History

Anything to do with History

3917a54ef2e71f0b2d57dd0d63e0f2fb Cameron @Cameron - about 4 years ago
The First Svengali | History Today
Whenever Dominic Cummings makes the headlines, commentators reach for the same word to describe his relationship with the prime minister: he is Boris Johnson’s Svengali. But who was the original Svengali? Svengali is one of those rare literary creations that becomes short...continued
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96d2c0ccb7cce03f75db3297b9a8af04 Iva @Iva - almost 3 years ago
Death of a Swordmaster | History Today
When change came, it was swift. Until the turn of the 1570s, Edmund Howes writes in his continuation of John Stow’s Annales, ‘the auncient English fight of sword and buckler was onely had in use’. Bucklers – small shields – were to be bought in any haberdasher. But ‘short...continued
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367ec04c80b95de4cfdf036599b35350 Garnet @Garnet - over 3 years ago
Raise Your Words | History Today
It is now 20 years since the publication of Jonathan Rose’s majestic and moving study, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Having sifted through more than 2,000 memoirs, Rose painted a vivid, sometimes barely believeable, portrait of men and women over t...continued
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62b830bbc5092803336a4f6bb9370281 Manley @Manley - 11 months ago
The Death of Caspar Hauser
Who was Caspar Hauser? No one knew. He stepped into the world in Nuremberg on Whit Monday in 1828 towards the end of the afternoon. A shoemaker in the Unschlitt Platz – named for the city’s nearby store of fat and tallow – saw Hauser first, a young man, perhaps 17, seemin...continued
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Abe69d7aacc9c6d89b2d1ff5e9ac6ef4 Hank @Hank - about 3 years ago
The Dust of Kabul | History Today
Afghanistan’s ancient Buddhist legacy is defined to the world by an absence: the vacant niches that, until 2001, were graced by the gigantic Bamiyan Buddhas. The Chinese monk Xuanzong passed by them in the early seventh century ad, a century after their erection, and reco...continued
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394b4c0c4dd468b433ba43c77bdbb708 Bart @Bart - over 3 years ago
Vikings Attack Lindisfarne | History Today
The northern diaspora we call the age of the Vikings is testament to the mobility of early medieval Europe. So, too, is the fact that the best contemporary account we have of the Viking raid on Lindisfarne, off the Northumbrian coast, on 8 June 793 comes from the court of...continued
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A83b4d2292ad0135445fc0a7644d14c3 Joe @Joe - almost 4 years ago
Publication of the Futurist Manifesto
‘In my own village’, the film-maker Luis Buñuel said of his birthplace in rural Spain, ‘the Middle Ages lasted until the First World War.’ Buñuel would escape the dead hand of the past through surrealism. But the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti went one better: h...continued
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F8901f0cff3b25b34627127dbc99fb89 Allene @Allene - over 3 years ago
What’s in a Name? | History Today
Auschwitz Memorial is a Twitter feed I was introduced to by the novelist and critic Linda Grant, which is run by staff at the Auschwitz Museum. Each entry – and at least one is posted daily – starts with a date, usually that of the person’s birth: ‘9 April 1938: Jewish tw...continued
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56a34dc91390858efd1999c86a89c348 George @George - almost 3 years ago
Hidden in Plain Sight | History Today
Michael Carter, a properties historian at English Heritage and the man who oversees, among others, the ruins of Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, is troubled by the effect that Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy has had on the public imagination. The Dissolution of the Monaste...continued
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367ec04c80b95de4cfdf036599b35350 Garnet @Garnet - almost 4 years ago
There’s a World Out There
Both producers and consumers of history tend to divide roughly into two camps. There are those who seek to find the present in the past, using examples from history to confirm their current prejudices. And there are those  who engage with the past on its own terms, howeve...continued
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656f443bf945c1d489be8648db415f13 Cynthia @Cynthia - about 3 years ago
Lucy and Lucretius | History Today
Sometime in the 1650s Lucy Hutchinson began her verse translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, ‘On the Nature of the Universe’. Written in the first century bc, and rediscovered in 1417 by the Italian humanist Poggio Baracciolini, Lucretius’ masterpiece was a sensual, w...continued
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24f317f89bef5f8cefa430eec1cd2f6d Nestor @Nestor - almost 4 years ago
Execution of the Tailor-King | History Today
Today, the spire of the church of St Lambert in Münster still has three unusual adornments: cages. They were first hung on 22 January 1536 to hold the mutilated bodies of Jan Bockelson and two other leaders of the Anabaptist sect that had ruled the north-west German city ...continued
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3c59b35923f7f5e6a11c533088a15138 Jessika @Jessika - almost 4 years ago
Birth of an Imperial Historian
