Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2022 i History Extra

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Queen Elizabeth I was resplendent, the crimson red of her wig offset by flowing white and the flash of steel, as she spoke to the troops assembled at West Tilbury on 19 August 1588. Her words, “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king”, would echo though the ages. This was precisely what the architect of that moment, Sir Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had in mind when he had written to his queen less than two weeks before, asking her to visit the troops at Tilbury: “Thus shall you comfort, not only these thousands, but many more that shall hear of it.” It was no accident that he stood beside her on that day as…

• 1917 The Russian Revolution (below right) sparks the collapse of the Russian empire, which the new Bolshevik government begins reorganising into a socialist state. The Ukrainian People’s Republic declares independence. • 1921 Following a four-year conflict between the Bolsheviks and the Ukrainian People’s Republic, many of its territories are forcibly incorporated into the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (SSR), which becomes one of the founding members of the Soviet Union. • 1932 An estimated 4 million people die in the Holodomor, a state-engineered famine designed by Soviet leader Josef Stalin to crush the spirit of Ukraine’s people and prevent them from rebelling against communist rule. • 1939 An area that is now Western Ukraine is annexed from Poland by the Soviet Union as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact…

Elizabeth Boyle on grief in the Middle Ages “Medieval people weren’t numb to the idea of death – they certainly grieved as much as we do. But when researching medieval emotion we must bear in mind that we need to navigate between what might be a glimpse of private emotion and a communal expression of feeling. Most medieval sources have been written for an audience, and they aren’t necessarily people writing down their private thoughts.” Kojo Koram on the economic and legal legacies of empire “Part of the reason why the legacy of empire has been ignored in Britain is because it’s been convenient for the debate to be presented as being about identity politics, not concerns over long-term wealth inequality or insecurity of work. By moving the conversation away…

Why does the Georgia gold rush make such an interesting setting for a novel? It was the lack of information about it that I think first attracted me. Having a time frame in which to set your characters, and an event around which to organise them, is very helpful for a first-time novelist – but having the freedom to move them around without compromising the historical accuracy or authenticity of the book was also important for me. The protagonist, Yip, is mute. How did you research the experiences of mute people in the period? As with other areas of the book, I did my best to research this aspect of my story. Unsurprisingly, I found that mute people – indeed, pretty much anybody who had a disability – were shunned,…

Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London by Vic Gatrell Cambridge University Press, 474 pages, £25 Anyone who still thinks that the Regency period that largely followed the Napoleonic Wars was a genteel, Jane Austen-infused era of elegance and romance should read this book by Vic Gatrell. As he argues in this definitive study: “Inequality, exploitation, disfranchisement, enclosure, factories, slavery, war, hunger, beggary, hangings, transportation, floggings, bullets, sabres and government repression... were what guaranteed Regency order and enabled the privileged to cavort so stylishly.” The Cato Street conspiracy of February 1820 was the culmination of a series of incidents of unrest caused by unemployment, bad harvests, high prices and starvation following the war. A small group of desperate and deluded men, holed up in…

1. Insects on the menu Dominic Lieven’s new history of emperors across the globe reveals that the seventh-century Chinese ruler Taizong once ate a plate of locusts when the insects were plaguing his people (page 79). 2. A beloved blood sport There’s plenty of fascinating material in our feature on birds through history. One thing that stood out to me was the fact that cockfighting “was for centuries Britain’s most popular sport” (page 38). 3. Secrets burned Lord Byron’s life was famously scandalous, but I’d not been aware that after the poet’s death his friends had set fire to his memoirs, rather than allow the secrets they contained to see the light of day (page 14).…

EYE-OPENER Frozen in time A little over a century after it vanished beneath the ice, experts have uncovered the wreck of the Endurance – explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship that famously sank in the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica in 1915. The discovery of one of the most famous lost vessels in maritime history is all the more extraordinary because the Endurance appears to be so well preserved. Experts from the search expedition, spearheaded by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, revealed images – including that of the ship’s wheel and aft well deck (below) – that show its sections still intact, with artefacts including anchors, boots and crockery evident throughout. Shackleton set out to the Antarctic in 1914, hoping to make the first land crossing of the continent. The…

“English settlers planted colonies in Crimea and on the Sea of Azov” “War has returned to Europe”, said the BBC News. Watching TV pictures from Ukraine, many thoughts crowd the mind. I’m sure that most of us, especially those of my generation and older, never dreamed that the possibility of war in Europe would ever arise again. One of the grim byproducts of the wars of our times has been the destruction of minorities, as we have seen recently in Iraq and Syria – destroying not only lives but also centuries of history in which minorities lived side by side and intermixed, creating often magical cultural fusions. In recent years I’ve made a couple of journeys to the Black Sea – the region the Greeks call the Pontus. Settled by…

