Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2020 i History Extra

“When we think of King Edward the Confessor today, two images probably spring to mind. One is the elderly presence in the Bayeux Tapestry whose death sets the scene for the dynamic figures of Harold and William to do battle for the throne. The second, is a man of extreme piety – “little more than a monk in a crown”, as Tom Licence writes in this month’s edition. By focusing on these two aspects, however, we miss a different side of Edward, whose successful 24-year reign was testament to his diplomatic vigour and military acumen. In this month’s cover feature, Tom offers a more rounded picture of Edward and also tackles the ongoing debate about whether he offered William the crown. You can read his piece on page 46. Earlier…

EYE-OPENER Financial ruin A Maya temple looms over the jungle at a site at Palenque, in southern Mexico. It’s among the many ancient sites that could be at risk following a huge cut in the money set aside to preserve the nation’s heritage. Announced in June, the cuts represent a 75 per cent reduction in the budget of the National Institute of Anthropology and History, the body responsible for maintaining museums, archives, monuments and historical sites. Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, insisted that the funds needed to be reallocated to hospitals as the effects of the ongoing coronavirus crisis continue to be felt around the world. Mexico has been particularly badly affected by the pandemic, with more than 30,000 deaths recorded by the start of July. However, the move…

“Reality TV has changed our culture in a way that historians can’t ignore” The changes in television during my time making films have been truly astonishing. July marked 20 years since the first episode of Big Brother aired on British TV, and Radio 4 recently broadcast a fascinating show called Watching Us (available on BBC Sounds), which explores how reality TV has given birth to new kinds of societal attitudes pervasive enough to mark a change in our culture that historians simply cannot ignore. It put me in mind of the turbulent events of 1968 and a book that left its mark on us students then, even though we didn’t see as clearly as its author the direction in which things were heading (to be fair to us, this was…

“The British defeat left former slaves in the US in a terrifying predicament” During the American Revolution, the British made an extraordinary promise. They issued proclamations informing all slaves whose owners had joined the rebellion that, if they came over to the British lines, they would be freed. Thousands did exactly that. Some of these so-called ‘black loyalists’ were formed into special regiments and fought against the rebels wearing sashes or badges that read ‘liberty to slaves’. But after the British defeat at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, these former slaves were put in a terrifying predicament. Their legal owners were determined to reclaim their human property once the last of the British forces withdrew. In 1783, on the eve of their evacuation from the US, the British did…

Why did doctors believe that bloodletting would improve a patient’s health? Bloodletting dates back thousands of years to the Egyptians. It gained widespread popularity through the writings of the Greek physician Galen, who practised medicine in Rome during the second century AD. He believed that humans carried four bodily humours inside them: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. When these four humours became imbalanced, a person became ill. Health could be restored through purging, starving, vomiting, or bloodletting – all of which would help rid the body of the superfluous or corrupt humours. While bloodletting may seem barbaric to modern eyes, it was considered a standard part of medical treatment for centuries, demanded by patients themselves. Take George Washington, who woke on the morning of 14 December 1799 complaining…

One of the great debates of Edward’s reign is whether he promised the throne to William, Duke of Normandy. The larger question to consider is whether he promised the throne to more than one person, including Harold. Some historians see Edward as a wily monarch who dangled the throne before multiple candidates to get them to do his bidding. Their case rests on the insistence of William’s supporters, and Harold’s, that Edward had promised the throne to their man. The problem is that all the noise about alleged promises post-dates 1066. There is not a shred of evidence from Edward’s lifetime for any of it. If Edward promised the throne to William (c1051, as is claimed) the Normans would have shouted it from the rooftops. But Norman writings of the…

From the sublime to the ridiculous Marginalia was used to both praise God and subvert the natural order The format most commonly associated with the term ‘marginalia’ is, perhaps, the manuscript illumination. Illumination, from the Latin ‘illuminare’ (meaning to ‘enlighten’ or ‘illuminate’), refers to the decoration of a manuscript with colour, including gold and silver leaf. This form of decoration, designed as part of a book’s original scheme, surrounds the text block with any combination of decorated initials, as well as border design including marginal figures and scenes. As such, it gave rise to many of the marginal characters with which historians are most familiar today. Our first example (above right) shows these elements of decoration in a 14th-century legal text entitled Statutes of the Realm, designed for use by…

