Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2022 i History Extra

EYE-OPENER Goddess of war Dating from 4,500 years ago and topped with a crown resembling the head of a serpent, this striking stone statue of a goddess was discovered by a farmer tending his land in the Gaza Strip. The 22cm-high Bronze Age carving was found by chance by Nidal Abu Eid in the south of the strip. It depicts Anat, a war goddess of the ancient Canaanite civilisation which, at its zenith, spanned what is now Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Syria. Because the area was a key trading route for a succession of ancient cultures, it has since yielded a host of archaeological treasures – a fact complicated by the political and military tensions that have characterised its more recent history. Despite the risks that the conflict…

Victoria died last month. She was almost 100 years old, still living on her own in her house in the tranquil north London suburb of Golders Green, far from the turmoil of war and revolution that had marked her life. Victoria was an Iraqi Jew. Spanning much of the 20th century, her memory carried down to us the poignant story of the Iraqi Jewish community from the 1920s to its final passing. It’s a tale that goes back more than 2,600 years. Few, if any, communities on Earth have such a historical memory. From the Babylonian captivity to modern times, Iraq was a centre of Jewish society, learning and culture. One Talmud – that vast compendium of Jewish legal scholarship, custom and folklore – was written in Babylonia. After many…

In 2021, when my daughter was studying the First World War in her final year of primary school, every week I asked her if she had learned about the contribution of soldiers from the British empire. The answer was always no – though she did have two lessons on animals that died in the conflict, including thousands of camels on the fronts in the Middle East and Africa. At that point, I asked her teacher when they would be talking about the role of soldiers from the colonies. There were no plans to do so, he replied. In fact, there was just one more lesson left: an overview of the term’s work. But he said he would make time to talk about it. When my daughter came home after that…

Watergate ended the presidency of Richard Nixon, but not his influence. He acted as an unofficial advisor on foreign policy for his successors until his death in 1994, a two-decade period during which he was able to at least partially salvage his reputation. The scandal brought disgrace to Nixon’s advisors, but also yielded some degree of fame: G Gordon Liddy, for instance, was able to carve out a career as a “shock jock” political commentator. Many others wrote personal memoirs chronicling the affair, offering competing accounts about their respective degrees of blame and responsibility. Among the US population at large, the scandal cemented a sense of disengagement with politics. For liberals, Watergate amplified a feeling of unease, sparked by the Vietnam War, about the role and practices of government, and…

Rob Attar: Most of your previous books have focused on the Second World War. What made you decide to head back 20 years earlier for this one? Antony Beevor: The most important thing for me was to understand the chain of disasters of the 20th century – the impacts of which actually are still with us today, as we see in Ukraine. Around 12 million people died in the Russian Civil War. This wanton destruction created a terrible fear among the middle classes, but also galvanised the left – the Bolsheviks and other communists – and marked the start of a vicious circle of rhetoric that developed, above all, in the 1930s. This is really what dominates the whole of the 20th century, yet I think that the Russian Civil…

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin John Murray, 368 pages, £25 “There’s real life for you...The open road, the dusty highway.” Mr Toad’s encomium to a nomadic life finds a more serious-minded echo in Anthony Sattin’s new book, which reveals that there has been more to the history of civilisation than cities and the settled life. In it, he shows vividly how nomads connected with nature in ways that city-dwellers can never achieve. Nomadism, he demonstrates, takes many forms: vast armies on the move in the days of the Mongol empire; transhumant shepherds in remote corners of modern Iran; and refugees from war and persecution – even if their ultimate aim is to find a permanent home somewhere. Sattin’s book reflects a recent surge of interest…

This is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain, 1922-2022 by Simon J Potter Oxford University Press, 320 pages, £20 Joining a long list of publications marking the centenary of the BBC this year, Simon J Potter’s lucid book provides a useful account of the key staging posts in the life of this national institution. He argues that there is “nothing inevitable” about the BBC, and that “much of its history has been shaped by haphazard experimentation”. Potter leads readers on a pleasant historical canter, starting from the BBC’s small beginnings as a company to its transformation into a corporation from 1927 under the mercurial John Reith. He discusses the organisation’s imperial role, its much-lauded contribution to winning hearts and minds during the Second World War and its postwar…

