Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2022 i History Extra

175 YEARS AGO How did Charlotte Brontë get Jane Eyre published? Charlotte (pictured right, c1850) spent her childhood and adolescence writing fantasy sagas in collaboration with her siblings. Her first publication was a family project, too: a collection of poems self-published in 1846 by Charlotte, Emily and Anne under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Charlotte failed to find a publisher for the first novel she wrote, The Professor; it was released posthumously in 1857. However, one publisher, George Smith, expressed an interest in her future efforts. She was already at work writing Jane Eyre, and sent it to Smith soon afterwards. It was published eight weeks later, on 19 October 1847. What was the critical reception? Many critics recognised that Jane Eyre was extraordinary, praising Brontë’s forceful style,…

Who invented hieroglyphs? There is no knowing who invented it, but hieroglyphic writing probably originated at one of the rival royal courts in the late-fourth millennium BC, before Egypt was unified under the first dynasty. While the idea of writing may have been borrowed from Mesopotamia (where it had been developed centuries earlier), the hieroglyphic system was distinctively Egyptian. When was hieroglyphic writing used? It was used continuously over a period of over 3,500 years. The earliest surviving examples are small: bone labels inscribed with symbols, which were found in a tomb at Abydos and dated to c3150 BC. The last-known inscription was carved on the temple of Philae on 24 August AD 394. Who wrote in this script? A small proportion of the ancient Egyptian population – perhaps only…

Darwin’s evolutionary ally In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin set out his theory of evolution by natural selection. Like many European scientists, Darwin relied on his global contacts. After returning from the voyage of HMS Beagle in 1836, Darwin began writing to people all over the world. One of his contacts was the Argentine doctor Francisco Muñiz (pictured). Muñiz was already thinking about evolution, having published an article on a sabre-tooth tiger fossil he had discovered. Darwin was impressed, and cited Muñiz in many of his later publications, including On the Origin of Species. Mendeleev’s contributor In 1869, Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev revolutionised the study of chemistry with his periodic table, which placed the chemical elements in order of atomic weight, leaving gaps for unknown elements. But…

African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History by Hakim Adi (Allen Lane, 688 pages, £30) Rhiannon Davies: Your new book covers African and Caribbean people in Britain from Roman times right up to the 21st century. Why did you decide to focus on such a long period? Hakim Adi: The aim is obviously to create something that is going to be useful to readers, so you do need to present the entire history. And I also wanted to showcase the latest research. The key book in the recent period is Peter Fryer’s Staying Power, which was published nearly 40 years ago, and while lots of work has been done by various people since that came out, the history hasn’t been presented in its entirety. So I wanted to sum…

Two Houses, Two Kingdoms: A History of France and England, 1100-1300 by Catherine Hanley Yale University Press, 480 pages, £25 In the High Middle Ages – as, indeed, for much of history – political power was personal. It may be an oversimplification to view a monarch by his famed temperament – to see Richard I “the Lionheart” of England (reigned 1189‒99) as bellicose, his brother John (r1199‒1216) as capricious, or Louis IX of France (r1226‒70) as pious. Yet these qualities did, largely, characterise their reigns. Wielding power was also a personal undertaking. To be a successful king required maintaining strong relationships with a realm’s interrelated elites, from the leading nobility and senior clergy to a monarch’s own family. Since the Norman Conquest, these aspects of medieval power tied England and…

Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year by Eleanor Parker Reaktion Books, 240 pages, £14.99 Before electrical lighting and central heating, the seasons exerted an influence over people’s lives that modern observers can struggle to comprehend fully. It goes without saying that Anglo-Saxons experienced the turning of the year differently: with most wealth derived from agriculture, and over 90 per cent of the population in the fields, it was the rhythms of sowing, growing and reaping that dominated. That is the focus of Eleanor Parker’s delightful and informative book, in which she introduces the workings of an Anglo-Saxon year with verve. Expertly drawing on the Old English poetic corpus, Parker gives a keen sense of how the four seasons were experienced. Winter was cold and dark, a…

DIARY PODCAST A day in the life of a medieval monk EXPLORE Culzean Castle, South Ayrshire TRAVEL Belgrade, Serbia WATCH Abiding fascination Marilyn Monroe continues to fascinate us. Earlier this year, Andy Warhol’s silk-screen portrait, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, sold for $195m, the highest price ever paid for a work of 20th-century art. This spectacular auction followed on shortly from Kim Kardashian being widely criticised for attending the Met Gala wearing the dress Monroe wore when serenading John F Kennedy on his birthday. In a year of such Marilyn-related news stories, a new biopic of the star might not seem such a big deal, but the latest offering from Australian director Andrew Dominik may yet prove otherwise. His Blonde, based on Joyce Carol Oates’s bestselling novel imagining the actor’s inner…