“The sense of belonging, and of loss, is rarely covered in history books” Histories are all around us – but often they are hidden, either because we’re not looking in the right places or asking the right questions. They are not only big moments, but small ones too. I want to tell you about a mother and daughter, Runi and Farah. I’ve been interviewing them across the course of nearly a decade for a series I make for BBC Radio 4 called Three Pounds in My Pocket, which charts – through personal testimonies – the social history of British south Asians in the postwar years, and of their descendants. Runi came to Britain in 1968 from Dhaka, then in East Pakistan but now in Bangladesh, as a young bride to…

559 BC Cyrus II (the Great), ascends the throne and begins the unification of the tribes of Persia. 539 BC Cyrus marches on Babylon and begins to rule there. 525 BC Cyrus’s son Cambyses II conquers Egypt, north Africa and Nubia. 522 BC Darius I (the Great), right, seizes the throne and establishes the Achaemenid dynasty. c515 BC Darius begins works on the construction of the great citadel of Persepolis in south-west Iran. 499 BC Darius crushes an uprising in Lydia, western Anatolia, but is defeated by the Greeks at the battle of Marathon. 480 BC Darius’s successor, Xerxes, captures Athens but is forced to quit Greece after a succession of military reversals. 423 BC Darius II ascends the throne. His reign is marred by a series of revolts in…

“Black communities have had to pay for the failures of emancipation” Ellie Cawthorne: You argue in Black Ghost of Empire that “the history of emancipation from slavery is not a story of endings, but unendings”. What do you mean by that? Kris Manjapra: We tend to think of the ending of slavery as a “once-and-done” moment. But in fact there was a long period, spanning around 100 years, during which there were various different moments of emancipation. And when you look closely at all those events, as my book does, you can identify a through line. You see that, rather than the end of slavery disrupting the racial caste system, the ways in which emancipations played out in reality actually conspired to perpetuate it. Emancipation processes provided failed pathways to…

“Before you study the history, study the historian,” said EH Carr in his 1961 lecture series ‘What Is History?’ In these lectures, later turned into a book, he argued that no writer of history has ever been able to recount the past without being influenced by their own present and human experience. It is Carr’s direction to study the historian – a call against objective history – upon which Richard Cohen expands in Making History. This in-depth analysis considers those who have written about the past, and how their writing was influenced by their present. Cohen begins with the so-called “father of history”, Herodotus, and considers how much the ancient Greek writer was influenced by his world and personal experiences when writing The Histories. Herodotus was perhaps the earliest narrative…

Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan by Felipe Fernández-Armesto Bloomsbury, 384 pages, £25 In Straits, we see a master of his craft at work. Fernández-Armesto is arguably the leading scholar of our times in making the early European Age of Discovery accessible to a wider audience. In this book, he takes on the biography of Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese explorer often referred to as the world’s first circumnavigator (although he died en route), who set out on his last great voyage in 1519. Fernández-Armesto draws on his vast knowledge of the wider context of European explorations: the geographical understanding and economic situation of the era. As he acknowledges, the first chapter – which particularly focuses on historical context – draws heavily on his book 1492: The Year Our World Began.…

Each session combines an introductory lecture, extensive Q&A, and discussion of a primary source chosen by Malcolm Gaskill. You can book individual modules or block-book the whole masterclass. Tickets: £15 per module or £60 for all five modules This curated five-part virtual lecture series from renowned historian Malcolm Gaskill will explore the fear of witchcraft that gripped the early modern world – its causes and consequences, and the experiences of people caught up in its currents. It will also investigate what these stories tell us about the wider culture and society of a pivotal period. 1. The Idea of a Witch – 29 April 2. Origins and Causes – 6 May 3. Prosecutions and Panics – 13 May 4. The Experience of Witchcraft – 20 May 5. The Decline of…

“Notre-Dame is like a wounded old lady learning to walk again, and that’s beautiful to see” Can you remember how you felt when you saw the first reports of the blaze engulfing Notre-Dame in 2019? I remember exactly where I was when Notre-Dame burned: preparing for a journey to France, where I was going to spend time at the palace of Versailles! Arriving in Paris, I could smell the burning in the air while changing metros. I felt my own sadness at the loss of a place I’d loved since my first visit as a teenager on a French exchange programme. But what really overwhelmed me was the intensity of other people’s emotions, not only in France, but all around the world. I hadn’t understood exactly what the cathedral meant,…

Kris Manjapra “Families were torn apart by slavery. But families were also torn apart by emancipation, and the state created a kind of protection for slave owners that continued for decades.” Kris examines the difficult legacy of emancipation from slavery on page 74 Joanne Paul “We might know all about Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, but it’s the story of the Tudor-era Dudley family – with all its scandal, love, bloodshed and ambition – that I want to tell.” Joanne charts the dizzying rise and deadly fall of the Dudleys on page 30 Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones “For too long, Persia has been the forgotten civilisation of the ancient world. Now it’s time to restore it to its rightful place in history, and show how the Persians were the world’s first superpower.”…