1. A pioneering patient In July’s Anniversaries I was interested to find out that the first patient to be treated by the newly founded National Health Service in 1948 was a 13-year-old girl called Sylvia Diggory (page 14). 2. The forgotten pacifists I hadn’t realised before that Britain had three times as many conscientious objectors in the Second World War as it did in the First, as revealed by Tessa Dunlop in her book review on page 78. 3. Perilous pins One of the fascinating details in our piece on historical dress accessories was the fact that women sometimes wielded hat pins as dangerous weapons at the turn of the 20th century (page 65).…

In May, Simon Schama (@simon_schama) wrote an essay in the Financial Times, discussing how and when history is weaponised for war. The historian argued that “bad history can kill. Those who butcher the truth may end up butchering people. Every day, the news from Ukraine says as much.” He continued: “Openness to self-criticism, the mark of strong, honest history, is not – as is sometimes said by flag-waggers and drum-beaters – a sign of national self-hatred. On the contrary, it represents an optimistic patriotic faith that, in free societies, the cohesion of national community is better served by the examination of truth than by otiose flattery.” As you would expect, Schama’s article prompted much discussion on Twitter. Tom Moore (@PaperMissiles) enthused that “Simon Schama has done us all immense service…

Accompanies the BBC Radio 4 documentary The Hidden History of the Front Door 1 No-go areas From plague houses to Number 10, doors have long been used to keep threats out – and in To most of us today, front doors are mere portals between the outside world and the privacy of our own homes, worthy of little more than a clean and perhaps a new lick of paint every now and then. But if you were charged with the defence of a castle in the Middle Ages, they could be the difference between life and death. Doors were the weak spot in even the best medieval fortifications, and by the 12th century, great efforts were being made to ensure entry was difficult for attackers. Before they even reached the…

The Russian Revolution was actually two revolutions. The first began when the last tsar, Nicholas II, was toppled in March 1917, brought down by a combination of food shortages, Russia’s disastrous performance in the First World War and his personal failings. With his fall, Russia seemed set for a democratic future but, until elections could be held, the country was ruled by a Provisional Government dominated by liberals from the tsarist-era Duma (parliament). The Provisional Government, its effectiveness hampered by a lack of legitimacy, faced a powerful rival in the shape of the socialist-led Petrograd Soviet that ruled the country’s then-capital city (now called St Petersburg). The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, sought to undermine the Provisional Government, which itself made a series of missteps – notably continued failures in…

Categorising accessories is tricky. Is the belt that holds up your jeans an accessory? What about your sunglasses, or your jewellery? We define the dress accessory as something that a person carries or wears, which supplements their garments. Accessories are often small and they can be highly decorative, but they have a practical function too. These add-ons to our outfits work with the entire body from top to toe. Some, like buckles, have been with us unchanged for thousands of years. Others, like the phone case, appeared almost yesterday. Some were elite must-haves, but many were carried, manipulated, admired and enjoyed by the masses. Accessories are the Cinderella of dress history, too often forgotten while their fancier sisters go to the ball. But in their own time these objects did…

Annabel Abbs on Eliza Acton’s pivotal role in inventing the modern recipe book “Anyone who has ever cooked from an early recipe will understand how difficult it is. Cookery books never used to have ingredients lists and rarely made any mention of how long a dish should be cooked for. They simply assumed the reader would know how to cook. Through her inexperience, Eliza Acton realised these details were really important to include – she invented the recipe as we know it today.” Charlotte Cooper-Davis on pioneering medieval writer Christine de Pizan “The fact that Christine de Pizan was a female author writing defences of women in the 15th century has always intrigued people. But to me, what’s most significant about Christine is her work as an entrepreneur, and the novelty…

