Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2023 i History Extra

” You only have to browse the TV schedules or the shelves of your local book shop to appreciate our enormous fascination with crime. Whether in fact or fiction, we can't stop devouring tales of lawbreakers and those who seek to bring them to justice. And this is no new phenomenon: criminal misdeeds have enthralled our ancestors for centuries – the more shocking, the better. In this month's magazine we're taking an in-depth look at the history of crime (and punishment), examining notorious debtors’ prisons, the stories of female killers, and the remarkable tale of a 19th-century outlaw. It all begins on page 36, and do also check out the visit to a historic jail in our regular Explore piece (page 84). Meanwhile, April's cover feature takes us back to…

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. He has presented numerous BBC series, and is the author of several books including The Story of China (Simon & Schuster, 2021). His Twitter handle is @mayavision “Destroy a river and you also lose its past, part of our collective memory” THE OTHER DAY, I TOOK THE DISTRICT LINE TO Barking for an urban history walk along one of London's forgotten rivers, the Roding. This waterway flows into the Thames at Barking Creek, near the site of a famous seventh-century Anglo-Saxon nunnery. Close to the tube station, Abbey Green Park today marks the site of the monastic enclosure that was sold off to Henry VIII's cronies for building stone. Little remains above ground, but excavations have picked up…

In October 1938, some 6,500 Jews living in Germany were arrested without warning and dumped by police outside the Polish frontier village of Zbąszyń. At first, the surprised Polish border guards denied them entry but, after a standoff, these wretched people – who possessed Polish citizenship but who had made their lives in Germany – were allowed across the border. Among these victims of Nazi antisemitism were Berl and Addi Wasserstein. With nowhere else to go, Berl travelled with his son, Addi, to the place of his birth: Krakowiec. This readable book by Berl Wasserstein's grandson tells the story of this settlement, interwoven with his family history. Krakowiec was for centuries a wholly unremarkable small town in eastern Europe. First recorded in 1423, today it lies just inside Ukraine's border…

Why does everyone love Loki? Blame the novelists. Once, this father of monsters was considered the epitome of evil; in the original Norse myths, he is ultimately revealed to be a malicious traitor. Carolyne Larrington charts how this initially unattractive figure has been reimagined from the 1970s onwards by authors such as Diana Wynne Jones, AS Byatt and Joanne Harris. His “questing intelligence, easy charm, sexual attractiveness and relaxed relationship with ethical questions” have turned him into a flawed antihero, as also reflected in recent Marvel films. With her previous books, Larrington has been our best interpreter of the medieval Icelandic sources of Norse mythology. In this new and very readable volume, she shows how those stories and characters have stayed alive, evolving and developing as they inspired a host…

PROFESSOR LISA ROSNER (left), historical consultant on a new radio series about the crimes of William Burke and William Hare, talks to us about their 19th-century murder spree Burke and Hare murdered at least 16 people in 1828. What drove them to commit these crimes? They absolutely did it for the money. Hare's wife ran a boarding house, in which a man called Donald died of natural causes. What they ought to have done was tell the authorities and give him a Christian burial, but instead they decided to try to sell the body to the “surgeons” at Edinburgh's university, who were in desperate need of cadavers for medical students to dissect. It worked – and they realised that they could be paid hard cash for bodies. How did they…

Ancient aromas What did prehistoric Britain smell like? To give us an insight, Francis Pryor took listeners on a sensory tour. “I want to get inside the heads of people in the prehistoric past,” Pryor told us. “What were they thinking when they visited Stonehenge, built their houses or milked their cows? People tend to patronise the past – they think prehistoric people were simple. But the breadth of their experience was a great deal wider than you might imagine.” historyextra.com/prehistoric-mind Grave concerns In uncovering the story of prehistoric Britain, among the most valuable sources available to us are burial sites. Broadcaster and biological anthropologist Professor Alice Roberts joined us to discuss her book Buried, which examines seven of these prehistoric “time capsules” – from a mysterious palaeolithic “Red Lady”…

Across 1 Sixteenth-century Spanish historian and missionary, Bartholomé de ___ ____, who exposed the European oppression of indigenous American peoples (3,5) 5 The capital of the Egyptian empire in its heyday (6) 10 African republic that gained independence from France in 1960, under president Hamani Diori (5) 11 Malala ____, activist for female education who survived an assassination attempt by a Taliban gunman in 2012 (9) 12 One of earliest examples of such text is the ancient Sumerian Kesh Temple Hymn, inscribed on clay tablets (9) 13 A prehistoric circular or oval earthen enclosure (5) 14 Peninsula, once home of Illyrian tribes, mostly occupied by (what was) Yugoslavia after the Second World War (6) 16 The battle of ____ (16–19 October 1813) was a decisive defeat for Napoleon (7) 20 A 4th/5th-century teacher of astronomy and philosophy, the…

