Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2023 i History Extra

“At its peak, the Roman empire “stretched from the Atlantic to Arabia, and from the icy northern seas to the Sahara”. How could Rome keep control of such a vast realm? In our cover feature this month, Tom Holland seeks to answer that question, focusing on the golden age of Pax Romana - two centuries of relative peace and prosperity across the Roman domain. As Tom explains, even in an age of limited warfare, the threat of violence was always lurking below the surface. You can read his evocative piece on page 22. The traditional starting point of Pax Romana is the beginning of the reign of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, who emerged triumphant from the decades of civil wars surrounding the rise and fall of Julius Caesar. Those tumultuous…

“The roots of western culture do not lie in Greco-Roman antiquity” THE SUPERVISOR OF MY POSTGRADUATE WORK years ago was Michael Wallace-Hadrill, a pioneering scholar of early western Europe, of the Merovingians and the Carolingian Renaissance, as it became known in the 1960s. His best-known book was The Barbarian West, in which he emphasised that the real roots of the west are to be found in the barbarian tribes and their elites in the post-Roman period: Franks, Visigoths, Angles, Saxons and Ostrogoths. His story told how western Europeans adopted Latin Christian civilisation and, in the ninth century, created the first European renaissance - a turning point in the history of Europe. Aided by revived Latin learning, Greek knowledge and science, Hebrew religion and, as the eighth-century English scholar Alcuin put…

The right to arm bears A Syrian brown bear became a private in the Polish army during the Second World War. Found as a cub and adopted by the 22nd Artillery Supply Company, the bear was named Wojtek. The soldiers who looked after him were assigned to north Africa to work alongside the British Eighth Army, but the troopship carrying them there banned pet animals. To get around this, Wojtek (seen here immortalised in bronze in Edinburgh, where he lived out his postwar days) was enlisted as a private, with his own paybookand serial number. Lost in translation Catherine the Great, empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796, tried her hand at translating Shakespeare. Her version of The Merry Wives of Windsor had a title which in Russian meant ‘Now…

Ambrose Parry (writing couple Chris Brookmyre and Dr Marisa Haetzman) discuss Voices of the Dead, their latest historical thriller Your new book is set in Edinburgh in 1853. How did you reconstruct life in the Victorian city? We used various historical sources, including chloroform pioneer James Young Simpson’s casebooks, plus the Scottish National Library’s online collection of contemporary maps. It fires the imagination to look at buildings and imagine the events that might have transpired within their walls. Marisa, how did you draw on your knowledge of medical history? Mid-19th-century Edinburgh was a hive of medical innovation and discovery, but this era also coincided with a resurgence of interest in mesmerism and spiritualism. I was inspired by an incident in which Simpson disrupted a spiritualist demonstration, reflecting the battle between…

Some books, like people, mark you indelibly. The first part of Alexander Murray’s Suicide in the Middle Ages taught me what history could be: ambitious in scope and humane in detail, rigorously researched and movingly written. This was the first of three volumes (the last is still awaited) in which Murray attempted “the mapping of mental desolation”, hunting across the late medieval centuries in England, France, Germany and Italy for people who took their own lives. He found some 560 - by no means all of those whose suicide was recorded, let alone who died by suicide, but enough cases to discern patterns. For instance, three times as many medieval men as women took their own lives, comparable to 19th-century ratios. Murray’s task was the excavation of each life and…

“If he was Britain’s greatest engineer of the 20th century, where is his legacy?” Rarely does a question feel so sacrilegious to ask, yet ring so uncomfortably true. This discordant feeling is prompted by Richard Morris’s riveting biography of Barnes Wallis. The inventor of Upkeep - the legendary bouncing bomb from the Dambusters raid - was also a master of geodetics, an expert in earthquake bombs and a conceptualiser of swing-wing and supersonic aircraft. Morris reminds us, though, that “airships and geodetics were dead ends; Upkeep in the end was a one-trick pony; Highball [another bouncing bomb] was never used; none of the late visions materialised." That Wallis’s name remains little known beyond the idiosyncratic bubble of British wartime nostalgia leads Morris to wonder: does his esteemed reputation derive solely…