What drew you to Elizabeth of York? I have always been fascinated by the late medieval and early Tudor periods, and Elizabeth’s life spans both. She is an enigma in many ways, at the centre of severalmysteries and controversies – notably the disappearance of her brothers, the “princes in the Tower”, and her relationship with her uncle, Richard III. Did she really scheme to marry the man many believed had ordered the murder of the princes? The sources are largely silent about her role and her views. I wanted to look at the evidence forensically, and to construct a narrative based on probabilities. How did the process of writing this novel differ from that for your series on Henry VIII’s wives? I wrote the whole story from Elizabeth’s point of…

Snow Widows: Scott’s Fatal Antarctic Expedition Through the Lives of the Women They Left Behind by Katherine MacInnes William Collins, 512 pages, £25 The names of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Captain “Laurie” Oates, “Birdie” Bowers, “Taff” Evans and “Bill” Wilson are widely known. They recall a tale of tragedy but also courage: that of the ill-fated British Antarctic Expedition that culminated in their deaths during the trek back from the south pole in 1912. But the names of the women who survived them – Kathleen Scott, Caroline Oates, Emily Bowers, Lois Evans and Oriana Wilson – have slipped from view. Katherine Maclnnes’s book puts these wives and mothers, and the sacrifices they made, at the heart of the story of the Terra Nova. Drawing on archival research and imagination, each…

Anthropologist MARY-ANN OCHOTA tells us about her new radio series exploring the European Green Belt, and explains how nature has become intertwined with postwar history along its course What is the European Green Belt? In 2002 a group of naturalists proposed the idea of creating the world’s longest wildlife reserve along the line of the former Iron Curtain. When you imagine the border between countries, you imagine a single fence, but actually in many places it’s two fences with this strip of dead ground in between. But it’s not actually dead ground; it’s ground that’s left alone, and that is where the potential for wildlife and habitats exists. So you’ve got this green ribbon that runs right across the landmass of continental Europe, from the Finnish-Russian border to the Greek-Albanian…

Defending Britannia As Hadrian’s Wall celebrates its 1900th anniversary, we explore its creation and the lives of the people who lived in its shadow Mongol wars Nicholas Morton explains how the seemingly unstoppable Mongol forces were halted Rival queens Estelle Paranque compares the reigns of Elizabeth I and Catherine de Medici Prices rising As the cost of living increases in Britain, Phil Tinline looks back at earlier inflationary eras…

Lindsey Fitzharris “A lot of disfigured soldiers during the First World War were hidden from the public, so I really wanted their stories to be told and to do them justice.” Lindsey describes the great leaps in plastic surgery during the First World War on page 70 Simon Thurley “My latest book is the story of the Stuart dynasty through the places where its monarchs and their families lived, loved and died. A surprising number of those amazing places you can still visit today.” Simon selects seven royal residences beloved by the Stuarts on page 88 Cordula van Wyhe “Historical dress accessories do not require expertise or prior knowledge to bring the past alive. That they were once part of everyday fashion now gives us a unique vision of history…

At 2.30am on 17 June 1972, police officers arrested five men burgling the Democratic Party offices in Washington DC’s Foggy Bottom neighbourhood. The building complex in which the offices were based had gained a reputation for crime, but these men were not – as an FBI agent later noted – “ordinary knuckleheads”. They were well-dressed, with expensive cameras, eavesdropping equipment and rolls of sequentially numbered $100 bills. As it soon transpired, they didn’t seem like typical burglars precisely because they weren’t. One of the men, retired CIA agent James McCord ❶, was head of security for the Committee to Re-Elect the President – known by its abbreviation CRP or, more mockingly, Creep. He worked, in other words, for Richard Nixon’s campaign to secure a second term in that November’s presidential…

“Life on Earth marked the inauguration of a long lineage of epic wildlife series fronted by Attenborough for the BBC” At ten past eight in the evening on Tuesday 16 January 1979, British viewers were invited to embark on the opening stage of what would turn out to be one of the most spectacular and groundbreaking journeys in British television history. The 50-minute programme was advertised in Radio Times as the start of an ambitious attempt across 13 weekly episodes to explore “the incredible variety of living things, and fossils, which throw light on the ancestry of life”. The series was called LifE on Earth, its presenter David Attenborough. It decisively announced not only a new phase in natural history TV but the beginning of a decades-long era in which…

