Innholdsfortegnelse for Novemebr 2021 i History Extra

“After many months of lockdowns and closures, some form of normality seems to be returning to Britain’s heritage attractions. Museums and galleries are launching new exhibitions, and an undoubted highlight this month is Elizabeth and Mary: Royal Cousins, Rival Queens at the British Library. The display will chart the complex relationship between the two monarchs that ultimately led to one authorising the execution of the other. And this is also the subject of our cover feature, written by historian Susan Doran, who edited the exhibition catalogue. On page 50, Susan charts the dramatic events through 12 fascinating objects relating to the rival queens. It’s a busy month for cinemas, too, and one standout release is The Last Duel, which is currently due to arrive in mid-October. The film centres on…

From the legacy of empire to the best way of tackling statues of the past’s most controversial figures, history is never short of contentious subjects – and now students around the UK can get involved in the discussion again thanks to the return of a major nationwide competition. The Great Debate, run by the Historical Association, sees students aged between 16 and 19 test their research and public speaking skills. This year’s event will mark the platinum jubilee of the association’s patron, Elizabeth II, by exploring the question: “Which changes of the past 70 years have affected your local area the most?” Each entrant will have five minutes to deliver their argument, which can cover any aspect of that period, before facing a couple of follow-up questions from members of…

“A new world is emerging, reviving older connections” “My dear boy, as long as you don’t invade Afghanistan,” prime minister Harold Macmillan told his successor, “you’ll be absolutely fine.” His words came back to me as I watched the disaster unfold this summer, astounded by the US and UK governments’ seeming lack of foresight and any kind of historical perspective. It was 25 years ago – can it really be that long? It seems like only yesterday – that I was in Afghanistan following the route of Alexander the Great when our track took us from Peshawar, Pakistan to Kabul. The Taliban were besieging the Afghan capital for the first time; at nightfall tracers arched across the sky and the crackle of gunfire could be heard to the south. Our…

Windows are too often treated as merely providers of light, ventilation and views. But there is little more terrifying than a dark window with an unknown face peering in. And there are few more useful places for covert entrances and exits, as prime minister Stanley Baldwin found in December 1936. Pursued by the press, he finally crept into Buckingham Palace through a back window, to talk with King Edward VIII about his forthcoming abdication announcement. “The history of architecture is also the history of windows,” pronounced Le Corbusier, a pioneer of modernist architecture. As we shall see through the following seven examples, the history of windows is also the history of war, politics, technology, aesthetics and morality. Not simply “the eyes of the house”, windows open up connections between architecture…

What was the Bradford sweets poisoning? On 30 October 1858, William Hardaker – known as “Humbug Billy” – was selling peppermint lozenges at Bradford’s Saturday market. As usual, he had bought them from sweetmaker James Appleton, who was employed by Joseph Neal. When Hardaker fell ill after sampling one of the humbugs, though, he did not make the connection that something might be wrong with the sweets, so his stall stayed open all day and more than 1,000 humbugs were sold. By Sunday morning, two local boys had died suddenly and dozens more people were gravely sick. Police quickly made the link between victims and the humbugs, and rushed around town warning people not to eat them. Each humbug, it later transpired, contained a potentially lethal amount of arsenic. The…

12 January 1940 The Sherwood Rangers leave England for Palestine with their horses July 1940 The regiment loses its horses and retrains as artillery April-July 1941 Half the regiment is deployed as gunners during the successful defence of Tobruk. The other half is involved in the battle for Crete August 1941 The Rangers’ training begins as an armoured regiment 31 August 1942 The regiment experiences combat in tanks for the first time at the battle of Alam Halfa in Egypt May 1943 The north African campaign ends in Allied victory December 1943 The Rangers return to the UK to train for D-Day 6 June 1944 D-Day sees the regiment landing on Gold Beach as a spearhead of the invasion of Europe 10–12 September 1944 The Rangers help British forces seize…

