History

Anything to do with History

Mariano @Mariano - 12 months ago

‘One Fine Day’ and ‘Imperial Island’ review

Nobody writes small books about the British Empire any more. Whether defending or deriding Britain’s long history of colonialism, the vogue is for holistic accounts, from beginning to end, usually in pursuit of a moral reckoning of what it was all about. In different ways...continued

5 minutes read

Kraig @Kraig - 11 months ago

‘The Life & Death of States’ and ‘Vienna’ reviews

In 1867 the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph announced he was splitting his patrimony in two. For over a decade he had ruled it as a single Austrian Empire despite it being a collection of dozens of historical kingdoms, duchies and crownlands amassed by his family over the c...continued

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Jaydon @Jaydon - 11 months ago

‘Theoderic the Great’ by Hans-Ulrich Wiemer review

When Theoderic the Great died on 30 August 526 his fame spanned the Mediterranean world. The Ostrogothic king ruled over Italy, southern France and much of Spain. His was the most powerful Germanic kingdom to arise following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and h...continued

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Priscilla @Priscilla - almost 4 years ago

Rules of Engagement | History Today

A book by Margaret MacMillan can be relied upon to be thoroughly researched, well-written and, unusually for historians, to be done so with a lively sense of humour. This study of war through the ages is no exception, despite its sombre theme. Based on MacMillan’s Reith L...continued

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Alvah @Alvah - almost 4 years ago

All By Myself | History Today

In modern western society, time for oneself, alone and in private, is taken for granted. Since the late 19th century, access to solitude has been central to understandings of privacy, which was defined in an influential article from the 1890 Harvard Law Review as ‘the rig...continued

5 minutes read

Hannah @Hannah - over 3 years ago

The Man who Haunts America

David Blight, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, once wrote that as ‘long as we have a politics of race in America, we will have a politics of Civil War memory’. He could just as easily have written that, as long as the United States has a politics of race, its politic...continued

6 minutes read

Ismael @Ismael - about 4 years ago

The Only Ones Left | History Today

Jackie Y. always thought of himself as a ‘North London Jewish kid’, even after learning in 1951, aged ten, that he was adopted. He later found out he was born in Austria, but his adoptive parents were reluctant to reveal more. Before getting married in a synagogue he had ...continued

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Alvah @Alvah - about 4 years ago

Saving Old Havana | History Today

Cuba’s greatest revolutionary might not be Fidel Castro or Che Guevara, but Havana’s city historian, Eusebio Leal Spengler, who died on 31 July 2020, aged 77.While Guevara’s face has adorned a thousand T-shirts and the ghost of Castro still lurks on countless Havana billb...continued

5 minutes read

Zackery @Zackery - almost 4 years ago

Geopolitical Realities | History Today

The spectacular rise of China over the past four decades has brought the world unprecedented opportunities and challenges, but no region has experienced this new geopolitical reality more keenly than South-East Asia. The 11 regional countries have benefited enormously fro...continued

5 minutes read

Alvah @Alvah - over 3 years ago

400 Years of Melancholising | History Today

Melancholia. Engraving by Sebald Beham, 1539 © Bridgeman Images.The Oxford scholar Robert Burton completed his first and only book on 5 December 1620. Even as he did so, he was on the defensive, anticipating criticism: ‘I like it, so doth he, thou doest not, is it therefo...continued

1 minute read

Pablo @Pablo - over 5 years ago

Theft is Property | History Today

During the 16th century, the Roman market for antiquities became highly competitive. Competence and money were crucial, but so were unscrupulousness and a fighting spirit. In the words of Cardinal Giovanni Ricci, who acted as a Medici agent in Rome in the 1560s, antiquiti...continued

5 minutes read

Jany @Jany - over 3 years ago

Luther & Co. | History Today

Martin Luther, one of the towering figures of German history, was, Lyndal Roper tells us, ‘a man who truly pondered pigs’. One of the achievements of this wonderfully stimulating collection of essays is to close the gap between Luther the man, who lived alongside swine an...continued

5 minutes read

Felicita @Felicita - over 3 years ago

Blow-by-Blow | History Today

The writers of British political and social diaries tend to be witnesses of great events rather than the main players. Disraeli and Gladstone, Lloyd George, Churchill and Thatcher left no daily journals, presumably because they were too busy making history, as opposed to ...continued

5 minutes read

Giles @Giles - about 4 years ago

Doctor Who? | History Today

When the White Rabbit asked how he should tell his story, Alice was not deceived by the King’s apparently straightforward instructions: ‘Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’ How can a narrator decide exactly what that beginning should be...continued

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Ezequiel @Ezequiel - 9 months ago

Was the Trojan Horse Real?

