History

Anything to do with History

C0c3cfe5664cc7e6deb04e9e150ccd98 Devin @Devin - 7 months ago
The Death of a Mnemonist
Solomon Shereshevsky dreamt of being a hero. He spent his life waiting for ‘something fine, something grand’. Born in the 1880s in the small Russian town of Rezhitsa, now Rēzekne in Latvia, he was a sometime music student, efficiency expert and broker.By the late 1920s, h...continued
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F4e69330da03b74c81cc5fa3f895fb24 Nelson @Nelson - about 2 months ago
Death of the King of Siam
When his father, Rama II, died in 1824 the Siamese throne went to Mongkut’s older half-brother, who ruled as Rama III. Mongkut, aged 19, joined a monastery. Three months was customary. Mongkut stayed for 27 years.While in orders Mongkut led a new, reformist religious move...continued
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769b45cbbba62f6d3aa67bb11e7a293f Raoul @Raoul - almost 4 years ago
Laocoön | History Today
‘Don’t trust the horse, my people. Even when they bring gifts, I fear the Greeks.’These are among the most famous lines of the classical world, uttered by Laocoön, the Trojan priest of Poseidon (the Roman god Neptune), in the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid, written in the...continued
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Ac7d6ae4836b778c0e45d9f73deed0cb Delia @Delia - 8 months ago
The Death of Little Jack the Boy Missionary
‘What more pleasing to a Christian parent whose heart yearns over his children [than] to see them thus engaged in the best of all causes, even the extension of the Redeemer’s kingdom’, wrote Joseph Blake in The Day of Small Things, his 1849 tract promoting missionary zeal...continued
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1f7b605070774dac8bb3c859143de9d2 Jeffrey @Jeffrey - 6 months ago
The Publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four
His first published work, a poem, appeared in the autumn of 1914. ‘Awake! Young Men of England’ was a call to arms for a nation newly at war. He was 11 years old and his name was Eric Blair.He took up the pen-name George Orwell in 1932 for his first book. (Other names con...continued
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9c02f74a2060b9a7d8d9cd41fd6c26ed Clarissa @Clarissa - 3 months ago
The Rebirth of Chivalry is Rained Off
It began as a joke. There were grumbles of conservative discontent about the lack of ceremony at the coronation of Queen Victoria in June 1838. Where was the ceremonial banquet? Where was the Royal Champion? They called it the ‘Penny Crowning’, a tawdry, cheap shadow of t...continued
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B32a14d6694cf7df7a187f69ad01ace5 Patrick @Patrick - over 3 years ago
A Tyrant goes on Trial
The idea that leaders and their functionaries might be held to account did not begin with the Nuremberg Trials that followed the Second World War. Precedents cited in the trials themselves included the Imperial Diet at Regensburg, which followed Frederick II’s invasion of...continued
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C1e15b7459468dc79542fc656b7a9fa2 Madalyn @Madalyn - over 5 years ago
The Death of Caesar | History Today
A huddle of conspirators walks away from the lifeless, bloodied body of Julius Caesar, having stabbed the great Roman general and statesman 23 times on the Ides, or 15th, of March, 44 BC.Caesar had recently been declared dictator perpetuo by a Senate fearful of its rumour...continued
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A6c0c46e61817f7ae594dd513e06b21d Elliott @Elliott - over 3 years ago
A Racist Forgery is Revealed
Jewish people have been blamed for everything from the Black Death to the Russian Revolution. But rarely has such race hate found more notorious expression than in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The work purports to be the verbatim transcript of speeches made by a s...continued
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B2e1b8b378e5e7660ec2a2923ad69789 Marlon @Marlon - about 3 years ago
Hercules and Omphale | History Today
Hercules, or Heracles to the Greeks, is covered with due modesty in the silk robes of Omphale, Queen of Lydia. She, in turn, is draped in the skin of the Nemean Lion, a fearsome creature killed by Hercules in the first of his 12 Labours. It is an act of cross-dressing ill...continued
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422f200971248def7ffc1673a54fa3cb Grayce @Grayce - over 3 years ago
Death of a Medieval Lover
From the beginning, their affair was hardly private. He joked about it in his lectures and wrote love songs that were sung far and wide. But they were both, in their own way, already famous.By the 1110s, Peter Abelard was in his thirties, with a fast-growing reputation as...continued
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70753e5e348bf454161ee0bcc63fed8d Juliet @Juliet - about 3 years ago
‘A Socialist Romance’ | History Today
In the autumn of 1895 Edith Lanchester was 24. Born into a middle-class family, she had studied at the Birkbeck Institute and worked as a City clerk. She was also already a seasoned socialist campaigner; her ringing voice, it was said, could command the attention of the m...continued
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1a4d3a462311ba36d913731c2e16402c Pablo @Pablo - almost 3 years ago
A Last Post | History Today
