Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2021 i History Extra

JANUARY 2021 “Happy new year to all our readers. For many of you, I suspect, 2021 can’t have come quickly enough, and one reason for optimism about the coming year is the promising news regarding several Covid-19 vaccines. It’s a remarkable scientific achievement, but not, of course, the first time that deadly diseases have been fought in this way. On page 38, Gareth Williams looks back at the race to inoculate us against smallpox, polio, TB and rabies, revealing the human stories behind these dramatic breakthroughs. Although overshadowed by the pandemic, Brexit has not gone away, and the transition process is due to have ended by the start of 2021. In our books interview on page 76, Robert Tombs discusses the roots of Britain’s departure from the EU and argues…

EYE-OPENER Monumental decision The A303 currently runs past the site of Stonehenge in Wiltshire - a course that looks set to be reshaped due to a government decision in November. The road will be turned into a dual-carriageway tunnel running underneath the monument, boosting the size of what is a major route to and from the south-west of England. The decision was made by the Department of Transport despite the Planning Inspectorate warning of “permanent, irreversible harm” to the site. However, the UK government insisted that “the secretary of state is satisfied that, on balance, the need case for the development together with the other benefits identified outweigh any harm”. Have a story? Please email Matt Elton at matt.elton@immediate.co.uk…

24 JANUARY AD 41 Claudius becomes emperor The sickly scholar is invited to rule Rome in his nephew’s place When the Roman aristocrat Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus, better known simply as Claudius, awoke on 24 January AD 41, he never imagined he would end the day as emperor. His nephew Caligula, in charge for almost four years, was still a young man. A sickly, scholarly figure, Claudius was 50 years old and had never been seen as a serious political figure. There seemed no reason for that to change. And then, suddenly, everything was thrown into flux. During the Palatine Games, which were held to honour his ancestor Augustus, Caligula was murdered by the Praetorian Guard. The conspirators hoped - among other aims - to restore senatorial rule, but in…

Regarding Corinne Fowler’s feature The Colonial Secrets of Britain’s Stately Homes (December), as well as letters and comments I’ve read on the subject, there’s something I’d like to say. As a history graduate who is as passionate about studying academically as I am about enjoying public history, I am often deeply upset at the attitudes of some regarding our colonial links. I also often ask myself why so many people seem to be so angry about sharing the full depths of the histories of stately homes. I wholeheartedly agree with Fowler’s thoughts and found it particularly interesting that her previous research revealed a common objection that “the past is the past”. History is not what happened, but how we interpret what happened. This is how and why so many new…

1. Don’t spin too many plates Operation Husky was planned while the Tunisian campaign was in full flow, which meant the Allied commanders all had their hands full with the current battle while trying to organise the next. Too many plates were being spun at once, which made the success of the eventual plan for Sicily even more remarkable. The lesson was learned, however: for Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, all the principal commanders were withdrawn from frontline duties and told to concentrate fully on the task ahead of them. This included most of the air commanders and a number of the naval commanders, as well as Generals Eisenhower, Montgomery and Patton, all of whom had been involved in both Tunisia and Sicily. 2. Work as a “brotherhood” General Harold…

The 1745 Jacobite Rebellion came to a bloody end on 16 April 1746 at Culloden Muir near Inverness. Throughout the battle, Charles Edward Stuart (better known to posterity as Bonnie Prince Charlie) had been among his hungry and exhausted troops, shouting encouragement. The prince’s prominence in the thick of it, surrounded by his horse guard, had made him a target for well-trained British-army gunners. Several officers nearby were wounded by the explosions, with one horse’s hind leg left hanging from the skin. Charles was unhurt, but his face and clothes were splattered with mud. As the Jacobite lines collapsed, signalling a total rout, all observers agree that Charles, the 25-year-old Jacobite leader, left the battlefield accompanied by a small mounted guard and some of his senior advisers. But, beyond this,…

Ellie Cawthorne: Your new book looks at Brexit, but from the perspective of a longer history of the relationship between Britain and Europe. What made you want to write this book? Robert Tombs: Our ideas about Europe, our relationship with Europe and the difficulties of that relationship - the whole European project, in fact - are all essentially based on an understanding of the past (and hence of the present), and expectations about the future. You could write endless books about Brexit and the EU, analysing political structures, economic systems and so on. But I think there’s a whole dimension of the decision that can only be understood as a reflection on the past, so therefore we have to take a historical approach. One of the central tenets of your…

In the summer of 1720, shares in the South Sea Company hit their peak – a rise of tenfold – before the bubble burst. The story was recalled in the days of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, in the global financial crisis of 2008, and again in the world of Covid-19. When we emerge from the pandemic, how will the state fund the massive rise in public debt? Now, low interest rates can be ‘locked in’; in the early 18th century, however, the problem was precisely the opposite. The government issued loans with high interest rates, but was not able to pay them off or redeem them without the consent of their creditors. Of course, the creditors had no incentive to surrender an interest rate twice what they…

