Innholdsfortegnelse for Xmas 2016 i History Extra

“With the famous line, “Someone had blundered”, Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade helped immortalise the suicidal dash towards Russian guns in 1854. But the question remains: who had blundered? In this month’s cover feature, Saul David revisits this iconic moment in the Crimean War and says who he thinks was to blame. You’ll find this on page 22. Historians have debated the Charge of the Light Brigade for more than 150 years. But Donald Trump’s election as US president in November may well prove an even more enduring source of fascination. As soon as the result was announced, we assembled a panel of experts to consider how his shock (to some, at least) victory fits into broader historical trends. Turn to page 12 for their views. Trump’s…

As Christmas 1865 approached, the town of Pulaski, Tennessee was not a happy place. Bitterly divided between supporters and opponents of slavery, Tennessee had nevertheless sided with the Confederate South in the American Civil War. Pulaski itself, on a major crossroads near the border with Alabama, was a slave-holding town, surrounded by “splendid plantations”. And since newly liberated slaves made up perhaps half of its population, the mood among the town’s white citizens was a toxic mixture of anger and fear. Even as Christmas approached, there were reports that it had become a magnet for ‘roughs’ from the local counties. Among the men gathering in Pulaski that winter were six former soldiers in their mid-twenties, all of whom had fought bravely for the Confederacy. These young men were far from…

Why did medieval people attempt to influence the cosmos through magic? What role did emotion play in the outcome of 17th-century witch trials and the use of protective symbols and objects in the home? These are questions being posed by historians as part of a three-year project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, investigating what people’s interactions with the supernatural between 1300 and 1900 can tell us about their states of mind. “We’re interested in how ordinary people felt about the potent yet unseen environmental forces by which they were surrounded, and how emotions, in any era, affect what we believe to be the truth,” says Professor Malcolm Gaskill, leader of the research team, which is made up of historians from the University of East Anglia, University College London and the…

Richard Carwardine is professor of history at the University of Oxford. His books include Lincoln: Profiles In Power (Routledge, 2003) Sylvia Ellis is professor of international history at Northumbria University, specialising in Anglo-American relations. She is the author of Freedom’s Pragmatist: Lyndon Johnson and Civil Rights (Florida University Press, 2013) Susan-Mary Grant is professor of American history at Newcastle University and the author of A Concise History of the United States of America (CUP, 2012) Adam Smith is a senior lecturer at University College London, specialising in American history. He also presents history series on BBC Radio 4…

@HistoryExtra: What do you think is the most fascinating period in history and why? Nicola Pritchett The Victorian period for me! The golden age of invention and innovation; advancements in medicine, industry, transport… all life-changing, fantastic stuff @Niamh_Lau Wars of the Roses. Political intrigue, murder, war, shifting monarchy. So interesting and very complex Cheryl Prince The Tudor period, especially the reign of Henry VIII. He effectively changed the course of history in breaking from the Catholic church. All for a woman Rob Reynolds I’ve always found the Punic Wars fascinating: an epic clash of cultures lasting decades with brilliant characters like Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal and Scipio Africanus @rdmontescutie Georgian England, hands down! The 1700s were such a powerhouse of innovation and change! Plus, the humor was top notch Sujitha Parshi…

Grant rose in just seven years from being a civilian with a mid-life crisis to commander of the Union armies in the Civil War There have been a lot of great military histories out this year. My favourite soldier biography is Ronald C White’s monumental American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S Grant (Presidio Press). At 800-plus pages, this is no light read, but the writing is delightful and the story of how Grant rose in just seven years from being a civilian with a mid-life crisis to commander of the Union armies during the American Civil War, and then US president, is compelling. For those who like their history broad and quirky, Lukasz Kamienski’s Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War (OUP) is well worth a look.…

 One of 2016’s most astonishing developments was the rapid fragmentation of national narratives and proliferation of sub-nationalisms, from Scotland to Hong Kong. The necessity for a global history has never been more urgent National founding myths faced strong challenges from minorities at the same time that hardliners vended souped-up fables of ancestral origins. The impact of such turmoil on conventional national histories is undeniable. The necessity for a global history has never been more urgent. Its scope is still being defined, however, and many issues have yet to be settled. I can’t think of a more useful guide to them than Sebastian Conrad’s What is Global History? (Princeton). This short, stimulating book sets out the challenges facing historians more used to working within the boundaries of an individual nation-state.…

BEST TIME TO GO Bethlehem has a Mediterranean climate with warm summers and mild winters. Springtime sees the surrounding hills at their most beautiful, covered in wild flowers after the winter rains. Christmas is an experience to remember, although pricier and very crowded. GETTING THERE While there is no Palestinian airport, international passport holders can move freely in and out of the West Bank via Israel or Jordan. Direct flights to either take around five hours, with the bus to Bethlehem then taking 2–3 hours. When coming from Jordan, expect long queues at the Israeli-controlled Allenby Bridge crossing into the West Bank, but less so if entering directly from Israel. WHAT TO PACK Clothing will depend on the season, but long sleeves and full-length trousers/dresses are required for visiting religious…

