Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2020 i History Extra

“Welcome to our first issue of 2020. New years often come with resolutions, and giving up alcohol could well be one of them. A century ago, the United States did so en masse, beginning the prohibition era that is now probably best known for the organised crime and illicit nightlife it spawned. But prohibition had numerous other legacies – less familiar, but arguably more important in shaping America’s development over the 20th century. In her article on page 50, Lisa McGirr reveals the many ways in which the ban on alcohol transformed a nation. Quitting drinking is one thing, but hopefully few are planning to give up washing for 2020. Yet, there’s a widespread assumption that this is exactly what our forebears did during the medieval period. As always, the…

When the respected Cambridge classicist Mary Beard (@wmarybeard) recently tweeted, “Can I ask academics of any level of seniority how many hours a week they reckon they work? My current estimate is over 100. I am a mug. But what is the norm in real life?” she can hardly have expected the response that ensued. Rebecca Brückmann (@historleans) led the angry responses: “I’m sorry, but I am not remotely impressed by academics working 100 hours/week... you cannot tell me that you maintain the same productivity for 100 hours as you could for 40–50. And you are setting a horrible example for junior scholars in terms of self-exploitation.” Brückmann continued: “It is quite impossible for people with caring responsibilities, less than stellar health or no means for external cleaning services (plus…

Just over a century ago , a group of idealistic men and women drawn from multiple nationalities moved into a large converted hotel on the shore of Lake Geneva, Switzerland, to begin work. Their mission was nothing less than keeping the world at peace. On 10 January 1920, they formed the Secretariat of the League of Nations, brainchild of the statesmen who had gathered a year earlier in rain-swept Paris to draw up plans for a new global order following the end of the First World War. The Treaty of Versailles that resulted is best remembered for the harsh terms of punishment it imposed on Germany. Yet in providing for the establishment of the league, the treaty also reflected the optimism of those, like American president Woodrow Wilson, who believed…

In the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), two minor characters spot King Arthur. They know who he is because, as one of them points out: “He must be a king… he hasn’t got shit all over him.” The scene encapsulates an enduring belief about the Middle Ages: medieval people, and especially medieval peasants, were dirty and smelly. This impression is bolstered by examples of real medieval people who rarely washed, such as Queen Isabella of Castile. She supposedly boasted that she had bathed only twice in her life: on the day she was born, and on the day she married Ferdinand of Aragon. And it is undoubtedly true that, like everyone who lived before domestic plumbing and electricity became the norm, medieval people would have struggled to…

Rebels at the checkout In May 1907, Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky could all be found at a church in Hackney. The fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was held in the Brotherhood Church on Southgate Road, headquarters of a radical Christian community. London was one of the few cities in Europe where attendees would be free from the threat of arrest. The three future revolutionaries were all delegates to the congress. A Tesco Express now stands on the site. Wrestling with fame Abraham Lincoln is honoured in the USA’s National Wrestling Hall of Fame. The tall, imposing president was a formidable wrestler in his youth. While working as a storekeeper in New Salem, Illinois, he beat the unofficial local champion Jack Armstrong in a now famous bout.…

At a time when Christianity is under attack worldwide, it is refreshing to read an unashamedly admiring study of priests and ministers who have put their lives on the line – and often lost them – fighting for their values against evil. Written by an Anglican curate, this book contains the potted biographies of 15 men and women from various countries and all three major Christian denominations – Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox – who were united in their struggle against Nazism and fascism in the Second World War. Some of the stories Butler-Gallie recounts are already well known – like those of the German Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged for conspiring against Hitler, or the Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe, canonised for sacrificing himself in order to save the life of…

The tragic tale of Marie-Antoinette, the queen of France who perished under the guillotine at the height of the French Revolution, has long fascinated novelists, film-makers and the public. Like many princesses, she was a pawn, married off at 14 to secure an alliance between Austria and France. Her husband, Louis, took seven years to consummate the marriage, bringing mockery on them both, and feeding rumours that the queen was taking her sexual pleasures outside of the king’s bed. The birth of her children came too late to salvage her reputation. For years she enjoyed a frivolous, pleasure-seeking existence, gambling, dancing and enjoying the company of her favourites in semi-seclusion at the Petit Trianon and the hameau – her personal chateau and Normandy-style village – in the grounds of Versailles.…

Kathryn Warner Philippa of Hainault was a remarkable queen, supporting her husband, Edward III, for four decades in the 14th century – even through the wars he waged against her family over the French throne. Kathryn tells the story of a medieval queen who beat the odds on page 60 Katherine Harvey I’m investigating medieval attitudes to the body, including ideas about personal hygiene. We often assume that medieval people were dirty and smelly, but in fact they liked washing just as much as we do! Katherine argues that medieval people were cleaner than we think on page 22 Stephen Tomkins The Puritans felt they were not allowed to worship as the Bible commanded. Since they couldn’t worship correctly in the parish church, they decided to hold their own meetings…

