Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2021 i History Extra

JULY 2021 “Every crisis brings opportunities. While many businesses have struggled or collapsed during the Covid-19 pandemic, others have been able to adapt and thrive in the changing economic landscape. It was just the same during the Black Death of the 14th century. Amid the great suffering and hardship, there were merchants who took advantage of the chaos and disruption to earn huge profits – to the horror of some of those around them. In this month’s cover feature, on page 20, medieval historian Robert Blackmore explains how fortunes were made in the darkest of days. His piece is followed by an interview with Niall Ferguson (page 29), exploring how societies have responded to pandemics and other catastrophes over the millennia. One catastrophe that thankfully didn’t come to pass is…

EYE-OPENER Surprise discovery These images show, from left to right, an Egyptian coffin held at Poland’s National Museum in Warsaw; the mummy it contained; and, finally, an X-ray revealing the body to be that of a woman in the seventh month of her pregnancy, who probably died during the first century BC. It’s the only known example of a mummified pregnant woman. The find was also surprising because an inscription on the coffin holding the mummy named its occupant as a male priest. Have a story? Please email Matt Elton at matt.elton@immediate.co.uk…

On 5 June 1871, an unlikely ceremony took place in the ramshackle colonial settlement of Levuka, on the tropical island of Ovalau, at the heart of the Fiji archipelago. Before a motley crowd of European settlers – sugar-cane planters, gun-runners and the assorted jetsam of empire – and a few native Fijians, a tall and imposing local chief was proclaimed the king of Fiji. The first and last person to bear that title, the man at the centre of proceedings was better known to his subjects as Cakobau (pronounced “Thakombau”). Born circa 1815, his personal journey, in the space of half a century, from cannibal to king to British subject, is one of the more incredible stories from the era of Pacific colonisation. As this year marks the 150th anniversary…

Ayanna Thompson on the history of blackface “Blackface has a very long history. It may even have been used in Greek and Roman theatre, and we know that blackface was used in medieval religious plays to depict devilish characters who had fallen from grace. But it flourished in Shakespeare’s time, with non-religious plays that explored the plethora of the world. We think that bitumen, makeup and even fake noses were used to create blackface on the Renaissance stage.” John Higgs on poet and painter William Blake “People have often misunderstood Blake’s work. And sometimes they’ve got it so wrong it’s ironic. Jerusalem is the obvious example. It’s now an unofficial British anthem, but Blake intended it as an angry rant to condemn the ‘hirelings’ of the British establishment. It’s a…

Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence by Frances Wilson Bloomsbury, 512 pages, £25 DH Lawrence has proven to be an endlessly fascinating subject for biographers. There is his working-class upbringing as the son of a collier; the scholarships he won to Nottingham High School and University College Nottingham; his tempestuous marriage to Frieda Weekley (nee von Richthofen); his restless, peripatetic search for new modes of being after the catastrophe of the Great War; his fortitude in the face of lifelong illness; and, of course, the courage and beauty of his writing in every major genre. He is rightly celebrated today for his achievement as a writer on sex and the life of the body. In this latest popular biography of the author, Frances Wilson argues that his real “genius”…

FERN RIDDELL recommends a vivid biography of a women’s rights campaigner who shook off the shackles of married life The Case of the Married Woman by Antonia Fraser Orion, 304 pages, £25 “She does not exist: her husband exists…” This is how Antonia Fraser opens her new epoch on the life of Caroline Norton, one of the most important female writers of the early Victorian era. Norton wrote these words in her 1854 pamphlet English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century. It came nearly 20 years after she had left her abusive husband, George, a move that saw her children removed from her, while she remained in the thrall of a man who continued to receive all of her earnings as an author. Her life and writings are vividly…

Novelist William Boyd chooses IN PROFILE Anton Chekhov was a Russian short story writer and playwright. Widely considered among the greatest ever short story writers, he is best known in the west for his four classic plays – The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard – which are still regularly performed on stage. A qualified physician, he died of tuberculosis at the age of just 44. “His short stories were all written in the late 19th century, but they’re so modern in spirit they could have been written yesterday” When did you first hear about Chekhov? My first Chekhov “Road to Damascus” moment was when I saw a TV adaptation of The Cherry Orchard on the BBC with Judi Dench in my late twenties. The scales fell from my…

Alice Roberts It’s extraordinary how much we can tell about prehistoric Britain, with only a few pieces of evidence to draw on. I look at the very first burial found in Britain, the Red Lady of Paviland, which takes us back more than 30,000 years. Alice reveals the secrets we can learn about prehistoric Britain through burial sites on page 78 Robert Blackmore Whether lived through or studied, with the 14th century you cannot avoid the Black Death. Though a human catastrophe, its economic effects were unpredictable, and I found that merchants could be winners as well as losers. Robert investigates the merchants who made a fortune during the deadly medieval epidemic on page 20 Souvik Naha As a historian of modern south Asia and the British empire, I use…