As victorious Allied forces searched the Berlin headquarters of the Gestapo in 1945, they discovered among the files a remarkable document. Although many parts of the German war machine had been poorly prepared for an invasion of Britain, it turned out that the secret police had in 1940 drawn up a list of 2,619 people it would arrest once it had control of the country The official title of this work was the Sonderfahndungliste GB (‘Special Search List Great Britain’), but it quickly became known as the ‘Black Book’. Many of the people on it were unsurprising. It featured politicians, military personnel and intelligence officers. More than half the people had escaped from Germany or Austria, and many were Jews. But the presence of others on the list was a…

VISUAL Sapiens: A Graphic History by Yuval Noah Harari and collaborators (Harvill Seeker, 248 pages, £18.99) Graphic content Since it was published in 2011, Sapiens has sold more than 10 million copies, providing countless dinner party guests with conversational ammunition. Considering its success, new editions are no surprise – but reworking it as a graphic novel is an unexpected approach. The lively, engaging result transforms humanity’s complex evolutionary story into something accessible enough for anyone to enjoy. FICTION Outlawed by Anna North (Orion, 272 pages, £14.99) On the wild side “In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw” – so declares Anna North’s heroine at the opening of this feminist take on the traditional Western. After failing to conceive, newly wed Ada throws off the shackles of…

The Archers, Radio 4’s long-running ‘everyday story of country folk’, is turning 70. Social historian DAVID KYNASTON tells us about his new documentary exploring how the drama has reflected real-life issues What was the thinking behind The Archers when it first launched? British agriculture was in a poor way between the wars, so the authorities wanted to put it on a sound economic footing. In the context of postwar austerity, there was also a desire to be able to supply cheap food to urban consumers rather than having to rely on imports. It’s like that line from Mary Poppins: “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” The ‘medicine’ was the advice to farmers being fed into the series by the government. The ‘sugar’ was the human drama around…

Emily Guerry The central place of Saint Thomas Becket - as a rebel, martyr and healer - in medieval visual culture fascinates me, and I am particularly interested in the iconography of his martyrdom in Gothic art. Emily delves into the cult that sprouted around the archbishop after his murder on page 20 James Holland I travelled extensively around Sicily to research my book. It’s a beautiful island but with a roughness and toughness to it, and even today I find myself marvelling at how difficult a place it must have been for those fighting there in 1943. James argues the invasion of Sicily should be celebrated, not criticised on page 50 Kavita Puri Racism was much less overt than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, but if you…

The phrases ‘National Trust’ and ‘woke agenda’ may not often be sighted in the same sentence, but the latter was the charge of 28 MPs who wrote to The Daily Telegraph in November in response to the Trust’s new report into its properties’ colonial histories. The MPs were particularly incensed that the report “implicitly tarnished one of Britain’s greatest sons [Churchill] by linking his family home, Chartwell, with slavery and colonialism”. They also criticised the decision of the National Maritime Museum, in light of the Black Lives Matter protests, to portray “multiple perspectives on history” and thus review Nelson’s “heroic status”. History must not, the letter concluded, “be sanitised nor rewritten to suit ‘snowflake’ preoccupations”. Cue the Twitterstorm. In the words of Greg Jenner (@greg_ jenner): “That’s LITERALLY what history…

On 29 December 1170, four of King Henry II’s knights murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket inside Canterbury Cathedral, scattering his blood and brains across the pavement. The killing, 850 years ago, marked the end of one of the most brilliant, divisive careers of England’s Middle Ages. Yet, in many ways, it was also a beginning. News of Becket’s killing spread quickly and, in a matter of months, he had been transformed into one of the most famous martyrs in Christian history. Becket was canonised a mere three years after his death, while, within a decade, Canterbury monks had recorded 703 miracles related to the slain archbishop, and tens of thousands of visitors had flocked to the cathedral to venerate his remains. Supported by the circulation of new liturgies, miracle stories, sacred…

The long history of interactions between Africa and Europe has been subject to increasing research efforts by scholars and activists in recent decades. Yet this new publication offers an unusually intimate narration of many African individuals present in various locations and time periods in Europe over the last 2,000 years, from Roman emperors to the migrants of the modern era. As well as demystifying the longstanding and complicated presence of African people in Europe, this book by University of Bristol professor Olivette Otele explains the role that complex intersections of class, skin colour, nationality and gender played in the nuanced experiences of African individuals. Otele carries out the important work of grappling with how notions of race and racialism have been configured in Europe over the two millennia. She traces…

The British Indian Army provides largely untapped resources for thinking about multiculturalism in and beyond the contemporary United Kingdom. In The Indian Contingent, Ghee Bowman follows an Indian Army muleteer [mule-driving] unit, Force K6, which arrived in France in December 1939. Widely known in wartime Britain, memory of K6, like much of the empire contribution to the Second World War, was a casualty of the postwar ‘England alone’ story. Bowman travels with K6’s officers and other ranks from the Punjab to the French countryside, and onwards through England, Wales and Scotland before returning to India in early 1944. K6 attracted media and local interest wherever its companies were billeted, a trail Bowman mines assiduously for the human side of soldiering. Like the Indian Army authorities, Bowman is particularly interested in…