Margaret Beaufort: Tudor matriarch Michael Jones explores the amazing life of a political survivor who founded a royal dynasty Debating the Stauffenberg plot Two historians consider whether the Allies should have been glad that the plot to kill Hitler failed After 1066 Marc Morris chronicles the Anglo-Saxons’ resistance to Norman rule Drunken vicars Discover how alcohol blighted the careers of many churchmen in early modern England…

Saul David The beauty of history is that it constantly throws up surprises. I thought I knew who was responsible for the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade until I rewalked the ground and new documents came to light. • Saul considers who was to blame for the Charge of the Light Brigade on page 22 Hannah Skoda The literature, sermons, political petitions and even letters of the 14th century are peppered with longing for ‘the good old days’. I’m interested in what this tells us about contemporary responses to cataclysmic change in the period. • Hannah explores the surge of nostalgia in the 14th century on page 38 Peter Ling When I began teaching the civil rights movement 30 years ago, the standard interpretation of Black Power was negative…

Men from a US Engineer Special Brigade help a fellow soldier ashore on Omaha beach, on D-Day, June 1944. This arresting image is just one of hundreds that are being digitally recoloured by Brazilian artist Marina Amaral. The process of recolouring can take Amaral hours – even days – to achieve, with painstaking research into the history and colours behind the original photograph. You can see more of Amaral’s work at marinamaral.com…

Toilet search reveals Aboriginal settlement What may be the earliest-known Aboriginal settlement in Australia has been found by a man looking for somewhere to go to the toilet. The site, which could be 49,000 years old, contains evidence of human interaction and rock art. Van Gogh sliced ear in a jealous rage Art historian Martin Bailey has claimed that Vincent van Gogh cut off his own ear in 1888 after learning of his brother Theo’s engagement, and not as the result of an argument with the artist Paul Gauguin. Illuminated manuscript reveals its real purpose Newly discovered marks on the 800-year-old Aberdeen Bestiary illuminated manuscript suggest it was created as a learning tool rather than for a high status client, as was previously thought. ‘Swedish Schindler’ declared dead Raoul Wallenberg,…

“It’s been quite a year of anniversaries, from the deaths of Æthelred the Unready (1016) and Shakespeare, 600 years later, and from the Norman conquest to the Somme. History has seldom felt more current – on TV, on radio and in print – and this magazine has done its bit, too, as a generator of ideas and a refractor of the huge public interest in the stories that have helped shape us. It seems to me that this only emphasises the value of history – how understanding the world around us is vital in an open society – as has been underlined this year by the momentous vote on Brexit and the US election. History, as always, gives value and meaning to the present. Viewed properly, it is our reality…

30 BC JOANN FLETCHER “The most dramatic year was surely 30 BC, when the death of Cleopatra VII not only ended three millennia of dynastic history in Egypt but shaped the future of the western world. Having clashed the previous year with their rival Octavian at the somewhat inconclusive sea battle of Actium off the Greek coast, Cleopatra and her husband Mark Antony were only defeated when their land forces defected and their Red Sea fleet was destroyed by Arab pirates. And Octavian was unable to capitalise on the advantage he had gained at Actium, since his troops had mutinied, demanding pay he did not have. Meanwhile Cleopatra still commanded an immense treasury. By 30 BC, having stockpiled half of this wealth within her vault-like tomb in Alexandria, Cleopatra gave…

Catherine of Aragon She’s been cast as a humourless Spanish harridan, but Catherine was highly popular in England Bitter, conservative, graceless: Henry’s first wife (married 1509–33) has often been portrayed as a foreign harridan, lecturing her erring husband about the loyalty he lacked. This is the picture painted by Protestant historians who disliked her deeply held traditional religious views. But, today, Catherine enjoys a far more favourable press – one that reflects the adulatory views that many of her subjects held about a queen whom they loved to the end. When Henry abandoned Catherine (he had the marriage annulled), these subjects thought of her as a wronged woman, while Anne Boleyn, her younger, sexier, replacement, was “the goggle-eyed whore”. For most of the nearly 24-year marriage, Catherine was Henry’s beloved…

Another packed year As our overstuffed shelves will attest, more history books than you could ever reasonably tackle are written each year – and 2016 has been no exception. How, then, to make sense of it all? Which books should you spend your valuable time and money investigating? Over the following pages, you’ll find the answer. We asked leading experts to choose the titles that most stood out in their field this year, in areas as diverse as the ancient world, the 20th century and the vast expanse of global history. And that’s not all: we also have authors offering their personal takes on the best historical fiction and TV of the past 12 months. The result is an eclectic mix, which will hopefully offer inspiration whatever your interests. I…

