain will be familiar with the stratospheric rise in the nation’s population in this period. Between 18...continued
4 minutes read
Ericka
@Ericka -
about 1 year ago
‘Empires of the Steppes’ by Kenneth W. Harl review
A Mughal depiction of the Siege of Arbela in the era of Hulagu Khan, c. 1596. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public Domain.Absorbed in Kenneth Harl’s Empires of the Steppes I was aware that less than a tithe of what I was reading would be remembered by the end of a week. Th...continued
4 minutes read