Few, if any, historians have been so high born as Anna Komnene, eldest daughter of Byzantine emperor Alexios I, who came into the world on 1 December 1083.Alexios had seized the imperial throne and, on his death in 1118, Komnene herself plotted to take power instead of he...continued
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69ab36bf73ce82cc3579c8f2504f3bac Gregoria @Gregoria - over 3 years ago
Saint for All Seasons | History Today
James Comey, former director of the FBI, was questioned in June 2017 at a hearing of the US Senate Intelligence Committee by Senator Angus King. At issue was President Trump’s requests for Comey to drop an investigation into National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and his...continued
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725ac8c62bcc32f06195cf20b372a31a Muriel @Muriel - over 2 years ago
Medusa | History Today
The Greek myth of Perseus decapitating Medusa is probably over 3,000 years old. Although Medusa is first mentioned in Greek literature in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, it is the fuller narrative, as told in Hesiod’s Theogony, that is portrayed in this limestone metope – a re...continued
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37ec91099450fc2fc637c77e78953759 Anderson @Anderson - about 3 years ago
Birth of ‘Typhoid Mary’ | History Today
The way George Soper told it, it might have been a case for Sherlock Holmes. ‘The typhoid epidemic that broke out in the summer home of Mr George Thompson at Oyster Bay was a puzzling affair’, he told the New York Times. It was 1906 and typhoid was rampant in the city; ne...continued
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6ede9b368e706f8b5e5082140d4d45d9 Moises @Moises - over 3 years ago
Amelia Earhart goes Missing | History Today
Aged 40, Amelia Earhart disappeared with her plane and her navigator on 2 July 1937 on the longest leg of what was intended to be the first circumnavigation of the world by a woman in an aeroplane. How does that fact change how we read her life?She was, her high school ye...continued
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96d2c0ccb7cce03f75db3297b9a8af04 Iva @Iva - over 5 years ago
The Wild Hunt of Odin
Odin (Woden, or Wotan), the principal pre-Christian deity of the Germanic peoples and the Norse god of the wind and the dead, raises a sword in command of his Wild Hunt across the midwinter sky.  Among the other figures in the procession is Thor, son of Odin and the god o...continued
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2cb2f1cf49e001b23749fba977acd24a Casper @Casper - about 3 years ago
Last Stand of Dahomey’s Female Army
Founded in the 17th century, the West African kingdom of Dahomey was a bellicose, expansionist state. The king’s main duty was to ‘make Dahomey always larger’. King Agaju boasted that, whereas his grandfather had conquered two countries and his father 18, he had conquered...continued
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96d2c0ccb7cce03f75db3297b9a8af04 Iva @Iva - over 5 years ago
Antoine Lavoisier Guillotined | History Today
Born into a noble family, the son of an attorney at the Parlement de Paris, Antoine Lavoisier invested his fortune in the Ferme générale, a tax-farming company that collected tax and customs on behalf of the royal government in return for a handsome cut. With his finances...continued
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E5a600388a4be6ed5b515081737d8445 Angus @Angus - over 3 years ago
The Feast of the Gods
Every other winter the Roman deities gather in honour of Bacchus, the god of wine. The elderly Silenus, tutor to Bacchus, arrives on an ass and at his feet, in blue, is his pupil collecting the wine he has provided and which is served by fauns and naiads. The gods sit at ...continued
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125f097c91a427394e6d36ae98c72376 Elaina @Elaina - over 2 years ago
Gold Llama | History Today
The Inca Empire emerged out of Peru’s Andean highlands in the 13th century and, at its greatest extent, stretched for about 3,500 miles down the western flank of South America. It was then the largest empire in the world, ruling a population of around 11 million. The Inca...continued
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56a34dc91390858efd1999c86a89c348 George @George - over 3 years ago
Prometheus | History Today
Peter Paul Rubens opened his studio in Antwerp in 1610 and Prometheus Bound was one of his first works to be produced there – though the eagle was painted by Frans Snyders, a colleague renowned for his depictions of the natural world. The scene is that of the Titan Promet...continued
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394b4c0c4dd468b433ba43c77bdbb708 Bart @Bart - about 3 years ago
Christ and the Doctors | History Today
The only biblical account of an event in Christ’s youth is found in St Luke’s Gospel. Aged 12, he accompanied his parents, Mary and Joseph, to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover. When his parents set out to return home to Nazareth, the boy lingered behind. Mary and J...continued
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6c170accf2ec5f1d4dbc252c635bb25c Erik @Erik - 10 months ago
The Original Bonfire of the Vanities
‘Piagnoni’, they were called: ‘weepers’. They were gangs of boys and young men – mostly middle class – who patrolled the streets of Florence in the 1490s, shouting abuse at the visibly impious: drunks, gamblers, women. They were called ‘pinzocheroni’, too: bigots. They, l...continued
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