@GreenBlueAn David Olusoga’s Black and British: A Forgotten History is fascinating, and was a real eye opener for me. @BGUHistory Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 [by Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall] was a benchmark for demonstrating the importance of intersectional approaches to big political history questions. @Merlinia12 Not history in the strictest of senses, but Lemn Sissay’s [pictured] My Name Is Why [an account of his time in foster homes and quest for his Ethiopian identity]. @mrbwteach Black Tudors: The Untold Story [the stories of 10 Africans living in Tudor and Stuart England] by Miranda Kaufmann. @juliaesdietz All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake [about a single object passed down through three generations…

We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 by Fintan O’Toole Head of Zeus, 624 pages, £25 Prominent Irish intellectual Fintan O’Toole’s latest book merges cameos from a self-proclaimed “boring” life with events, people and changes in Ireland at large over the past six decades. In 2013, the Royal Irish Academy commissioned O’Toole to write A History of Ireland in 100 Objects, and We Don’t Know Ourselves has a similar feel, although here the past is painted mainly through villains, victims, eccentrics and scandals. O’Toole uses these cameos as metaphors. He remarks, for instance, that the church in which he served mass in his youth has become part of “Ireland’s religious rustbelt”, and recalls earnestly singing a rebel song at a family gathering around the time of Bloody…

Migration expert DR KATY LONG discusses her new series on a century of refugee crises, contemplating what we owe those fleeing persecution and how the handling of such displacements in the past offers us valuable lessons today Your series deals with the history of refugee politics. Doesn’t that seem most apposite in the wake of the Taliban retaking Afghanistan? Questions around refugees have been with us for a century, and we keep trying - and to a large degree failing - to answer them. When the first images started coming out from Kabul’s airport, we were interviewing a survivor of the Kindertransport [a mission to rescue thousands of children from Nazi Germany]. He was talking about his father not being able to get a visa to escape Berlin, and so…

1725-95 BBC Countryfile presenter Adam Henson runs the Cotswold Farm Park. His first children’s book, A Year on Adam’s Farm, is out now “Bakewell played a key part in the development of early breed selection which has helped give so many areas of the country an identity” When did you first hear about Robert Bakewell? My father was a farmer, like me. He was interested in the history of animal breeding. To showcase rare breeds he opened the Cotswold Farm Park in 1971 and would tell me about this man who did so much to shape British agriculture. Dad set out the Farm Park livestock displays so they suited periods of history, from the Iron Age to the modern day. To help represent the agricultural revolution paddock, we had a…

Hannah Skoda “Medieval law can seem arcane and bizarre – but I’m struck by how carefully and even sceptically medieval people thought about its implications. People understood how law worked and used it to their advantage.” Hannah reveals why deadly duels were a popular means of solving disputes on page 28 James Holland “I came across the Sherwood Rangers during a trip to Normandy in 2004. Among others, I was with David Christopherson, son of the commanding officer for much of those last 11 months of the war. It’s been a privilege to write about those who fought.” James shares the exploits of a daring Allied tank regiment on page 62 Susan Doran “I have long been fascinated by the problem of the succession in Elizabethan England, so I was…

ON THE HistoryExtra PODCAST The words ring down the ages: “A prince, whose character is marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” Thomas Jefferson’s description of King George III in the Declaration of Independence has been taken virtually as holy writ in the United States, where scarcely a day goes by when George is not described as a tyrant, despot or dictator in some newspaper or website. In Britain the verdict is predictably less harsh, but he is still primarily known as the mad king who suffered from a rare disease of the blood called porphyria and lost the American colonies, probably because he was mad. Thomas Paine, one of the greatest propagandists of the 18th century, called…