Sarah Gristwood John Guy’s special gift is to combine groundbreaking archival research, which offers genuinely new insights into the seemingly familiar Tudor period, with a magically vivid and accessible writing style. His latest book, Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years (Viking), explores the last two decades of Elizabeth I’s reign. Guy paints a portrait of a flawed and complex queen in a time of profound national uncertainty. Sarah Gristwood is author of Game of Queens: The Women Who Made 16th-century Europe (Oneworld, 2016) Lucy Worsley Caroline Shenton’s Mr Barry’s War (Oxford University Press) is a real jewel, finely wrought and beautiful, just like the Palace of Westminster that it describes. It’s the story of quite a bonkers project, with the architect Charles Barry and his collaborator Augustus Pugin facing immense challenges to…

Simon Sebag Montefiore Daniel Beer’s 2016 book House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars (Allen Lane) is masterful, gripping and deeply researched. It’s filled with astonishing, vivid and heartbreaking stories of crime and punishment, of redemption, love and terrifying violence. It has an amazing cast of despots, murderers, whores and heroes, and takes place in godforsaken mines, Arctic villages and beautiful taiga. It’s a wonderful read. Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of several books including The Romanovs 1613–1918 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016) George Goodwin Jerry White’s Mansions of Misery: A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison (Bodley Head) is a factual portrait of desperate and roguish Londoners that is as startling as anything in Dickens. Its wealth of anecdote and sympathetic style, spiced with witty observation, makes…

“In the new urban economy Twelfth Night disappeared as a major feast day” Victorian Bakers at Christmas TV BBC Two scheduled for December Between the 1830s and 1870s – not much longer than a generation – Christmas was reinvented. Unlike the riotous festivities of earlier eras, the Victorians, in the words of food historian Annie Gray, created a celebration that was “family-friendly, hospitable... and charitable”. Though the change was driven in part by Victoria and Albert’s “overt emphasis” on the nuclear family, this was also a celebration in keeping with the demands of a rapidly industrialising society. “A new focus only on Christmas Day was evident,” says Gray. “Already the 12 days [when farm workers downed tools] were no more, but now in an urban economy where people didn’t get…

1 Royal Albert Memorial Museum EXETER Where Roman finds are on show There are extensive Roman finds on display here. Exeter is the former legionary base of the Second Augustan Legion and the site of a legionary bathhouse (currently not on display) of a similar design to the legionary fortress baths at Caerleon, which were built later by the same legion. rammuseum.org.uk 2 Chester Roman Amphitheatre CHESTER Where a great Roman landmark lies The county seat of latter-day Cheshire was the legionary base for the Twentieth Victorious Valeria Legion, as well as being home to another great legionary amphitheatre. Discovered in 1929, the partial excavation reveals the largest Roman amphitheatre in Britain. english-heritage.org.uk 3 Yorkshire Museum YORK Where Constantine became emperor Known in Roman times as Eboracum, this legionary base,…

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Born in Okemah, Oklahoma, Woody Guthrie became a radical American singer-songwriter. Best known for writing ‘This Land is Your Land’, his songs about migrant workers of the Great Depression earned him the nickname ‘Dust Bowl Troubadour’. Associated with leftwing causes throughout his life, in the 1960s he inspired a new generation of folk singers, most notably Bob Dylan. Married three times, he fathered eight children before dying at the age of 55 from complications arising from Huntington’s disease, an inherited neurological disorder. When did you first hear about Woody Guthrie? In my teens, before punk, I was obsessed with Bob Dylan, and got into singer-songwriters who were like him, including Woody. At the time, though, it was virtually impossible to get his records where I grew up in Barking, Essex.…

Today the town of Greccio, in the Apennines in central Italy, is a sleepy sort of place. But at Christmas 1223, it welcomed one of the best-known men in the medieval world: Francis of Assisi, Catholic friar and founder of the Franciscan order. And it was Francis who decided that Greccio should put on the world’s first nativity scene. Then in his early forties, Francis was keen to remind the people of Greccio that there was more to Christmas than fancy food and fine gifts. Then, as now, people often lamented that the true meaning of the festival had been lost. So, determined to “commemorate the nativity of the Infant Jesus with great devotion [and] all possible solemnity”, and adamant that there must be no hint of “lightness or novelty”,…

Marlowe is to join Shakespeare on the title pages of Henry VI, Parts One, Two and Three in The New Oxford Shakespeare . How common were writing collaborations? Collaboration takes many different forms – writing one act, adding a scene, or part of one to an already completed work – and was standard practice for playwrights of Shakespeare’s time. Thomas Middleton, Thomas Nashe, John Webster and many others co-wrote drama; Thomas Heywood claimed to have had “a main finger” in 220 plays. Shakespeare collaborated as a jobbing playwright at the beginning of his career, but from 1594 became a founding shareholder and the leading dramatist for a highly successful theatre company. Most of his plays after 1594 are single authored but he collaborated again towards the end…