Hakim Adi “There is a significant and substantial history of African and Caribbean people in Britain which has often been denied, but which people should have access to. I wanted to help provide people with that information.” Hakim shares hidden stories from the long history of African and Caribbean people in Britain on page 72 Lisa Pine “My abiding interest in daily life and society in the Third Reich led me to investigate the fascinating topic of food, in order to find out the impact of the Nazi regime on the German diet both before and during the Second World War.” Lisa looks at how the Nazis campaigned to control food and farming on page 58 Toby Wilkinson “I have been fascinated by hieroglyphics since I was five years old.…

“Has history got it wrong about Oliver Cromwell’s persecution of Catholics?” The question posed in The Guardian’s headline refers to new research claiming that Cromwell was far more committed to religious freedom and equality than previously thought. Taking to Twitter, Paul Lay (@_paullay), author of Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate (2020), noted: “Important this is being said, but it is not new to historians of the period.” “Indeed,” as Arthur_S (@allanholloway) pointed out, “much of it is covered in the 1973 biography of Cromwell by Antonia Fraser, a Catholic herself, who points out that Cromwell was an Independent and believed in the right to dissent and religious observance.” Nick Anstead (@NickAnstead) was prompted to write: “It is interesting that the anti-Catholic/anti-Irish view of Cromwell is mentioned…

“One thing’s for sure: religion will not fade away any time soon” In my job, travelling the world making films on history and culture, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring religion in its many manifestations. Religion, after all, is a gift for the camera: full of colour, action and often moving rituals. It’s also a crystallisation in words and gestures of humanity’s beliefs, hopes and dreams, making for a powerful sensory insight into the ways in which our ancestors understood their relation to the universe. In a Vedic school in Varanasi (India), I’ve seen boys chanting late-Bronze Age Sanskrit; in Yazd (Iran), I’ve sat with Zoroastrians before the sacred fire; recently, I joined a million people at a farmers’ festival in Henan (China) celebrating the goddess Nüwa, who created…

KAVITA PURI explores lesser-known stories from our past Kavita Puri is a journalist, broadcaster and author of Partition Voices: Untold British Stories (Bloomsbury, updated for 2022). Her Radio 4 show, Inheritors of Partition, is available on BBC Sounds “Sometimes, remembering is too painful, the urge to forget too strong” One was from Melbourne, Australia; the other was from London, England. They had been able to track each other down only by their shared – and rare – family surname. The Australian cousin brought black-and-white photographs of her ancestors, taken at the turn of the 20th century; they wore their best clothes, and posed formally. The other cousin was my husband, whose paternal Jewish family came from near Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, south-west Poland). His grandfather managed to survive the Holocaust…

4,280 The highest (average) total of inmates on prison hulks in England in a single year, 1842. Of those, 3,615 were transported to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), Australia 216 The number of 10- to 15-year-olds incarcerated in hulks in England in 1841. Three of these boys were under 10 years old 1 in 4 The approximate fatality rate of prisoners on board the hulk Justitia who died between August 1776, when it first received inmates, and March 1778. Out of a total of 632 convicts, 167 perished 60 The total number of years that a hulk called Justitia operated at Woolwich. The first ship with that name was moored there from 1776 to 1802; its successor of the same name was used for 34 years, from 1814 to 1848…

Northumbria The land of the people “north of the Humber” was the product of a seventhcentury merger between Deira and Bernicia, and extended as far north as the Firth of Forth. In the mid-860s it was settled and ruled by Vikings until it became part of the kingdom of England in 954. Gwynedd The kingdom of Gwynedd was the longest-lasting and most politically important realm of the British west until England finally gained control in the 13th century. Dyfed Based on the Iron Age tribal territory of the Demetae, Dyfed was absorbed into the larger realm of Deheubarth in the tenth century, then invaded by the Normans following the Conquest. Wessex Probably based originally in the Thames Valley, the kingdom of the Gewissæ shifted to Hampshire and Dorset, rebranding as…