Ellie Cawthorne: When you tell people you are writing a book on the Freemasons, what are the initial reactions you get? John Dickie: In Britain, I think there are two competing stories that dominate discussions of Freemasonry. On the one hand, they appear in the public imagination as a shady organisation with something to hide. And this is what fuels the newspaper coverage they get – outlandish stories in which they are responsible for cover-ups of the sinking of the Titanic, or the Hillsborough disaster. People put two Freemasons in a row and make a conspiracy. Counter to that runs the Freemasons’ own narrative of their history, one of a noble, honourable tradition of brotherhood and altruism. This, admittedly, is much more dull. But somewhere in between these two stories…

If you could hop in a time machine and go back to one period of history, which would it be? It’s a fun game to play. I would travel back to AD 1000, the pinnacle of the great traditional civilisations, and journey across the world. This is the moment when, with a bit of luck and a couple of good phrase books (they had them), you could set out from Dover, across Europe to Byzantium, through Cairo in the brilliant Fatimid caliphate, then out on the Silk Road across central Asia – or down into Cholan India, and take one of the sea routes through Indonesia to the thronging ports of Song China, one of history’s greatest civilisations. There you could relax with beer on the shore of the Yellow…

What inspired you to create a story about medieval pilgrims? I first read about pilgrimages when I was researching a non-fiction book, Rome: A History in Seven Sackings, and the subject immediately appealed to me. I love writing about journeys, just as I love going on them, and I’m interested in people who travel not for ordinary reasons but because of beliefs they hold. I was particularly intrigued by the 13th century, as it was an age of intense religious fervour. The novel offered a great excuse for me to learn about medieval England, which was a new world for me, and one which I hugely enjoyed discovering. Who are some of the characters you send on your fictional pilgrimage? The characters were inspired by the wildly different motives that…

Mary Seacole 1805–81 IN PROFILE Mary Seacole was a Caribbean-born, Anglo-Jamaican businesswoman and pioneer nurse best known for the comfort that she provided for wounded British soldiers in the Crimean War. Her 1857 autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, is one of the earliest memoirs of a mixed-race woman. In 2004 she was voted the greatest black Briton, and in 2016 a statue of her was erected in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital, London. “Seacole wasn’t just ambitious and positive-thinking – she was also someone with a lot of integrity and passion to do good for other people in the world” When did you first hear about Seacole? I first heard about her when her autobiography was republished in the 1980s. She was celebrated in her…

Tom Licence Legitimacy, holy mystique, prioritising peace but crushing enemies – these were the ingredients of a successful reign. We admire the warrior Harold of 1066, but Edward the Confessor teaches us more about kingship. Tom re-evaluates the reign of Edward the Confessor on page 46 Afua Hirsch Each African country we explore in my new series had a story to tell that we felt was a little bit different to what people are used to hearing. Africa has so much to offer the world, including the sheer brilliance of the art it’s producing now. Afua reveals how Africa is looking beyond its traumatic past on page 39 Diana Preston While researching the development of the atom bomb, I was fortunate enough to interview survivors of Hiroshima, the last living…

An inspiring conversation unfolded on Twitter after Chris Millard (@chrismillard83) asked: “In your humble opinions, which historian is the best, most stylish, or most lucid writer?” There were many suggestions, some more familiar than others. Among the discoveries for me was the late German historian Thomas Nipperdey, who Alexander Schmidt (@alexchalkeus) believes “rewards those who made the painful effort to learn academic German with an exceptionally elegant prose”. Susan D Amussen (@susandamussen), and many others, suggested one of my all-time favourites: the Canadian-American early modern specialist Natalie Zemon Davis. As Sharon Strocchia (@SharonStrocchia) put it: “I use her essays to teach prose writing. Impeccable topic sentences, brilliant paragraph structure, human warmth and voice. Plus she’s a master of the lost art of the essay.” Another much-cited name was social historian…