“Studying history should not be only for the elite, say academics.” So read the headline of a recent article in The Guardian, as several historians responded to the news that two universities – Aston in Birmingham and London South Bank – would be cutting their history degrees. The institutions have faced government pressure to focus on perceived “high-value” STEM [science, technology, engineering and maths] and vocational courses that typically produce graduates who earn higher salaries. Moreover, with the removal of restrictions on student numbers at British universities, Russell Group institutions at the elite end of the sector are taking on more and more students, leaving some younger universities struggling to recruit. As might be expected, Twitter users had much to say on the subject. Head of history at Aston University,…

“Traditions constitute the invisible, under-the-surface flow of history” This summer marks 500 years since the conquest of the Aztecs’ great capital Tenochtitlan by Spanish forces under Hernan Cortes. The 18th-century economist Adam Smith called the “discovery” of the New World and its aftermath one of the greatest events in human history. Maybe he was right. Never before had a whole continent been taken over, its native peoples dispossessed and enslaved, killed or died of disease; its natural resources plundered and extracted. So much flowed from this conquest: European colonisation, the Atlantic slave trade, the shifting of the balance of world history. For the Aztecs, Maya, Inca and thousands of other native American peoples, it was cataclysmic – and still is. Just look at what’s happening in the Amazon. As the…

“Jacobs’ writing transports readers to the world of Southern slavery” “No matter what the slave girl looks like, if she’s dark, if she’s light, if she’s medium, if she’s at all attractive, if she has beauty it is a curse, because the master will be after her... Even the little child will learn that if God has bestowed beauty on her, it will prove her greatest curse. Slavery is a cage of obscene birds.” This quote, from Harriet Jacobs’ 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is emblematic of how her evocative style and relatable, contemporary voice transports readers to the intimate spaces of the world of Southern slavery. Yet for years, many people refused to believe that her book could be true, or that it could have…

For a truly unvarnished view of early 18th-century England – its hypocrisies, vices and vast inequalities – look no further than the graphic satires of William Hogarth: from the temptation, decline and fall of a wealthy merchant’s son in A Rake’s Progress (1735), through to the human degradation of Gin Lane (1751). Hogarth is famed as a contrarian and iconoclast – traits (you might think) that would naturally put him at odds with organised religion. Certainly his attitude to the Church of England was ambivalent – a relationship summed up by the occasion when he is said to have urinated in a church porch. Yet, when it comes to Hogarth and religion, all is not what it seems. Hogarth was born in 1697 in Bartholomew Close, West Smithfield, a short…

Ellie Cawthorne: what kind of things might you find in a prehistoric grave, and what could they reveal about the past? Alice Roberts: Prehistory is intensely interesting to me because the only way that we can approach it is through archaeology. You are left to piece together the story through traces left in the ground – the material objects of ancient cultures, remnants of constructions and buildings, and the remains of our own ancestors. There’s an often forensic process that goes on when you’re trying to reconstruct what life was like in the prehistoric era, and burial sites represent a treasure trove of information. Graves such as that of the [early Bronze Age] Amesbury Archer or the “Red Lady of Paviland” [actually a young man who died 33-34,000 years ago]…

Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England by Michael Livingston OspreY, 224 pages, £20 I’m a fan of Bernard Cornwell. There, I admit it. I really enjoyed Last King-dom. The sweep of 70 years of this electric time in English history was a feat of imagination, told with verve and relish. Of course most of his story didn’t actually happen, but you don’t have to believe it. It’s fiction. Cornwell composed the introduction to Michael Livingston’s new book, and his name appears large on the cover. So does his aura: the epic title, the smoking sword, the Last Kingdom-esque graphics. It’s a great story, of course: the 937 invasion of England by a huge coalition of North Britons and Vikings; the epic struggle at Brunanburh, long remembered as…

@WalthoKrystal Bad Girls by Caitlin Davies. A captivating account of the experiences of different women in the judicial system for over a century. @DufferRoy One Hand Tied Behind Us by Jill Liddington & Jill Norris is an extensive history of women’s right to universal suffrage. It highlights many lesser-known women, the ground swell that bore fruit in 1918 and the continuing fight for equality. @MrNilsson27 The Five by Hallie Rubenhold. Excellent book about the five “canonical” victims of Jack the Ripper that gives the victims their due. @jess_dinning Women vs Hollywood by Helen O’ Hara. One of the most informative history books I’ve read. Doesn’t shy away from the dark moments, but also manages to celebrate women’s achievements. @RebeccaCliffor4 Helen McCarthy’s Double Lives, currently on the shortlist for the Wolfson…