When you step through a door in a modern mall, the last thing you expect is to be cordially greeted by an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman - or ominously warned of imminent Viking attack. But in the Brooks Shopping Centre in Winchester, that is exactly what you get. Inhabited since the Iron Age, Winchester has a rich history spanning more than 2,000 years. However, its early medieval prominence as a major cultural, religious and administrative centre has dominated the public imagination - especially its association with King Alfred the Great. This connection has been enhanced further in recent years through its appearance as a location in Ubisoft’s 2020 video game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and the Netflix series The Last Kingdom. Despite the statue of Alfred gazing along the Broadway towards the High…

Joya Chatterji "In my new history of south Asia, I’m trying to show the extent to which things remain connected, despite the formation of the nations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. You can’t easily rip such societies apart." Joya untangles the complex history of south Asia In the 20th century on page 66 Paul Dryburgh “Roger Mortimer engineered the unprecedented deposition of an English king and possibly embarked on an infamous romance with the queen. But he overreached himself, and paid the ultimate penalty.” Paul introduces the political schemer who helped depose Edward II on page 40 Marion Gibson “My new book chronicles the history of witch trials over seven centuries. Through it I’ve explored how we’ve come a long way, but have also gotten nowhere in our attempts to…

Nasa’s recent public comments on UFO sightings reflect a recent resurgence in interest in the topic. The comments revealed that the Pentagon’s UAP [unexplained anomalous phenomenon] Taskforce is currently investigating hundreds of unexplained sightings reported by military personnel. Back in 2017, a New York Times story claimed that a secret Pentagon-funded project had been looking at reports of UFOs by US Navy pilots and military sources since at least 2007. The official US government line has always been that the Air Force Project Blue Book, which ran from 1947 to 1969, was the last government-funded investigation of odd things in the sky, and that a report from the University of Colorado concluded there was no scientific interest or defence threat. Since then, Nasa’s position has been that it isn’t interested…

THE CONVERSATION “It matters which historical figures we remember in our public spaces” I HAVE A HABIT: WHENEVER I PASS A HOUSE sporting a blue plaque, I have to stop and look - and I always learn something. The other day, as I hurried down a familiar street in London’s Fitzrovia district, a flash of blue caught my eye. I paused to read that: “Young Charles Dickens twice lived in this house 1815-16 and 1828-31, a few doors from the Cleveland Street workhouse.” What struck me was not so much that Dickens had lived there, but that a workhouse had once existed so close by. And that’s the point of those plaques: to highlight an individual of note linked to a place, and to transport you back in time, connecting…

Infectious enthusiasm As Britain’s National Health Service celebrates its 75th anniversary this July, two topics look set to dominate the extensive media coverage. The first is the sense of crisis stalking the NHS, illustrated by sky-high waiting lists, troubling financial shortcomings, exhausted staff and extensive industrial action. The second is the NHS’s enviable reputation as arguably Britain’s best-loved institution. In 2022, some 62 per cent of people surveyed by polling organisation Ipsos stated that the service was the thing that made them “most proud to be British” - an increase of 12 per cent from 2016. The fun-runs, tea parties and other events marking the NHS’s ‘birthday’ on 5 July speak to its standing in British public life. It’s an institution that appears to be part of the furniture -…

Two hundred miles east, in Montgomery, Alabama, a 42-year-old black activist called Rosa Parks was devastated by the news that Emmett Till’s murderers had walked free. On 1 December 1955, she finished her shift at the department store where she worked and waited to catch the bus home. At the time, transport was segregated in the south. Although this arrangement was meant to provide “separate but equal” facilities to passengers of all races, in reality black people received the worst deal. Mia Bay, the author of Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, told me: “Especially in the early days of buses, there was a worst seat on the bus: the seat over the wheel at the back. It was much higher than the other seats and had no…

Matt Elton: Your new book covers what you describe as “the South Asian 20th century”. What do you mean by that term? Joya Chatterji: I focus on the area ruled by the former British Raj, formally or informally. I think of there being a kind of united south Asia in which glimmers of the British empire (and the social structures that predated it) could still be made out throughout the latter half of the 20th century - long after the British themselves had left. I’m also keen to push back against the idea that the history of India, Pakistan or Bangladesh can be understood independently of that of the others. They’re too intertwined. It just wasn’t the case that they were all somehow born entirely anew after partition in 1947…

