History

Anything to do with History

Elliott @Elliott - over 2 years ago

The Berbice Rebellion | History Today

Monument to Coffij, leader of the Berbice slave rebellion, Square of the Revolution, Georgetown, Guyana. Alamy.You are not alone in not having heard of the Berbice slave rebellion. Marjoleine Kars was herself unaware of it until she chanced upon hundreds of pages of repor...continued

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Casper @Casper - over 2 years ago

Losing the Plot | History Today

‘A Correct View of the Stable etc. in Cato Street’. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.As Vic Gatrell writes, the Cato Street Conspiracy is ‘underdog history at its purest’. On the evening of 23 February 1820 around 25 men gathered in the hayloft of a sta...continued

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Torey @Torey - almost 2 years ago

Meet you There | History Today

Engraving from the ‘Compendium Maleficarum’, a witch-hunter’s manual published in Milan, 1608. Wiki Commons.Like most towns, the place where I grew up has a recognisable crossroads at its centre. Strikingly, the west-east thoroughfare is split by one of the largest church...continued

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Muriel @Muriel - over 2 years ago

Gutter Press | History Today

Adolf Hitler with Harold Rothermere, 1934. Alamy.In 1943 a member of the Roosevelt administration railed against what he called the ‘Newspaper Axis’. With the world embroiled in war, a number of newspaper owners in the US doggedly maintained a policy of isolationism, resi...continued

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Eleanora @Eleanora - over 4 years ago

Sticks and Stones | History Today

It is not very often that the skills of hand and eye align with that of language, but in Andrew Ziminski’s case the writer has been lying low while the craftsman went about his business for over three decades. Now, on the page, he is revealed as being thoughtful, observa...continued

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Nelson @Nelson - over 4 years ago

Which way are you going?

Three times I rushed toward her, desperate to hold her / three times she fluttered through my fingers, sifting away / like a shadow, dissolving like a dream, and each time / the grief cut to the heart, sharper.Odysseus’ tragic encounter with his dead mother Anticleia is a...continued

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Anderson @Anderson - over 2 years ago

Illustrious Ancestors | History Today

The Great Kurultáj, photographed in 2014. The event takes place annually in Bugac, Hungary. Wiki Commons/Derzsi Elekes Andor.The fantastic belief that Hungarians are a branch of a vast ‘Turanian’ nation has deep roots. From the ancient state of ‘Turania’ on the Central As...continued

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Patrick @Patrick - about 2 years ago

The ‘Jena Set’ | History Today

At the Fürstengraben, 1779. From ‘Jena from its origins to the present day’, published 1850, British Library HMNTS 10260.d.42.A quiet university town in the middle of Germany, Jena was, as Andrea Wulf writes, ‘so small that it took less than ten minutes to cross’. How cou...continued

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Casper @Casper - almost 2 years ago

The Body as Machine | History Today

George Balanchine, New York City Ballet, 1960. Neil Libbert/Bridgeman Images.George Balanchine, founder of the New York City Ballet (NYCB), pursued pure abstraction in his choreography, emphasising the physical virtuosity of his dancers by foregoing narrative and theatric...continued

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Sandrine @Sandrine - about 2 years ago

For God (and us) | History Today

Wells Cathedral, photographed by Alfred Capel Cure in 1857. Metropolitan Museum of Art.Many cathedrals are so old, large and familiar that it’s tempting to see them more as a landscape feature than as something someone built. Like an ancient crag, they sit at the heart of...continued

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Marie @Marie - about 4 years ago

Portrait of the Portrait Artist

In Augsburg’s Staatsgalerie Altdeutsche Meister there is a three-panelled painting illustrating the life of St Paul, painted by Hans Holbein the Elder in 1504. Commissioned for the city’s Dominican convent of St Katherine, it includes a self-portrait of the artist with hi...continued

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Alexzander @Alexzander - almost 5 years ago

The Scholar’s Tale | History Today

Even in the world of academic publishing, where time moves at its own glacial pace, 29 years is a long time to work on a project which never saw completion. In 1922, J.R.R. Tolkien was commissioned by Oxford University Press as a junior collaborator on a student edition o...continued

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Teagan @Teagan - over 1 year ago