Hieroglyphics can broadly be grouped into three types: phonetic (a picture representing sounds); logograms (symbolising a word or meaning); and the determinative. The latter accompanied another sign to clarify which of its many possible meanings was being used (so a determinative of three wavy lines confirms the preceding sign means “river”). Here, Toby Wilkinson translates a section of hieroglyphic text from the Great Hymn to the Orb, written by Akhenaten in c1350 BC. In it, the pharaoh extols the power and beauty of the creator god, the orb of the sun. The signs are read from right to left, and from top to bottom: ❶ The first three signs spell out the letters “rmw” (“fish”), which is confirmed by the determinative of a fish symbol below. The three strokes indicate…

“In the hands of the BBC, television finally had the backing it needed after a decade spent struggling to get off the ground” For the first 14 years of its life, the BBC had been synonymous with radio. But on 2 November 1936, the corporation launched the world’s first regular “high-definition” television service. And although it would take more than two decades for this new medium to become a mass social phenomenon, the meaning of the term “broadcasting” changed almost overnight. The BBC was now on the path of becoming supplier to the nation not just of sound but of sound and vision. Shortly after 3pm at the Alexandra Palace studios on the slopes of Muswell Hill, the BBC Television Orchestra began to play. The musical comedy star Adele Dixon…

The Death of William Gooch: A History’s Anthropology by Greg Dening (Melbourne University Press, 1995) Greg Dening was an exceptional historian. He was an Australian Jesuit who had abandoned the priesthood in protest against the indictment of abortion, and continued to dissect his own prejudices while probing the limits of academic enquiry. When this book appeared, I had been living abroad, first in Berlin and then in Canberra. Those immersions in different cultures made me appreciate that histories have a global map: the past may be another country, but describing how they do things there depends on a tourist’s origins. In Australia, “history from below” – the everyday stories of everyday people – had become commonplace long before Britain stopped celebrating dead white generals. Australia, a former dominion possessed by…

MEMOIR The Interpreter’s Daughter by Teresa Lim (Michael Joseph, 352 pages, £20) Family secrets When Teresa Lim moved to Britain in 1992, she missed the colourful food of her home country of Singapore. To counter her homesickness, she began creating a family cookbook, but instead soon found herself immersed in her ancestors’ lives, in particular the forgotten tragedy of her great-aunt Fanny. With a single photograph to go on, Lim embarked on a quest to discover and honour Fanny’s true story. GLOBAL The Hong Kong Diaries by Chris Patten (Allen Lane, 560 pages, £30) End of empire It is 25 years since Hong Kong was handed over to China, and to mark the occasion the last British governor has published the diaries of his time in charge. Chris Patten’s journal…

“We now know about the damage fame causes – both to the celebrity and also, in a way, to us” Your new show, Icon, looks at celebrity through the lens of Elizabeth Taylor. What can you tell us about it? It’s a classic radio series in the sense that it’s pursuing an abstract idea – the nature of celebrity and celebrity culture – but the unusual thing is there’s no presenter. So the story has to reveal itself; the ideas in the series need to be almost negotiating between themselves. And a way to do that is to begin with the experiences of perhaps the most iconic of all screen goddesses, Elizabeth Taylor. She was a child star within the Hollywood system. She was involved in romantic scandals. She was…

1. Historical hair hero As a bearded man myself, I’m always interested to learn about fantastic facial hair from the past, such as the story of a North Dakotan farmer who donated his five-metre-long beard to the Smithsonian in 1967 (p57). 2. A sensational story Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a classic novel but I hadn’t realised that it was also an instant bestseller. In Why We Should Remember…, Sara Lyons reveals how its popularity lead to “Jane Eyre fever” in England (page 15) 3. Malaria medic James Poskett’s feature on global scientific pioneers was full of fascinating details, but one that caught my eye was the story of Graman Kwasi, an enslaved African man who pioneered a treatment for malaria in the 18th century (page 50).…

The herpes strain that infects an estimated 3.7 billion people across the world today may have become widespread some 5,000 years ago in the wake of mass migrations into Europe from the Eurasian steppe during the Bronze Age, according to new research. University of Cambridge scientists located and sequenced ancient genomes of HSV-1 for the first time, using DNA from human remains found over a huge geographical area and time period. The team identified herpes in the remains of four people, from regions as disparate as Britain, the Netherlands and Russia, who died at different times across a 1,000-year period. Using samples from these remains, scientists determined that HSV-1 became dominant around 4,500 years ago. Dr Lucy van Dorp, co-lead author of the study, said: “By comparing ancient DNA with…