The history of black people in Britain during the 18th century is a series of unknowns. We don’t know the size of the black “community”, or even if black Georgians formed discrete communities. We only have fleeting glimpses as to how they interacted with one another and are unsure what proportion of them were free and what proportion lived in forms of unfreedom. While some were clearly servants, others were undoubtedly enslaved. Instead of detail, we have passing references which hint at lives that can never be better understood. What makes this all the more frustrating is that black Georgians themselves, despite these gaps in the historical record, are literally visible to us. They appear in hundreds of portraits, as servants, footmen, maids and stable-boys. Usually pushed up against the…

ON THE History Extra PODCAST 1 Why was attending church so important? “In the Middle Ages, going to church offered a lot more than merely a way of connecting with God. Christianity was not only a religion, but an entire worldview that sought to explain a great deal more than people’s relationship with God. Church-going encompassed ethics, telling you how you should behave, and entire areas of study that we would now separate off as science, sociology or politics. Even history was a part of it; medieval histories of the world took a lot from the Bible. The importance of the church in the lives of medieval people went far beyond theology. In fact, the church fulfilled a lot of functions which we would now look to the government to…

ON THE HistoryExtra PODCAST Eric Berkowitz on the long history of censorship “What is forbidden today will often become the standard tomorrow – the most stark example being the Tyndale Bible back in the 16th century. William Tyndale met a terribly violent death but, very soon after, his work became the basis for the King James Bible itself.” Annie Garthwaite on Cecily Neville, Duchess of York “We tend to have this impression of medieval women as having very little power or agency, and spending most of their time doing embroidery and waiting for a knight in shining armour to ride along. But it really wasn’t like that – women of Cecily of York’s status would have wielded quite considerable power and responsibility in their own right. These were not meek…

Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor by Andrew Lownie Blink, 352 pages, £25 The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, can be hard to see clearly. Looming over their controversial figures are clouds of confusion: were they fools for love or feeble faces of the British monarchy? Those clouds only grow more obscure every time a new royal couple seems to be juggling the conflicting demands of love and duty. The official position – that, by stepping away from the demands of his nation, the duke set himself beyond the pale – sowed the seeds of its own revision, positioning this particular duke and duchess as victims of a repressive monarchical establishment. Now Andrew Lownie sets out to revise the revisionists,…

MENTAL ILLNESS The Gallery of Miracles and Madness by Charlie English (William Collins, 336 pages, £20) Exhibition and atrocity In the 1920s, German doctor Hans Prinzhorn curated an extraordinary art collection, in which each piece was created by a psychiatric patient. It inspired artists across Europe, but Charlie English explores what happened next as Germany fell under the Nazis’ spell. Modernist artworks were decried as “degenerate”, and people with mental illnesses were targeted by an appalling extermination campaign. FICTION The Tale of the Tailor and the Three Dead Kings by Dan Jones (Head of Zeus, 96 pages, £9.99] Evil in the medieval Hot on the heels of Powers and Thrones, his epic history of the Middle Ages, Dan Jones trades its symphonic grandeur for this atmospheric chamber piece. It’s a…

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Afghanistan’s present and future has been a subject of much discussion, with many lamenting the lack of understanding of the region’s history and its tortured relations with western powers. As historian Olivette Otele (@OlivetteOtele) tweeted, “I wish people had basic info about the history of the place/region… the mess didn’t start with current Taliban and people there have been suffering for a very long time.” Academic Justin Podur (@Justinpodur) sought to provide historical context with a much-applauded thread that set the scene in 1839, the year Britain invaded Afghanistan from India and installed their own candidate, Shah Shuja, on the throne in Kabul. His thread described the process of imposing Shuja, including “rapes, looting, massacres”, and the way in which, after Shuja’s assassination in 1842, “the British regrouped. to get…

One hundred years ago, in 1921, paper poppies were first sold to raise money for returned soldiers of the First World War. In postwar society, many veterans struggled to find homes, employment and financial security, so associations were formed to campaign for their rights. Sometimes, these efforts turned violent, causing great anxiety in a British political establishment still reeling from the Russian Revolution and postwar political radicalism across Europe. Yet when a number of ex-servicemen’s groups combined to form the British Legion, with Field Marshal Earl Haig as its president, veterans’ associations started to become more widely popular and part of the establishment rather than a force for opposition. As part of this process, the British Legion introduced the idea of selling paper poppies as a fundraising campaign to alleviate…