This is my final offering as editor of History Today, so allow me a few observations on history today and tomorrow, and what the discipline must do if it is to continue to prosper, to inform debate, at least in the English-speaking world.I have long subscribed to the mant...continued
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25dc49998970e9ad413d98493dfe5d6c Teagan @Teagan - over 3 years ago
Time’s Changing Tempo | History Today
There has probably never been a better time to read long novels, or even a cycle of them, than the last 12 months – at least if you’re working from home, with a bit of space and free of such challenges as home schooling. Perceptions of time have changed a great deal over ...continued
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10f64d8d0be1cc890068d55fc752e9ee Alexandro @Alexandro - about 2 months ago
The Kingdom of Sicily is Born
Roger II, it has been said, conceived of his Sicilian kingdom as a ‘work of art’. If so, contemporary reviews were mixed at best. To Bernard of Clairvaux he was ‘the Sicilian usurper’; to the Byzantine Theodore Prodromos he was the ‘tyrant of a small toparchy of apes’; to...continued
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6b970372434ca9c9def5abb121107916 Rex @Rex - over 3 years ago
Fall of Africa’s Greatest Empire
The Songhay Empire would not be the first military power to set too much store by its cavalry. Founded in 1464 out of the ruins of the Malian Empire, Songhay was the largest of the indigenous empires in Africa. At its zenith, it covered around 540,000 square miles, stretc...continued
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A83b4d2292ad0135445fc0a7644d14c3 Joe @Joe - about 3 years ago
Susanna and the Elders | History Today
Demonstrating brilliant technique and interpretative insight, Artemisia Gentileschi was just 17 when she first painted on a theme she would return to repeatedly. The biblical Apocrypha recounts the tale of Susanna, the beautiful wife of Joachim. She is bathing in their ga...continued
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F8901f0cff3b25b34627127dbc99fb89 Allene @Allene - over 3 years ago
My Back Pages | History Today
‘People who keep journals have life twice’, claimed the writer Jessamyn West – though it’s hard to imagine that anyone who has kept a diary over the last 12 months will be keen to relive it anytime soon. Diarists of 2020 will, however, be providing a service to historians...continued
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192059156a7075f96be3d979645bdbcc Zackery @Zackery - about 4 years ago
Birth of a Freedom Fighter
Nat Turner was born into slavery on a Virginia plantation on 2 October 1800. Convinced from an early age that he was a prophet, Turner taught himself to read and write. His spiritual path mirrors that of many other mystics: he maintained an austere life apart from the wid...continued
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192059156a7075f96be3d979645bdbcc Zackery @Zackery - almost 3 years ago
Bonaparte’s Troops Crush Austrians at Battle of Rivoli
Rivoli marked a key stage in the Italian campaigns of the twenty-something Napoleon Bonaparte on behalf of France’s ruling Directorate – successes that brought France's youngest general to the notice of his countrymen and Europe. After the declaration of war against the n...continued
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7094e9deddcf03241ed9894017ba09bc Rose @Rose - about 4 years ago
Lesbian ‘Obscenity’ Suppressed | History Today
On 9 November 1928 Bow Street Magistrates Court was crowded. D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow had been successfully prosecuted for obscenity in the same courtroom 13 years earlier. Now it was the turn of The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. The perceived obscenity in Hall...continued
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3fb9059c39d0a39c0a9f0cf17b7858fc Priscilla @Priscilla - over 3 years ago
Into the Unknown Region | History Today
International travel has been off the agenda for most during the pandemic, even the brief city breaks that are so easy to take in such a well-connected, diverse and compact continent as Europe. Yet, though some claim to have experienced a revelatory new relationship with ...continued
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7bcb1d07c0ef7a8d3ef21a145cb66a5c Giovanni @Giovanni - about 4 years ago
All of History is There
The Trinidadian-born Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul was at his most provocative in The Middle Passage (1962), in which he related his travels through the Caribbean. ‘History is built around achievement and creation’, he wrote, ‘and nothing was created in the West Indies.’ A ...continued
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1a914154cd263fa68f1b8d6529ef63dd Sandrine @Sandrine - almost 4 years ago
A Holy Trinity | History Today
With travel restricted and holidays on hold, many will have explored their localities anew during lockdown. Lucky are those with access to rural expanse, though urbanites can find rewards, too, in cityscapes altered, for better and worse, by the pandemic.The City of Londo...continued
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125f097c91a427394e6d36ae98c72376 Elaina @Elaina - almost 4 years ago
The Future of the Past
With this issue, History Today reaches its biblical three score years and ten, vigorous and sprightly. Anyone looking back over a sample of the 840 issues of History Today published since its founding in 1951 will notice some striking changes over time. There has been a c...continued
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