A famous Babylonian tablet contains an early example of ‘fake news’, claims a University of Cambridge academic. Dr Martin Worthington, a senior lecturer in Assyriology at St John’s College, says that a nine-line passage from the Gilgamesh ‘flood’ tablet, discovered in the 19th century, contains cunning wordplay that changes the meaning of a crucial message. The tablet, held in the British Museum, tells the story of the Great Flood – a myth believed to have inspired the Biblical story of Noah. Although the Babylonian god Ea appears to tell Uta-napishti (Noah) that food will “fall from the sky” if he asks others to help him build an ark, Dr Worthington claims the phrase has a double meaning. In the same way that ‘ice cream’ sounds like ‘I scream’, the message…

The Staffordshire Hoard is back in the news. The greatest find from the early English period since the Sutton Hoo ship burial, this treasure trove of almost 4,600 fragments of metalwork, gold, silver and precious stones was found by a metal detectorist in 2009 by the A5 near Lichfield. It was immediately apparent that there was something unusual about the makeup of the hoard. Intriguingly, most of the key items were military. There were 86 sword pommels, 10 sword pyramids (from the hilt ends) and more than 275 pieces of sword hilt plates, with hundreds of other fragments. But there were no belt or scabbard decorations, or ornate horse gear of the kind described in Old English wills. Immediately there were questions. Why was most of it military? Could it…

“From war slave to Victoria’s court: one woman’s amazing story” On 9 December 1867, Queen Victoria received a visit from one of her goddaughters and the child’s mother. This is what the queen wrote in her diary: “Saw Sally, now Mrs Davies, & her dear little child, far blacker than herself, called Victoria & aged four; a lively intelligent child with big melancholy eyes.” ‘Sally’ was Queen Victoria’s name for a woman whose incredible life had, until a few years ago, been almost totally forgotten. She was more formally known as Sarah Forbes Bonetta, but these were not the names she had been given at birth. Going from her marriage certificate, her birth name may well have been ‘Ina’, a name that had been taken from her, along with much…

Clean with wine “There are some women who have sweat that stinks beyond measure,” noted the 12th-century writer Trota of Salerno. She advised cleaning them with a cloth dipped in wine in which “there have been boiled leaves of bilberry, or the bilberries themselves”. Invest in a basin Although medieval people didn’t bathe in the morning, they used an ewer and basin to wash their hands and face when they woke up. The same equipment was used for handwashing throughout the day. Turn to urine Our ancestors washed clothes and domestic linens in a tub, or in a river or stream. And to ensure that their garments emerged thoroughly ‘clean’, they sometimes added stale urine or wood ash to the water. Shave your hair… One way to combat dirt was…

As a historian who’s always searching for the text or the image that makes us re-evaluate the past, I’ve become preoccupied with looking for photographs that show our Victorian ancestors smiling (what better way to shatter the image of 19th-century prudery?). I’ve found quite a few, and – since I started posting them on Twitter – they have been causing quite a stir. People have been surprised to see evidence that Victorians had fun and could, and did, laugh. They are noting that the Victorians suddenly seem to become more human as the hundred-or-so years that separate us fade away through our common experience of laughter. Of course, I need to concede that my collection of ‘Smiling Victorians’ makes up only a tiny percentage of the vast catalogue of photographic…

Philippa was traded for ships and soldiers so her mother-in-law could invade England – the most unromantic marriage imaginable On 24 September 1326 Isabella of France, the estranged queen of Edward II, landed on the Suffolk coast. She arrived at the head of a force of 1,500 mercenaries, there to enforce her audacious plan to take the English throne from her husband in favour of the couple’s son, Edward of Windsor, the future Edward III. She had also sworn to destroy her husband’s powerful, detested and despotic chamberlain, Hugh Despenser the Younger. Isabella succeeded. Within two months, a man the king had elevated to the status of his co-ruler had been executed – a term that hardly does justice to the grotesque humiliations he endured on the day of his…

Launched in 1620, the Mayflower voyage – which carried the first English Puritans to North America – had a long gestation period in England. Stephen Tomkins’ new book explores the Protestant separatist movement that eventually culminated in the journey. Puritanism emerged under the Protestant regime of Elizabeth I, fuelled by dissatisfaction at perceived church corruption. The dissenters splintered into several groups – including Baptists and Brownists – all of which were illegal. Faced with fierce state persecution, they looked to move abroad, eventually turning to North America. Ellie Cawthorne: How did Puritanism begin in England? Stephen Tomkins: England had a state church at the time, which every person in the country would be expected to attend. Anyone who went against this would be breaking the law. During Elizabeth I’s reign,…