Rhiannon Davies Tuning in to Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland’s new podcast, The Rest is History, during the latest lockdown has offered a great window of escape from the humdrum of hand sanitiser and endless quiet nights in. With Sandbrook’s speciality being modern history and Holland taking charge of all things ancient, the two perspectives mesh together to offer fascinating insights on both the past and the present. The pair grapple with big historical questions, such as what makes a figure ‘great’, while still finding plenty of time to amble down historical rabbit holes, including discussions of whether they would have fancied themselves as roundheads or royalists in another life. Heading across the Atlantic, meanwhile, Grayson Perry’s Big American Road Trip (All 4) delves into the issues that continue to…

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It’s one of the great historical questions - what aromas would hit your nostrils if you could step out of a time machine in, say, 16th-century London? Time travel may still be outside of our grasp, but a new project aims to offer the next best thing: to identify and recreate the smells our forebears might have experienced. The three-year ‘Odeuropa’ initiative will see historians join forces with scientists and artificial-intelligence experts to scour archive texts and images created between the 16th and 20th centuries for references to scents. They will then explore the context in which they were found, the kinds of people who noticed them and the reactions they provoked. As well as creating an online olfactory encyclopedia, they will also work with perfumers to recreate these smells…

“We need to talk about England. What kind of nation will it be?” I’ve put this one off, I’ll be honest. After all, it’s been building up for quite a while. But on 1 January 2021 we finally leave the European Union. How will historians see this moment? Too early to tell, you will rightly say, but historians taking the long view are already telling us that Brexit was the product not only of the divisions of the last 10 years or so, but was rooted in Britain’s 20th-century experience of empire: the biggest fact in the last 300 years of British history. Often in history the precursors are not evident until the events actually unfold. Only then you see the signs were there all along. On the heels of…

Flight of fancy In 1898, a traveller named Louis de Rougemont, writing in Wide World Magazine, claimed to have seen wombats flying through the air in Australia. He also said he had, for decades, been the god-king of an indigenous tribe in the outback Neither of these ‘facts’ was true. Although he had lived in Australia, De Rougemont was simply a teller of tall tales. Once his stories were exposed, he toured music halls billed as “the greatest liar on Earth” Madcap inventor The unlikely inventions of the English baronet Sir George Sitwell (1860-1943) included a musical toothbrush that played the song ‘Annie Laurie’, and a miniature pistol for the shooting of wasps. He also attempted to pay his son’s Eton school fees in the form of potatoes from his…

Sujit Sivasundaram on how the British empire spread across the oceans “Traditionally the history of the British empire is written as a galloping story, with the empire expanding across the globe from the nerve centre of London. But this metropolitan view has marginalised stories from the islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. We’ve always imagined empires as primarily land-based, but we need to think much more fundamentally about the role of oceans.” Natalie Haynes on the varied representations of women in Greek myths “We only ever think of Helen as ‘Helen of Troy’, but in another version of the story at least as old as Homer, she goes to Egypt, not to Troy, and doesn’t elope with Paris at all. It’s strange that these versions of the stories have…

Your novel is set in 1553 – what was happening in England at that time? The custodians of boy-king Edward VI persuaded him in his final days to choose a successor other than his Catholic eldest sister, Mary. The king chose Jane Grey, but for the populace – wearied by decades of reform and cynical about the nobles who had benefited - this was unacceptable, and a popular uprising swept Mary to power. She became England’s first-ever ruling queen, and there was widespread rejoicing at what was understood as a restoration of justice and common sense. But what started so well in the summer soon unravelled, because Mary had mistaken popular goodwill as a mandate for her mission to restore England to Rome. Where does your heroine Alys Twist fit…

Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece by Paul Cartledge Pan Macmillan, 336 pages, £25 Poor old Thebes. You’d think it would be enough to secure eternal fame as a city state to have produced some unique epic poetry and some of the earliest examples of European writing, not to mention bequeathing the world its most famous psychological complex (for, though he realised it a bit late, Oedipus was Theban). But alas, not so. You can think of Thebes as the Michael Collins of ancient Greece. If you can’t remember who Collins is, that’s the point. Collins was the third man on Apollo 11, a glittering achievement that should have won him eternal fame and glory. Sadly he happened to be next to two slightly more glittering companions, Neil Armstrong…

IN PROFILE Félix Kir was a Catholic priest who supported the French Resistance in the Second World War. After helping 5,000 PoWs escape German captivity, he was sentenced to death, but managed to secure his release. After the war, he was elected mayor of Dijon several times and served in the national parliament. He is also famous for popularising the cocktail that bears his name. “As a man of God, Kir could have chosen not to get involved. But he had a strong sense of morality, and that put him in grave danger” When did you first hear about Félix Kir? A few years ago I wrote a book about Maurice Flitcroft, a crane driver from Barrow who entered the 1976 British Open golf championship. I like strange characters with…