Is this the most surprising election result in American political history? Adam Smith: It shouldn’t be. After eight years of a Democratic president, with the economy still recovering from a serious recession, the narrow victory of a Republican was always a likely outcome. US politics is cyclical; outside of the exceptional circumstances of the Civil War or the Great Depression, the parties tend to alternate in ascendency every 8 to 12 years. The surprise was only because the pundits were so utterly convinced that Trump would lose. The polls always showed a tighter race than the media consensus would indicate, and there was plenty of instability evident in the electorate. Trump’s die-hard supporters who I talked to on election day claimed to be certain of their man’s success, so it…

I write further to the discussion in December’s Letters about the photo in October’s Anniversaries, purporting to show the Karl Drais pedal-less bike. In 1817 Karl Drais did invent a pedal-less bicycle, known in Germany as a Draisine, and in England as a hobby-horse. The photo you printed actually shows a velocipede (nicknamed the boneshaker), invented in around 1867, probably by the Michaux brothers. By about 1870 the wooden wheels with iron tyres, as shown in your photo, were replaced by wire wheels with metal rims and solid rubber tyres. This development led directly – by increasing the diameter of the front wheel to push up the speed – to the high wheel bicycle, known later as the ‘ordinary’ and nicknamed the penny farthing. By 1885, with the introduction of…

Adrian Goldsworthy is on top form with his Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Pointing out that war was virtually endemic in the ancient world, he explains clearly and persuasively how Rome was able to maintain the peace for such a long period. How did an ancient Greek learn Latin? In Learning Latin the Ancient Way (Cambridge University Press), Eleanor Dickey lifts the curtain on the famous language teacher Dositheus and his imitators. It is the holiday-phrasebook stories that are so fascinating (going to school; shopping; at the baths) – all Latin translated. From life to death, war to peace, power to prostitutes, aliens to apes, beards to bribes, lovers to lawyers and education to equality, you’ll find it all in more…

 One of the greatest thrills of historical research is delving through original manuscripts written by and about the people and events in question. But so often these same manuscripts are relegated to the footnotes of even the most scholarly works. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (Allen Lane), Christopher de Hamel’s brilliant book, restores them to their rightful place in the sun. It explores 12 of the most famous manuscripts in existence and reveals what they tell us about almost a thousand years of medieval history. It’s the story of women who left an indelible mark on 16th-century Europe Sarah Gristwood’s Game of Queens: The Women Who Made 16th-Century Europe (Oneworld) is an engaging and highly readable book telling the interweaving stories of an extraordinary group of women whose struggles for power…

The story of the Brontë family – Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their reckless, brilliant brother Branwell – has enthralled successive generations. New feature-length drama To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters (BBC One, December), written and directed by Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley), looks at the family’s internal dynamics. A starry cast includes Jonathan Pryce (Wolf Hall) as the siblings’ father, Patrick. Also on BBC One, look out for the Call the Midwife Christmas special (December). For those who want to binge on alternate history, series two of The Man in the High Castle will be available via Amazon Prime Video from 16 December. For Henry VIII’s Six Wives (BBC Two, Wednesday 7 December), Lucy Worsley explores key moments in the lives of Catherine of Aragon and her queenly successors. (See our…

“The deep-seated integration of Christian and Muslim life in the city is a reminder that sectarianism has not always defined the Middle East” Bethlehem often seems to exist more in the imagination than in reality. I first visited in 1999 as part of a whistle-stop tour of Israel. Like most visitors, we were bussed to the Church of the Nativity for a 30-minute guided tour. An hour later we were back at the hotel in nearby Jerusalem without having set foot on the streets of Bethlehem beyond the church. As the coach left Bethlehem that day, through an urban sprawl covering the rugged hills of the central West Bank, I wondered what lay beyond the guided tour. Who were the people that lived there? What was the reality behind the…

Black bun Scottish new year celebrations are renowned, and this pastry-wrapped fruit cake has been part of Hogmanay festivities since at least the 18th century. Traditionally, it would have been carried over the threshold by a dark-haired man at midnight to ensure good luck for the house, a custom known as ‘first-footing’. Whether it’s delivered by a tall, dark stranger or simply enjoyed with a cup of tea or whisky, the black bun still makes a tasty treat. INGREDIENTS 350g shortcrust pastry Filling: 225g plain flour 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda 1 tsp mixed spice 1 tsp ground ginger 1 tsp ground cinnamon 1 tsp ground mace 1 tsp baking powder 115g raisins 350g sultanas 350g currants 115g mixed peel 115g pale muscovado sugar 115g chopped almonds 5 tbsp milk…