Julia Lovell on the lasting legacy of Maoism “Mao and his ideas are insufficiently understood, especially in the west. I think that the spread and the resilience of these ideas has been underestimated. They have arguably been dismissed as irrelevant – consigned to the dustbin of history. Therefore Maoism perhaps appears more unthreatening and more mockable than, say, the ideas of Nazism and Stalinism.” Lara Maiklem on looking for historical treasures along the river Thames “Down by the foreshore of the river, it’s almost like time travelling – when you pick something up, you know that you could be the first person in thousands of years to have touched it since the last person dropped it. The Thames contains more than 2,000 years of history, so you never know what…

My ‘classic book’ would have to be Eric Ives’s masterpiece The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (2004). An extended and revised version of his earlier work Anne Boleyn, published in 1986, it is without doubt the best biography of Henry VIII’s controversial second wife ever written. I was privileged to hear Professor Ives lecture on the subject, and his passion and breadth of knowledge were wonderfully impressive. Ives put forward the convincing theory that Thomas Cromwell, rather than Henry VIII, was the architect of Anne’s fall. He portrayed her as a powerful Renaissance woman who projected herself fearlessly into what was then very much a man’s world. Ives's examination of the books Anne read and her patronage of artists such as Hans Holbein the Younger broadened our knowledge of…

The heroine of your book is Mary Bennet – a minor character in Pride and Prejudice. What was it about her that captured your imagination? Poor Mary – dowdy, pompous and awkward, she’s the only Bennet sister who’s made the terrible mistake of failing to be born beautiful. This is a misfortune for which there’s no forgiveness. No one likes her, and her family mostly ignore her. Even her creator was merciless towards her – the only scene in which she plays a central role is one of horrible public humiliation, when her father leads her from the piano with the wounding words: “You have delighted us long enough.” But I began to feel sorry for sad, lonely Mary. I wondered how she had become such an unappealing figure. What,…

“Christine Keeler wasn’t a pushover. She spoke back, and that’s arguably what got her into trouble” The series charts the scandal that erupted in 1963 when it was revealed that Tory minister John Profumo had been having an affair with showgirl Christine Keeler. What is the drama’s approach to the story? The Profumo affair is like Watergate, in that everyone knows about it, but the details are obscured through reportage and history. However, one thing that Amanda [Coe, screenwriter] felt strongly was that nobody had ever asked what it must have been like for two 19-year-olds – Keeler and her friend, Mandy Rice-Davies – to be at the centre of that story. How did Coe research the project? Amanda has this wonderful ability to corral every bit of literature available,…

Hedy Lamarr 1914–2000 When did you first hear about Lamarr? I’ve been a big fan of her films – Hollywood classics like Cecil B DeMille’s biblical romantic drama Samson and Delilah (1949), which I think is absolutely hilarious – ever since my teens. I quite liked her racy personal life and the fact that she was very much her own woman. However, I learnt a lot more about her from an excellent documentary called Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story which I saw a couple of years ago. What kind of person was she? She was incredibly talented. I respect anybody who can move between disciplines like she did, and be both a big-screen star and a serious mathematician, whose research all those years ago helped lay the basis for the…

Born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna into a wealthy Jewish family, Hedy Lamarr is best known for starring in hit Hollywood films such as Lady of the Tropics (1939) and Boom Town (1940). She was also a gifted inventor, helping develop a radio guidance system for torpedoes to counter the threat of jamming, patented during the Second World War. The principles of her work are incorporated into Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technology. The six-times-married mother-of-three died a recluse in Florida, aged 85.…

Photographs charting the work of one of Britain’s largest building firms are to be digitised as part of a new project led by Historic England. The Breaking New Ground initiative will scan more than 10,000 images from the collections of John Laing, which worked on construction projects ranging from the M1 motorway to the modernist Coventry Cathedral. A tranche of 2,000 photographs will be viewable at historicengland.org.uk from 13 January, with the remainder uploaded by autumn 2020. The image above shows a tunnel being built at Berkeley Nuclear Power Station, Gloucestershire in 1958. Have a story? Please email Jon Bauckham at jon.bauckham@immediate.co.uk…

10 JANUARY 1776 Common Sense fires up America Thomas Paine’s revolutionary tract urges colonists to cut ties with Britain In the autumn of 1774, the radical pamphlet- eer Thomas Paine arrived in the New World. The American colonies were in open revolt; already the first shots had been fired in what would become the War of Independence. But to his disappointment, Paine found that many Americans were not yet ready to contemplate the ultimate breach. “Their attachment to Britain was obstinate,” he recalled, “and it was, at that time, a kind of treason to speak against it. Their ideas of grievance operated without resentment, and their single object was reconciliation.” This, Paine decided, was where he must come in. By the end of 1775 Paine had finished work on a…