Rhiannon Davies: Your book focuses on Harold Gillies, a surgeon in the First World War who made huge strides in facial reconstruction surgery. But how far back in history can we trace plastic surgery? Lindsey Fitzharris: It pre-dates the First World War, so I don’t want anyone to think that Harold Gillies is the father of plastic surgery as a whole. The term “plastic surgery” was coined in 1798. At that time, plastic meant something that you could mould and shape – so in this instance, a patient’s skin or soft tissue. And attempts at early reconstruction of the face or to alter the appearance tended to focus on really small areas of the face. Rhinoplasty [reconstructing the nose] is one of the oldest surgical procedures on record, dating back…

A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power by James Walvin Little, Brown, 400 pages, £25 Quobna Ottobah Cugoano was born in what’s now Ghana. Kidnapped at the age of 13, he was forced into the stinking belly of a slave ship. After surviving the Middle Passage, he worked in the sugar fields of Grenada before sailing to Britain in servitude in 1772. Though Britain was the most prolific slavetrading power of the 18th century, when Cugoano arrived here the legal status of slaves in Britain was in question, and a movement to halt the nation’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade was growing. Cugoano obtained his freedom, got baptised and found his voice. In his 1787 memoir he described slave traders as “servants of…

Battles of Conscience: British Pacifists and the Second World War by Tobias Kelly Chatto & Windus, 384 pages, £22 Tobias Kelly’s scholarly examination of British pacifism neatly addresses the gap between past reality and current historical narrative. Much more has been written about the (far fewer) conscientious objectors who refused to fight in the First World War than those in the Second, in which three times as many pacifists took a stand. This says a great deal about how we remember the 1939-45 conflict. Widely regarded as the right war to fight, there seems to be little space for pacifists in discussions of the war against the Axis. The timing of this book is particularly prescient, arriving in the middle of another conflict – sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine…

GLOBAL Berlin by Sinclair McKay (Viking, 464 pages, £20) City scenes It’s not possible to understand the 20th century without understanding Berlin. That’s the contention of Sinclair McKay, whose biography of the German capital grapples with its complex and traumatic history. As with his bestseller Dresden, McKay uses previously unseen, first-person accounts from the city’s inhabitants to build up a vivid picture, from the First World War’s end to the fall of the Berlin Wall. FICTION Horse by Geraldine Brooks (Little Brown, 416 pages, £18.99) American triptych Based on the true story of Lexington, a brilliant thoroughbred and stud sire, Horse is the latest novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks. Weaving together three tales from American history – those of an enslaved groom in Kentucky, 1850; a gallery owner…

Here’s a selection of the exciting content that’s coming up on our website historyextra.com Why we need to think differently about the Vikings When it comes to the Vikings, the images that dominate today are all along a similar theme: raider, plunderer, barbarian. These tropes are entrenched in pop culture, but they belie the depth and diversity of Viking life. Dr Christian Cooijmans argues that we need to think differently. historyextra.com/viking-hostility The Ladies of Llangollen Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby dreamed of an unconventional life: one where two women, deeply in love, could live together. It was a dream that took them to north Wales and saw them rub shoulders with the personalities of the day. historyextra.com/ladies-llangollen The downfall of Maximilian I of Mexico In the early 1860s a plot…

“Pepys was fascinated by what was going on all around him, and wrote in vivid detail about everyday life, from breakfasts to bowel movements” When did you first hear about Pepys? I have always been a history geek. I became obsessed with epic historical events like the Great Fire of London and the bubonic plague, so when I chanced upon Pepys’ diaries I was hooked – they gave me a ringside view of events. I love anything that transports one back to the distant past and reveals the detail of how life looked and smelled in days gone by. What kind of man was he? He was narcissistic enough to almost invent the diary form and to understand the importance of his chronicles, bequeathing them to Magdalene College, Cambridge for…