From the mid-1960s until 2010 it was generally believed that “The King’s Malady” from which George III suffered in 1765, 1788-89, 1801, 1804 and 1810-20 was the rare blood disease porphyria. This was a consequence of a theory vigorously promoted by Dr Ida Macalpine and her son Dr Richard Hunter in their book in the late sixties. The theory gained lasting popular traction in large part from its repetition in Alan Bennett’s 1991 play The Madness of George III, and the subsequent movie adaptation in 1994, in both of which porphyria was presented as the concluding diagnosis of “The King’s Malady”. It is now clear that the porphyria theory was wrong. It was based on a large number of misconceptions and a highly selective use of evidence; it contained factual…

1 Make a meal of it In 1386, two noblemen, Gérard de Mortagne and Gilles, Lord of Chin and Busignies, took to the lists for a trial by combat at Nancy in front of Jean I, the Duke of Lorraine. The cause of the duel is unknown, but it was fought in a deeply fractured political context. The combat did not proceed as expected. Their seconds and the duke’s men pulled the combatants apart, and the duke invited them to dinner, where his daughter, Isabelle, asked them: “For her honour and that of the other ladies there present… to submit their dispute… to the ruling of my lord the duke.” 2 A sorry affair Historian and bishop Gregory of Tours recounted a trial by combat in AD 590 between the…

ON THE HistoryExtra PODCAST Devil-Land: England Under Siege 1588-1688 by Clare Jackson (Allen Lane, 688 pages, £35) Ellie CawtHorne: Devil-Land looks at England from 1588 to 1688. Why do you think this is such a fascinating 100-year period of English history? Dr Clare Jackson: Partly because so much happened: you get a feeling that events were unfolding at a dizzying speed that even contemporaries had difficulty getting their heads around. Throughout the book I tried to put myself in their position – to imagine how it would feel to not know who might be on the throne this time next year, or what sort of religious settlement might be in place. So much was precarious in the 17th century and so much was up for grabs. As the period opened,…

Conclave 1559: The Story of a Papal Election by Mary Hollingsworth Head of Zeus, 320 pages, £25 This follow-up to 2004’s critically acclaimed The Cardinal’s Hat sees the return of the 16th-century cardinal Ippolito d’Este, as we follow him through the machinations of a papal election. It chronicles the events of 1559, an auspicious year in Europe. War-weary Spain and France had temporarily settled their differences in the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis after more than six decades of intermittent fighting. When Pope Paul IV died in August of that year, he had few mourners: indeed, rioters celebrated by decapitating his statue and burning down the Inquisition building. A hardliner, the pope had exiled Ippolito for simony – the act of buying or selling religious roles or items. It was a particularly ungrateful…

Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan Allen Lane, 352 pages, £20 When did you last consult an index? I looked at one an hour ago to find a recipe for an unseasonal mushroom casserole, and another an hour earlier while hunting for juicy bits in a biography of Charles de Gaulle. But because we are so used to having access to indexes, we rarely pause to think how lost we’d be without them. Dennis Duncan, a lecturer in English at University College London, laments this blase attitude. His account of this apparently innocuous piece of textual apparatus shows how, besides serving as a navigational tool, it can also be a literary performance in its own right. The index is sometimes a vehicle for wit or a chance for an…

Alexander the Great Edmund Richardson reveals how the ancient Greek conqueror became a global icon in the centuries after his death Wars in Afghanistan A panel of expert historians consider the long history of foreign interventions in the land Anglo-Saxon rebellion Matt Lewis revisits Hereward the Wake’s campaign against the Norman invaders People’s princess Tracy Borman on the story of Princess Charlotte, who captured the hearts of Georgian Britain…