Ancient Outtakes | History Today

Second century mosaic at the Bardo National Museum, Tunisia, depicting Panther-Dionysus scattering pirates, who are changed to dolphins. Photographed in 2012, Wiki Commons/Dennis Jarvis.The classicist Adrienne Mayor first came to public attention with The First Fossil Hun...continued

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Alexandro @Alexandro - almost 5 years ago

The Stylus is Mightier than the Sword

‘As many cuneiform signs as exist, I have written on tablets’, reads the colophon impressed on a clay tablet found in Nineveh. ‘I deposited [those tablets] in my palace’, it continues. A colophon usually appears at the end of a written work to immortalise information abou...continued

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Adelia @Adelia - about 5 years ago

The Brothels of Ancient Pompeii

As countries around the world grapple with whether to make prostitution legal, what – if anything – can we learn from the legalised brothels of ancient Pompeii? Sarah Levin-Richardson’s new book addresses the economic, social and legal complexities involved in ancient sex...continued

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Priscilla @Priscilla - over 2 years ago

Naming It | History Today

Carl Gustav Jung, standing in front of the Burghölzli clinic, Zurich, 1909. Library of Congress.Orna Ophir starts her captivating history of schizophrenia with a story about the first schizophrenic person she knew. When the author was 16 years old she met Orlean, then 19,...continued

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Myles @Myles - over 4 years ago

Sweet Dreams | History Today

In January 1888, an unremarkable novelist called Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward 2000–1887. In the novel, a man in Boston falls asleep in the late 1880s and wakes up 113 years later, in an America of Universal Basic Income, where all property has been nationalis...continued

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Erik @Erik - over 4 years ago

The Exhumation of a Nazi Perpetrator

In East West Street (2017), Philippe Sands unfolded interwoven investigations that all sprang from the troubled history of Lviv in Ukraine. This quest embraced the fate of his family and the evolution of legal notions of crimes against humanity hammered out by Hersch Laut...continued

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Maida @Maida - almost 5 years ago

Spain in the USA | History Today

In 1565, half a century before the Pilgrim Fathers, the Spanish began the first European settlement in the present-day United States. Yet, despite Hispanic roots that go back nearly half a millennium, descendants of more recent immigrants have ignored this basic truth and...continued

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Maureen @Maureen - almost 2 years ago

Dead Letters | History Today

HMS Erebus in the Ice, 1846. Francois Etienne Musin. Royal Museums Greenwich/Wiki Commons.Interest in the fate of Sir John Franklin’s 1845 doomed expedition to find the Northwest Passage is enjoying something of a renaissance, thanks in part to its sensational dramatisati...continued

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Giles @Giles - over 2 years ago

Sea Change | History Today

Detail of the Mary Seacole statue at St. Thomas’ Hospital, London. Matt Brown/Wiki Commons.Helen Rappaport’s In Search of Mary Seacole is a major new study of its Jamaican-born subject, voted top of the list in a 2004 poll of ‘100 Great Black Britons’ and previously the s...continued

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Teagan @Teagan - over 5 years ago

Regulation and Reputation | History Today

Booms, with hindsight, may prove bubbles. So it is that Alan Greenspan, appointed Federal Reserve chairman by Ronald Reagan and hailed by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward as the ‘maestro’ of Wall Street’s extraordinary 1990s gains, has suffered a plummet in reputation s...continued

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Hulda @Hulda - over 4 years ago

A Strange Pantheon | History Today

After the mammoth effort of his magisterial biography of Winston Churchill, Andrew Roberts relaxes with this short collection of essays – possibly modelled on Churchill’s own ‘Great Contemporaries’ series. Originating as a lecture series, the volume gives the impression o...continued

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Elvie @Elvie - over 5 years ago

Chaucer: The Poet in His World

It isn’t really possible to write a biography of Chaucer. Painstaking research over many decades has turned up a small number of documents related to his life, which between them give a patchy, at times perplexing, picture. This foremost medieval English poet – always the...continued

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Webster @Webster - over 5 years ago

Can You Keep a Secret?

In February 1649 the Royalist newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus characterised ‘Parliament Jone’, aka Elizabeth Alkin, as ‘an old Bitch’ able to ‘smell out a Loyall-hearted man as soon as the best Blood-hound in the Army’. Elizabeth later claimed that during the Civil Wars sh...continued

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