1 The king had a curved spine Shakespeare gave us a “deformed” Richard III “not shaped for sportive tricks”, with a hunched back, a withered arm and a limp. Archaeology gave us instead a curved spine: a rare form of scoliosis that developed in Richard’s adolescence, resulting in a squat torso and uneven shoulders. He had no other skeletal conditions, however, and could have been as physically active as others around him, though he was not particularly strong. Osteologist Jo Appleby (below) briefly wondered whether the skeleton was female before concluding that it was that of a man with a delicate frame. 2 He enjoyed a life of luxury Studies of the remains showed that Richard ate well, consuming a high-protein diet including plenty of seafood. Towards the end of…

“Hardworking and efficient housewives know what they have to do in the service of this great German family – the German people – if it has to overcome temporary small shortages. They simply do their shopping in accordance with the interest of the great German family!” So said Rudolf Hess, deputy Führer of the Nazi Party, in a speech in 1936. He went on to elaborate on what was expected of “good” German women: “They do not attempt to buy expressly that which is in short supply at the time, but instead buy those things which are available in abundance and prepare them in such a way that they look really good and taste really good to their husbands and children. No good German housewife particularly mourns the quarter-pound of…

Russia and the Russians: From Earliest Times to the Present by Geoffrey Hosking (Second edition, Penguin, 2012) A thoughtful and sophisticated analysis of how the relationship between the rulers of Russia (and the Soviet Union) and Russian society has evolved, from the mid-16th century to the Putin era. Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals by Dominic Lieven (John Murray, 2000) An exceptionally wide-ranging comparative study of the Russian empire with contemporary powers such as the Austrian, Ottoman and British empires. This comprehensive text covers geopolitics, the nature of rule, political structures, the economy, the military, society and culture. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture by James H Billington (Vintage Books, 1966) First published in 1966, this impressive coverage of the history of religion, culture,…

Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine by Lawrence Freedman Allen Lane, 608 pages, £30 When Britain’s leading historian of military strategy writes of the influence of politics on postwar global conflict, and includes a chapter on the present Russo-Ukrainian War, it behoves us all to take notice. When it is moreover couched in terms that are as wise as they are insightful, this is doubly so. Sir Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, has effectively stood Carl von Clausewitz [the 19th-century Prussian general whose 1832 work On War has long been a stalwart of military strategy] on his head. He argues that just as warfare is politics “by other means”, so warfare also must be conducted politically, and his book illustrates…

Ballroom: A People’s History of Dancing by Hilary French Reaktion Books, 304 pages, £18 Have you ever watched Strictly Come Dancing and wondered about the history of ballroom and Latin dancing? If so, Hilary French has provided an authoritative and accessible introduction. Over 14 chapters she explores the development of the dance form and the ebb and flow of its popularity in the 20th century, from the everyday dance halls to the Hollywood glamour of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The analysis of the physical spaces in which dancing was performed and enjoyed is one of the most compelling aspects discussed, with a collection of photographs helping to bring these places to life. In 1894, the Blackpool Tower Ballroom opened, one of the first places in England built for the…

Lack of contact with the outside world; lots of reading, cooking and housework; long stretches of silence and fragile truces with those you live with; maybe an obsession with gardening. While this could be describing the first lockdown, I’m actually talking about life in a medieval monastery. Historian Danièle Cybulskie joined us on the HistoryExtra podcast recently to offer an insight into the realities of cloistered abbey life, and I must admit, it doesn’t sound as bad as I had imagined. Firstly, for most of the Middle Ages, the brothers had not been forced against their will into a monastery. “The idea of consent was really important,” stresses Cybulskie, “people didn’t want you to be a monk if you hadn’t made that choice for yourself.” In fact, any prospective holy…

John Betjeman 1906-84 “Betjeman had an unassailable devotion to celebrate the world around him, and the ability to take people with him on that journey” When did you first hear about Betjeman? As a child, I was absolutely transfixed by his 1973 BBC documentary, Metro-Land. What made it so memorable was this erudite, grandfatherly figure, who told the story of how the north-west London suburbs around the Metropolitan Line developed in the early 20th century. That was where I grew up, but thought it rather uninteresting until Betjeman immortalised it. What kind of man was he? Sometimes he would wear his heart on his sleeve, as he did in some of his poetry – for instance, talking about the women he admired from afar. But in other respects, he was…