Ever since 1873 when the German businessman and archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, following the evidence of Homer’s Iliad, found the remnants of a grand metropolis – now Hisarlik in modern Turkey – the existence of the city of Troy has been generally accepted as fact. As...continued

5 minutes read

Patrick @Patrick - about 3 years ago

Out on Good Behaviour | History Today

In 1972 the New York Times journalist Roy Reed called Parchman prison in the Mississippi Delta a penitentiary with ‘one of the bloodiest and most dispiriting records of all the penal institutions of North America’. In his 1996 history, Worse than Slavery, David Oshinsky e...continued

5 minutes read

Jaydon @Jaydon - over 3 years ago

Roosevelt’s Southern Connection | History Today

After a 1937 trip to Mississippi, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent the state’s senator Pat Harrison a letter of praise along with the debts he had incurred after losing to him in a game of poker: ‘I bow to your prowess and apologize for the delay, and trust that you h...continued

5 minutes read

Marlon @Marlon - almost 3 years ago

Plato to NATO | History Today

In 1959 Xenophon Zolotas, governor of the Bank of Greece, began his address to the World Bank thus:Kyrie, it is Zeus’ anathema on our epoch for the dynamism of our economies and the heresy of our economic methods and policies that we should agonise between the Scylla of n...continued

5 minutes read

Priscilla @Priscilla - almost 2 years ago

The Lost Tudor | History Today

Monastic choir, from the Psalter of Henry VI, French, c.1420 © Bridgeman Images/British Library Collection.In about 1430, Katherine de Valois, widow of Henry V, secretly married a young Welsh squire named Owen Tudor. Their union, which was not widely known until after her...continued

1 minute read

Elliott @Elliott - over 2 years ago

Modern Times | History Today

The 18th century was one of phenomenal change. Revolution sent shockwaves across Europe and America, while expanding global trade networks ushered in a new consumer age, one underpinned by the international trade in enslaved Africans and the brutal structures of empire. I...continued

5 minutes read

Marie @Marie - 12 months ago

‘The Hundred Years War Vol 5’ by Jonathan Sumption review

With Triumph and Illusion Jonathan Sumption has, after more than three decades’ toil and 4,000 pages, brought his epic five-volume history of the Hundred Years War to its conclusion. In this final volume he takes us from 1422 – the year in which Henry V died having achiev...continued

5 minutes read

Eleanora @Eleanora - about 3 years ago

Women at War | History Today

There has been a recent upsurge of interest in early medieval ‘warrior women’. Television programmes such as Vikings depict fearsome women fighting beside men among the Viking hordes and, in 2017, an article claiming that the warrior grave at Birka, Sweden, belonged to a ...continued

5 minutes read

Abbie @Abbie - about 1 year ago

The English Plan to Colonise Russia

In 1613 the English ambassadors John Merrick and William Russell landed in the port city of Archangel, in the Russian north. The first purpose of their mission was fairly innocuous. The two men were given a set of written instructions to protect the financial position of ...continued

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Jany @Jany - over 3 years ago

Got (Breast) Milk? | History Today

A trend has arisen on social media in recent years for celebrity mothers to post photos of themselves breastfeeding. The purported intention is to celebrate women’s bodies and to normalise breastfeeding. They join a long tradition: images of staged lactation for the publi...continued

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Marie @Marie - about 3 years ago

In Good Spirits | History Today

‘To drink drunk is an ordinary matter with them every day in the week’, said Giles Fletcher, ambassador to Russia, in 1588. His observation echoed an image commonly painted by other early modern diplomats and travellers, one that still permeates popular assumptions about ...continued

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