LETTER OF THE MONTH Airlifts and airdrops Reader Joseph Nicholas is correct when he writes (Letters, August) that the main focus of the Allies’ attempt to break the Soviet Union’s blockade of West Berlin in 1948–49 was an airlift, with planes full of food and other essential materials landing regularly at Tempelhof airport. But it should not be forgotten, and I mention this in partial defence of your crossword setter, that there were also airdrops. One of the best known was Operation Little Vittles. This was the brainchild of American pilot Gail Halvorsen who arranged to drop sweets, chocolate and chewing gum to the children of the city. He told the children that they would recognise his aircraft because he would “wiggle his wings” before parachuting the goodies down to…

Donald Trump appears to be an American president like no other. He has attacked political opponents with a venom unmatched by his predecessors. His apparent disregard for the truth, such as when refusing to accept photographic evidence that more people attended Barack Obama’s inauguration than his own, has shocked many observers. His musings – such as his comment that it would be “interesting” to consider the injection of disinfectant as a treatment for Covid – have sometimes appeared eccentric (even though, in this case, he later claimed that he was being sarcastic). These are but a few examples of a brand of presidential leadership that appears unique. As one journalist put it a year into the Trump presidency: “Donald Trump was a very different kind of presidential candidate and from…

It’s a divisive issue. For some, the idea is horrifying. For others, it is an everyday part of reading. Whatever your view, each time you open a book, you leave behind evidence of you, the user: a note in the margin, a thumbprint on the cover, a folded corner acting as a bookmark, or perhaps even a crinkled edge or two from having read it in the bath. Books live lives. They amass a biography as they pass through the hands of their creators and readers. And that’s every bit as true of medieval texts as it is of the thrillers, the fantasies and the romances (not to mention the history books) we read today. In the case of medieval books, this lived biography can be traced through the strange…

The latest in the attractive Penguin Monarchs series, this little book offers an account of England’s most notoriously terrible king. Vincent tackles this reputation head-on, describing a historical tradition that forever associates John with Magna Carta: his reign’s most important achievement, coming from his greatest failure and humiliation. Our picture of John’s military, governmental, and personal shortcomings has been shaped by hindsight: lionising the treaty made at Runnymede in 1215 as the foundation of legal liberties and justice against tyranny, brought about by John’s inadequacies as both a king and human being. This is problematic constitutional history (not least because of the relative unimportance of the 1215 version of the charter, revoked within weeks). Yet the dark caricature survives, given flesh in the popular imagination by the legends of Robin…

Ravenna is a deceptive place, hiding its momentous history under the ambience of a quiet provincial city. In the evocative introduction to this new book, Judith Herrin describes how, during a visit to the Italian town on a hot summer’s day in the 1970s, she felt frustrated that none of the available guidebooks placed the extraordinary early medieval buildings in any kind of coherent historical context. This book is the eventual result. Beautifully illustrated, impeccably researched and accessibly presented, it traces Ravenna’s career as the capital of the Roman empire in the west. The story begins in AD 402, when the western Roman emperor Honorius moved his court to the city to escape invading Goths, and comes to an end 400 years later, when it was absorbed into the empire…

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From political upheavals to the deaths of key leaders, many forces contributed to the collapse of the Roman Republic in the first century BC. Now the authors of a new study have used geological data, climate modelling and historical records to suggest an additional factor: the eruption of a volcano 6,000 miles away. The team analysed volcanic ash preserved in Arctic ice cores, matching it to a sample taken from Mount Okmok in Alaska and dating it to an eruption in 43 BC. They then set about exploring the impact of the eruption and found that, although it remains one of the largest of the past few thousand years, it wasn’t the magnitude that caused the most far-reaching consequences, but the nature of the particles it spewed out. Because these…

Five hundred years ago, Sultan Suleiman I (reigned 1520–66) ascended to the throne. Although he was the longest-reigning and arguably greatest of all Ottoman sultans, his time on the throne began under the long shadow cast by his father, Selim ‘the Grim’. On 30 September 1520, the 26-year-old Suleiman landed at Üsküdar on the Asian side of the Bosporus, having learned of the sudden death of his father just eight days earlier. Selim’s death was kept secret as the Janissaries, his elite infantry and household troops, were notoriously volatile when it came to political succession. The next day Suleiman crossed the strait and headed to the Topkapı palace, where he met the political and religious leaders of the imperial divan (or council) who swore their allegiance to him. He then…