In search of Hadrian I enjoyed Michael Wood’s article about Anglo-Saxon studies in your December issue (Comment). Apart from anything else it contained probably the most intriguing and thought-provoking aside I think I have ever read. In parenthesis Mr Wood commented: “(The Libyan Hadrian, a ‘man of African race’, along with the Syrian Theodore, is the most important figure in the history of education in England.)” Theodore was archbishop of Canterbury from 668 to 690. Simon Schama’s History of Britain doesn’t mention either him or Hadrian. Rebecca Fraser’s A People’s History of Britain tells us that Theodore established training schools and ensured that “gifted children whatever their means” could attend school. He also reformed the curriculum to include Greek, Latin and the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry,…

In 1932, as the Great Depression pushed unemployment towards 3.5 million, and swathes of Britain were branded ‘Distressed Areas’, a posh young politician called John Strachey was trying to find a way through the crisis. He had broken from Labour to join his friend Oswald Mosley’s New party. Then, watching Mosley turn fascist, Strachey turned Marxist – and published a book that captured the great fear of his time. The Coming Struggle for Power warned that capitalism was growing desperate, and would soon abandon democracy: “The democratic forms, liberal ideas, and subtle methods of the rule of the capitalist class have to be scrapped. Direct, open terror against the workers, violent aggression against its rivals, can alone enable a modern empire to maintain itself. A name for such a policy…

THE MEDDLER Eleanor of Provence married Henry III in January 1236 and was the mother of Edward I, who was born in June 1239. In  the early 1250s, King Henry grew exasperated with his wife’s meddling in politics and expelled her from court, exclaiming: “How high does the arrogance of woman rise if it is not restrained?” Although the couple reconciled, Eleanor was grossly unpopular with her husband’s subjects, and in 1263 a London mob pelted her with rubbish as her barge passed along the Thames. THE SHE-WOLF Isabella of France, Queen Philippa’s mother-in-law, married Edward II in January 1308. Throughout Edward’s turbulent  reign she gained a reputation as a mediator between her husband and his disgruntled barons, and was popular – especially when she rid England of the king’s…

The brief, dramatic reign of Richard III will always fascinate us. Michael Hicks has added to the considerable body of work on the king with this important new study, which eschews a broad survey of Richard’s life and times in favour of a more focused look at Richard the man. This is not, as the cover blurb enthusiastically claims, the first detailed account of Richard III’s entire life. Many have trodden that path before, but Hicks adds considerably to the picture, stating: “A mature man does not change his whole character once he becomes king.” To understand his reign, one has to make sense of what preceded it. And Richard’s formative experiences as Duke of Gloucester, particularly in the period between 1471 and 1483, form the heart of the book.…

Desmond Seward is a prolific author of an impressively broad range of popular histories. His latest, The King Over the Water, spans the rise and fall (as a political force at least) of the Jacobite ‘movement’. In brief, the book traces those within the British Isles and beyond who supported, with varying degrees of enthusiasm or activism, the restoration of the Catholic Stuart king, James II and VII, and his legitimate male heirs, after the so-called Protestant ‘Glorious Revolution’. While Seward makes full use of the latest historical research and subject mainstays, there are no fresh revelations from the archives here. Rather, the author argues, the innovation lies in the approach, which is to cover the whole Jacobite period, from 1688 to the death of James’s grandson Henry in 1807;…

On 25 July 1943, soon after the Allied landing in Sicily, Mussolini and his Fascist regime were swept from power. It was not the anti-Fascist resistance but the Italian political establishment that pulled the plug on Il Duce. The new government, under Marshal Badoglio, officially maintained ties with Nazi Germany, fearing reprisals. Behind the scenes, there were secret negotiations for an armistice with the Allies, and on 8 September it was officially announced. Germany immediately invaded those parts of Italy not yet in Allied hands. The Nazis reinstated Mussolini as head of a satellite state that soon came to be known as the Italian Social Republic. Meanwhile, radical Fascists, with the help of the German occupiers, created a nasty regime bent on restoring Italy’s ‘honour’ after the supposed betrayal of…

MILITARY Super troopers Dismissed from the SAS for ‘misuse of explosives’, Ranulph Fiennes enjoyed only a short-lived stint in the special forces. Nonetheless, the arctic adventurer draws on his own experiences, and those of his father, to tell a much longer history of elite units, ranging from ancient Rome’s Praetorian Guard right up to today’s US Navy Seals, via the Knights Templar, ninjas and the New Model Army. UNITED STATES From slave to spy As Professor Erica Dunbar notes, Harriet Tubman’s life story is one that needs no embellishment – not only did she escape slavery before helping hundreds of others flee bondage, she was also a fearless activist and Civil War spy. With engaging sidebars and contemporary illustrations, this accessible book offers a new take on the life and…