Alexander Wakelam “The debtors’ prison was an essential part of the Georgian economy. Its surprising effectiveness helped to ensure the wheels of commerce continued to spin, but it tore families apart and damaged lives across the social spectrum.” Alexander considers why so many Georgians languished in debtors’ prisons on page 36 Rosalind Crone “The copious records created by criminal trials – especially those of women accused of murder – provide us with a rare glimpse into their lives, even through their own words.” Rosalind chronicles the cases of five women who were convicted of deadly crimes on page 46 Gordon Corera “Twenty years on from the Iraq War, we can stand back slightly from the heated political debates of the immediate aftermath, and try to understand why the conflict happened…

Kavita Puri is a journalist and broadcaster for BBC Radio 4 whose history series include Three Pounds in My Pocket. She is also the author of Partition Voices: Untold British Stories (Bloomsbury, 2019) “A broad reckoning with the Cultural Revolution is still far off in China” I SPEND A LOT OF MY TIME THINKING ABOUT historical memory, about when we choose to speak – or to forget – both as individuals and collectively. I also think about how memory shifts, how it surfaces and retreats depending on the wider contemporary context, and how it evolves as it is passed down and becomes second - and third-hand remembrance. I was reminded of this while reading an excellent new book, Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution (Faber & Faber).…

Fashion a la frog An Italian scientist solved some of the mysteries of sexual reproduction by equipping male frogs with tiny trousers made from taffeta. In the 1760s, it was unclear that both male sperm and a female egg were needed to create new life. Lazzaro Spallanzani took two groups of male frogs. One group he left as nature intended, and the other he dressed in trousers. The first group mated successfully when introduced to females; the trousered frogs, their sperm contained, did not. Prize mix-up In 1987, the secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences rang Donald O Cram, owner of a Californian carpet-cleaning business, to tell him he had won the Nobel prize for chemistry. Mr Cram, assuming it was a practical joke, put down the phone.…

Accompanies series two of Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley, on BBC Sounds 1 The knife-wielding tavern owner Mary McKinnon was convicted of stabbing one of the customers in her Edinburgh establishment – and earned a one-way trip to the gallows Edinburgh in the 1820s was a city of contrasts. The New Town was the playground of the affluent, lined with beautiful houses and grand assembly and concert rooms, where the wealthy could indulge in intellectual pastimes. The Old Town, however, was crowded and filthy, packed with dingy inns and taverns. As well as selling pints of ale, many also offered sexual services to their customers. The city's sex industry had been expanding since around 1760, and by the turn of the 19th century, South Bridge had become notorious for street…

Your new novel, The Company, takes inspiration from a historical Victorian scandal involving the use of arsenic in fashionable wallpaper. What was the story? Scheele's Green, a colour invented by the SwedishGerman scientist Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1775, was a brilliant green that became all the rage in home decor in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The problem with it was that it was derived from arsenic and could be deadly, especially under damp conditions, when the pigments reacted with moisture to produce a toxic gas. How did you research such a sinister topic? Two great books on this topic were instrumental for me: Lucinda Hawksley's Bitten by Witch Fever (Thames and Hudson, 2016) and James C Whorton's The Arsenic Century (OUP, 2010). Hawksley's book is really the…

We have seen them in black-and-white photographs of the time: women in starched gowns and broad-brimmed hats taking tea on manicured lawns, a liveried Indian servant inevitably attending on them. Margaret MacMillan, however, takes us behind the gloss to reveal the real lives of women who travelled thousands of miles to live in India at the height of the British empire. Women of the Raj tells stories of their lives there – as wives, as teachers or as those seeking husbands, known as the “fishing fleet”. It was not always a life of privilege, and the class system largely prevailed. Wives of ordinary soldiers travelled below deck in rat-infested cabins, while upper-class ladies enjoyed fresh breezes on deck. Once in India, the women adapted quickly, covering their ankles with pillowcases…

Uproar!, we are forewarned, rips through the context and production of British 18th and 19th-century pictorial satire, focusing on the careers of Georgian artists Thomas Rowlandson, Isaac Cruikshank and James Gillray. The author's note states that this is a subject known only to enthusiasts and academics – quite a claim, on the face of it. It is certainly true that many of the complex references to contemporary characters and events – which would have been immediately understood by those living through the moment represented – are inevitably lost on the modern viewer. And Alice Loxton is good at summarising the background to the often bewildering barrage of detail around images of William Pitt the Younger, Bonaparte et al. However, many readers of this magazine are unlikely to be ignorant of…