Your novel is set in early 19th-century Britain – what was the atmosphere then? Britain went to war with France after years of anxiety about the revolution: would revolution happen here? The government was repressive; there were masses of spies. Then war began and threat was no longer purely internal: surely Napoleon would invade in boats, balloons, on rafts. Mobilisation was large-scale; news of victories and disasters abroad kept up the constant disturbance. Limping, limbless soldiers and sailors were a common sight. It was a time also of great inequality, impoverishment, bankruptcies and machine-breaking, together with great technical and scientific development. Introduce us to your characters and where they fit into this landscape. My two main characters are Sarah and her daughter Eve, separated as a result of a balloon…

What’s the thinking that lies behind the approach of Written in Scotland? The arguments that we have in Scotland, with ourselves and with others, are played out in many ways through literature – and theatre, actually. Our literature is very close to us. If I can put it this way, one thing I would ask you to do is read Donald Dewar’s brilliant opening speech to the Scottish Parliament in 1999. What other first minister would have invoked Robert Burns, Walter Scott and the language of the Mearns [the former county of Kincardineshire] in a very short opening address and in front of the Queen? It encapsulated a lot of what Scotland’s about. We have a concern about identity that’s gone on for more than 400 years, ever since the…

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Since their initial discovery in 1947 in caves in what’s now Israeli-occupied West Bank, the Dead Sea Scrolls – a set of ancient religious manuscripts, mostly in Hebrew and including the oldest known version of the Bible – have been a source of fascination. Now, the authors of a new study have employed artificial intelligence in an attempt to learn more about the scrolls’ origins. The team analysed digitised images of the “Isaiah Scroll”, the longest of approximately 950 known manuscripts. An algorithm was devised to separate the shape of the ink from its background and detect tiny differences across more than 5,000 instances of a single character – aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This technique was used to query a belief that, based on the high…

21 JULY 356 BC The Temple of Artemis burns to the ground An arsonist desperate for eternal fame sets one of the seven wonders of the world ablaze For the people of Ephesus, the Temple of Artemis was a source of immense local pride. Reportedly built by the extraordinarily rich king Croesus, it was said to have been made largely of marble, boasting huge pillars. In the centre stood the colossal figure of Artemis the huntress, made from blackened wood. For visitors, there were few better attractions in the Greek world. Pilgrims brought jewellery as a gift for the goddess; refugees came to seek sanctuary. No wonder the Greeks ranked it as one of the seven wonders of the world. But on 21 July 356, disaster struck. The man responsible…

The King’s Painter: The Life and Times of Hans Holbein by Franny Moyle Apollo, 576 pages, £35 Say the name Henry VIII and the chances are a Holbein portrait will spring to mind: the king in dominant pose with hands on hips, legs astride and piercing dark eyes. The most celebrated painter of the Tudor age did more to shape Henry’s public persona than any of the able ministers who surrounded him. By the time Holbein was appointed as king’s painter in around 1535, Henry needed all the help he could get. The annulment of his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and the seismic religious reforms that followed, had sparked widespread resistance. To make matters worse, the king’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, had so far failed to give him…

Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder by Michael Burleigh Picador, 448 pages, £25 Considering its frequency, assassination – the murder mainly of rulers and politi cians – has not attracted much attention from serious historians, so it is refreshing to see that Professor Michael Burleigh has devoted a thoughtful and eminently readable book to the subject. It is often said that assassination changes nothing, but that is clearly untrue. The killing of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand triggered events that led to the First World War, and millions of lives could have been saved if the bombs set by either Georg Elser or Claus von Stauffenberg had succeeded in killing Hitler. Burleigh begins with a dramatic account of one of the most documented (not least by Shakespeare) assassinations…

18TH CENTURY Inheritance: The Lost History of Mary Davies by Leo Hollis (Oneworld, 304 pages, £20) Fatal inheritance As a baby, Mary Davies had inherited vast swathes of land in London, making her a target for fortune-hunters. One day in 1701 she woke up with a man in her bed and just hours later found herself married. When her husband sought to seize control of her assets, a court case ensued – exposing a tale of lies, coercion and opium-laced strawberries, as described in Leo Hollis’s compelling new book. BIOGRAPHY Churchill & Son by Josh Ireland (John Murray, 400 pages, £20) Father and son Winston Churchill was, says Josh Ireland, “obsessed with his son” Randolph. In charting their close but combustible relationship, Ireland offers a new perspective on one of…

Reign of terror Marisa Linton descibes how the French Revolution descended into an era of fear and bloodletting Gender pain gap From hysteria to “womb fury”, Elinor Cleghorn explores how women have been medically misunderstood over time Tokyo Olympics Christopher Harding revisits the games of 1964 – the first to ever be held in Asia History of sex Fern Riddell on the ways societies have explored sexuality over the centuries…