Think of Edward the Confessor, and you’ll probably imagine an old, grey king, approaching death. This is how we see him depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry, in iconography inspired by his saint’s cult, and in TV dramatisations of the Norman conquest. We think of Edward the saint, preparing his soul for heaven, and we regard his reign as a prelude to the more exciting events of 1066. Like Charles Dickens, in his A Child’s History of England, we quickly pass over “the dreary old Confessor” to get to “the brave Harold”. Edward has become linked in our minds with the decline of Anglo-Saxon England, Harold to its final defence. Yet Edward’s reign is the key to many mysteries, including how England came to be conquered. Reputations can be misleading. It…

John F Kennedy (president from 1961–63) As president, John F Kennedy relied heavily on his family – and so does Donald Trump. Trump made his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner key aides; JFK’s brother Robert was attorney general and his most influential adviser. Both men’s notoriously turbulent private lives have generated a blizzard of headlines – though, in Kennedy’s case, those wouldn’t appear until after his death. Both authorised substantial military build-ups and supported large tax cuts. Richard Nixon (1969–74) Nixon believed himself to be under siege from the press – much as Trump does now. Trump uses Twitter to attack journalists, while Nixon instructed his vice president, Spiro Agnew, to give speeches criticising the media. Against the backdrop of the social upheavals of the 1960s, Nixon called for…

We don’t think of potatoes as exotic. Quite the opposite; they are utterly familiar. When the artist Subodh Gupta was growing up in 1970s India, he wondered whether everyone ate potatoes, or if it was only people in Bihar. A French traveller visiting Colombia in the early 19th century was surprised to see ‘European’ potatoes sold alongside South American vegetables such as cassava. For an Indian boy, potatoes are Indian. For a Frenchman, they are European. This is pretty remarkable for a food unknown to most of humanity before the 16th century. Until then the only people who ate potatoes lived along the spine of mountains that runs from the Andes in Bolivia and Chile north through the Rockies. This ‘American cordillera’, as it’s called, is the origin of potatoes.…

David Abulafia on how the oceans have shaped human history “There are many ways of writing maritime history. But what I’m really interested in is the way that humans have interacted with the oceans – using them as a means of global communication, often between continents. The Mediterranean, for example, is where Asia, Europe and Africa meet. I’m intrigued by what we can learn when we focus on the sea itself, rather than the lands around it.” Alice Procter on museums and colonialism “If you look at the objects on display in museums, there’s a lot of emphasis on how they are made or their beauty. But we don’t see much about where these objects come from and how they ended up on display. Yet many pieces have really contested…

The royal soap opera saga of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle gives an uncanny topicality to this account of the last time a British royal gave up his regal responsibilities for an American wife: the 1936 abdication crisis. The two episodes echo Karl Marx’s dictum that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. For where Edward VIII’s slavish passion for the twice-married Wallis Simpson rocked the monarchy and threatened to bring down the government, Harry’s devotion to another US divorcee has not had quite the same political impact. Alexander Larman has done a thoroughly researched job in retelling this oft-told tale and has made some fresh discoveries that shed new light on the affair. In particular, he shows that a man named McMahon, who pulled a loaded gun…

SCIENCE Radioactive fever In the early 20th century, Britons clamoured for a seemingly magical new substance: radium. This supposed wonderstuff was packed into all kinds of everyday goods, from radium water sold over the counter at Harrods and glow-in-the-dark watches to radioactive hair tonic guaranteed to “give unparalleled satisfaction”. Santos’s book offers an alarming case study of how consumer culture can turn toxic. ART HISTORY Artistic double act It’s hard to think of a city more celebrated for its artistic heritage than Rome. But, argues Loyd Grossman, much of that reputation is down to a serious facelift that the Eternal City underwent in the 17th century. In this love letter to the ‘city of statues’, Grossman recounts how Pope Alexander VII and Bernini teamed up to create Baroque masterpieces that…