Across 7 Aymara 8 Brougham 10 Manhattan 11 Globe 12 Demesne 14 Tsarist 16 Riefenstahl 20 Papyrus 22 Mithras 23 Reith 25 The Prince 27 Archives 28 Enigma Down: 1 Amin 2 Breakspear 3 Brandt 4 Sung 5 Chronicler 6 Amnesty 7 Armada 9 St Bede 13 Mary Prince 15 Alan Turing 17 Simnel 18 Spartan 19 Assegai 21 Suttee 24 Hain 26 Nagy Five winners of Medieval Horizons M Cook, Suffolk; P Masters, Leicestershire; R Atkinson, Cheshire; G Elkin, Staffordshire; C Johnston, Lancashire…

LETTER OF THE MONTH Pirates and pen names Sam Willis's entertaining article about Charles Johnson's scandalous works popularising robbers, pirates and highwaymen (Murder and Mayhem in Georgian Britain, March) reignites a long controversy about the true identity of the author. Although the so-called “Captain” Johnson demonstrates a sound knowledge of seafarers’ speech and lifestyle in his books, no record exists of any contemporary captain or pirate of that name. Captain Johnson was therefore probably the pen name of a London writer-publisher exploiting the name of dramatist Charles Johnson, who had staged a successful play about pirates a few years earlier. Literary scholar JR Moore suggested that Daniel Defoe was the real author of Johnson's work, believing its style and treatment of seafaring and criminality to be similar to other works…

Rhiannon Davies: In The Earth Transformed you argue that the history of humanity is inextricably linked to the history of the environment. Why is that? Peter Frankopan: Well, I'm not the first person to make that point. The Abrahamic faiths – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – all have an origin story rooted in the Garden of Eden. The point of the Garden of Eden is that if you obey God's commandments, you have plenty. You have optimal climate conditions; you have ecologies that give you everything you need. But when you transgress and you eat from the forbidden tree, you're punished by being kicked out of the Garden of Eden and forced to live in a dangerous world. Though other global religions don't have exactly the same story, there are…

“Acting is merely the art of keeping a large number of people from coughing,” declared the sublime actor Ralph Richardson. His wry line suggests just how hard it is to say anything of substance about this most ancient of art forms. Unlike the playtext itself, a performance leaves behind no trace except in the memory of individual audience members or in the frankly idiosyncratic opinions of theatre critics. Peter Ackroyd's study of the English actor from medieval times to the modern day doesn't entirely solve this problem. What it does do, however, is showcase an astonishingly expansive cast of leading actors and actresses through the centuries, giving an inkling of what it might have been like to be in their company and watch them at their best. Thus he recounts…

In his new book, Seamus O'Maho ny invites readers to view the shifting fortunes of three men over the course of nearly four decades. The guru in question is Sigmund Freud; the bagman is his most devoted disciple, Ernest Jones; the sceptic is Jones's brother-in-law, eminent surgeon Wilfred Trotter. There's a particular focus on psychoanalysis – which the author, like Trotter, clearly regards as a cult, not a science. “Psychoanalysis,” he remarks, “became a home for rich directionless strays, who analysed other rich directionless strays.” If O'Mahony is essentially dismissive of Freud's intellectual legacy, he displays a grudging respect for the man himself. Trotter, the sceptical Englishman, with his dexterity as a surgeon and his innate modesty, is most sympathetically portrayed. Least favoured is the industrious but sycophantic Jones, whose…

PODCAST Creating prehistoric cave art EXPLORE Shepton Mallet Prison, Somerset TRAVEL Prague in five places VISIT Radical vision The Rossetti generation – spearheaded by Dante Gabriel, his sister, Christina, and his wife, Elizabeth (neé Siddal) – defied the staid expectations of Victorian society, creating an explosion of paintings and poetry that celebrated romance and radicalism. Their Pre-Raphaelite years (from 1848) in particular were marked by revolutionary zeal – both in personal terms and in the way they railed against the art establishment. Now, a major exhibition at Tate Britain brings together 150 examples of the Rossettis’ work, from portraits and photos to sketches and poems. As well as delving into the art, displays will also explore the lives of the artists – including Dante's extramarital affairs with some of his…

MY HISTORY HERO Singer, actor and author Michelle Gayle chooses IN PROFILE James Baldwin was a gay black American writer known for his novels, essays, plays and poems; he was also active in America's civil rights movement. His two best-known works are his novel Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), voted one of the best English language novels of the 20th century, and his essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955). An unfinished manuscript of his became the Oscar-nominated documentary, I Am Not Your Negro (2016). He died in France aged 63. He argued that all the things that white people hated were things that we should love about ourselves When did you first hear about James Baldwin? While doing my A-levels, although my studies were focused on the classics.…