In March, as Russian forces continued their assault on Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky made a speech to German MPs. His impassioned address drew extensively on Cold War imagery, including his fears of a new wall being built in central Europe “between freedom and bondage” – making explicit parallels with the Berlin Wall, which divided that city between 1961 and 1989. Zelensky’s words added to an ongoing discussion among historians and other social media users about the ways in which the current conflict can be viewed through the prism of Cold War politics, legacies and memories. MacroScope (@MacroScope17) tweeted that “we avoided disaster during the Cold War largely because leaders on both sides had first-hand memories of the Second World War. Now we have ‘hawks’ [politicians and commentators in favour of…

22 MAY 1455 The Wars of the Roses begin Yorkist forces triumph at the first battle of St Albans The Wars of the Roses began not with a battlefield clash but in bloody urban warfare fought on foot through the streets of St Albans, a modest market town some 20 miles north-west of London. Unrest had been building in England since Henry VI inherited the throne in 1422, aged about nine months. During his long minority, the country was ruled by a council of nobles between which bitter rivalries arose. Henry’s powerful queen, Margaret of Anjou, was also unpopular – not least with Richard, Duke of York. Like Henry, York was a descendant of Edward III with a strong claim to the throne. In May 1455, York and his ally…

LETTER OF THE MONTH Local Heroes As I was coming to the end of February’s issue, I was delighted to read Priya Atwal’s article about Ancient House Museum of Thetford Life (Explore, pictured below). I am always thrilled to find local museums in towns, usually hidden away and rarely well-advertised or signposted. Typically staffed by well-informed volunteers, they can contain the most intriguing items and personal stories from people who have donated items for display. Such wonderful institutions are a far cry from their city cousins, often relying on donated funds from visitors and local council grants, so they surely deserve a wider press. We have several small local museums in mid-Kent, each providing a fascinating glimpse into the life of our neighbours in time. I should love to read…

“The directorgeneral himself had called on BBC staff to throw open the windows and clear the place of its ‘ivorytower stuffiness’” At 7am on Saturday 30 September 1967, in a windowless studio in London, a pop revolution was ignited. Watched by his producer, the 24-year-old disc-jockey Tony Blackburn switched on his microphone, welcomed listeners across Britain to “the exciting new sound of Radio 1” and placed onto his turntable ‘Flowers in the Rain’, the latest single from The Move. “It wasn’t one of my favourite records,” Blackburn later confessed, but “I wanted something nice and happy, something that reflected that era.” As the “Summer of Love” – a season of flower-power, love-ins and teach-ins – reached its psychedelic close, the BBC unveiled a new radio station dedicated to the latest…

In the lottery of smallpox, declared French mathematician and explorer Charles-Marie de La Condamine, “everyone has his ticket, and many every year must draw the blank of Death”. Viruses are not alive, yet they create more havoc than the most powerful monarch. Whatever anti-vaxxers may claim, Queen Elizabeth II faced only a minuscule risk when she received a Covid vaccination. The stakes were far higher for two earlier female royals, Caroline of Ansbach (who became the queen of George II) and Catherine the Great, who set national examples during the battle against smallpox by publicly endorsing variolation, an early form of protection that induced a week of sickness with no guarantee of survival. In her new book, Lucy Ward provides a racy but detailed account of these initiatives. She begins…

Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers by Emma Smith Allen Lane, 352 pages, £20 Reading books for review is often a hurried activity but, luckily, Portable Magic is not a book to be read slowly. Instead, it sweeps the reader along in its wake – much as the spellbook does the foolish young boy in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, the story with which Emma Smith begins her book. It is a well-chosen opening salvo: Smith is herself a magical writer – stealing a pinch of literary history here, mixing it with a dab of popular culture there, all the while swinging the wide-sleeved arms of her prose to keep everything in motion. In 16 chapters, Smith whirls us through many aspects of books that we rarely notice –…

FRANCE France: An Adventure History by Graham Robb (Picador, 544 pages, £25) Vive la France Covering the entire history of France in 544 pages might sound like an impossible task, but Graham Robb’s enjoyable romp makes light work of it, surging from the legendary origins of the Gauls to the 21st-century Tour de France, with some unexpected detours along the way. The narrative is interspersed with his own experiences of travelling in France, revealing historical landscapes in a new light. CULTURAL Dinner with Joseph Johnson by Daisy Hay (Chatto & Windus, 528 pages, £25) Food for thought Once a week from the 1770s to 1809, the publisher Joseph Johnson invited friends to his London home for dinner. But the leading lights of the intellectual scene didn’t come for the food…

IN PROFILE Jesse Owens was a black American sprinter who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin – a feat that shattered Adolf Hitler’s plans to use the games as a showcase for Aryan supremacy. President Roosevelt never publicly acknowledged Owens’ triumph. However, in 1976 Gerald Ford awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of what is among the most iconic sporting achievements of the 20th century. “He was a bit of a showman, and even raced against horses for money. When asked why, he said: ‘You can’t eat four gold medals’” When did you first hear about Owens? It was at school while studying for my history O-level. I remember being fascinated by the story of this incredible black athlete who, by winning four…