“How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy?” This is the opening contradiction, as well as the challenge at the heart of Ned Blackhawk’s brilliant new book. In an era when Native peoples are still more likely to experience social and economic deprivation, and when language, cultural and environmental loss continue to plague their communities, this question has never been more urgent. Since its foundation, when “Indians not taxed” (and thus not citizens) were explicitly excluded from the Constitution, the US has grappled with the presence of Native peoples within its borders. In his new book, Blackhawk shows how these struggles - over land, sovereignty, individualism and independence - are at the heart of how the modern US was formed.…

Michael Scott has produced both a breathless account of some of the most audacious adventures from the Enlightenment tradition of treasure hunting, and a sharp and insightful look at the deeper politics behind the treasure that archaeologists find. We begin in the late 18th century, with Napoleon, his soldiers and scientists invading Egypt and discovering the Rosetta Stone. Scott renders the complicated standoff between British naval forces, the dying Ottoman empire and the cultural aspirations of the French Revolution into a preface for what is to come: amazing discoveries underpinned by a dark web of politics and personalities. The next adventure takes us deep into the world of the Great Game and China’s austere Taklamakan Desert. This time the Brits are the ones backing Marc Aurel Stein as he with…

PODCAST Female enslavers EXPLORE 878 AD, Winchester, Hampshire TRAVEL Oslo in five places VISIT Face value The Georgian era was a period of social, economic, intellectual and - as a new exhibition demonstrates - artistic transformation in Edinburgh. Marking the 200th anniversary of the death of renowned local artist Sir Henry Raeburn, the new display features 13 portraits of a diverse range of figures from the National Trust for Scotland’s collections. These form the springboard for a bold exploration of his life and social milieu, telling the stories of the artist and his sitters through audio recordings, as well as examining the attitudes of Edinburgh society at the time. Raeburn’s Edinburgh The Georgian House, Edinburgh/ Until November/ nts.org.uk/visit/places/georgian-house WATCH Power, corruption and lies Surrounded as she was by ruthless people…

LETTER OF THE MONTH Truth and history I enjoyed the focus on theoretical approaches to history in the Conversation pages of the June issue. I found the suggestion made by David Motadel in his piece - that historians now agree that their work is shaped, consciously or otherwise, by their environment - highly convincing. History and the past are not the same: the past encompasses the ‘before now’, and ‘history’ is the accepted methods of analysis needed to understand it. As the philosopher Richard Rorty argued, humans are unable to detach themselves from their beliefs and existing viewpoints. This is why Motadel’s argument is so convincing. We need to abandon notions of empirical truth: although history as a discipline is governed by a set of rules and conventions, this does…

Does the modern Goth subculture have any link to the Gothic people? The Goth subculture first took root in the UK in the 1980s, when bands such as The Cure and Bauhaus became increasingly popular. It soon evolved to become more than a musical movement. Goths typically favoured black clothes and dark, often crimped hair; many sported long coats, corsets and chokers. What connection do these Goths have to the people who helped forge medieval Europe? Though it’s not known exactly where they came from, those historical Goths were a Germanic people who migrated across the continent, building kingdoms and sometimes fighting against established powers such as the Romans. After the late fifth century they were divided into Visigoths (western tribes) and Ostrogoths (eastern). Today, ancient Goths are seen as…

1 A wife to the rescue On 22 February 1716, Lady Winifred Herbert walked out of the Tower of London accompanied by her maids. Little did the guards know that one of those maids was her husband. William Maxwell, 5th Earl of Nithsdale, was a leader of the 1715 Jacobite rising in support of the Old Pretender. When the rising failed, he was captured and sentenced to death for treason. And that’s the fate he would have faced if his wife - who visited him regularly in the Tower - hadn’t smuggled him out dressed as a woman. Maxwell escaped to Calais and then to Rome, where he lived out his life in poverty. 2 A drink for the road In February 1101, Ranulf Flambard, bishop of Durham, fled the…

Sidi Mubarak Bombay never forgot the moment he lost everything. It was the early 19th century, and he was just a child living in a remote village in the Yao territory of east Africa, which today lies on the border between Tanzania and Mozambique. He never knew his mother, who died soon after he was born, but he had a father, a family, friends, a home. All were taken from him when, as he later recalled with moving candour, a large group of men “equipped with sword and gun, came suddenly”. These were not strangers. They had been there before, offering goods that they knew the villagers could ill afford. The Yao, Bantu-speaking peoples of east and central Africa, were far from naive: they were sophisticated agriculturalists, highly skilled ironsmiths…

James Davey’s challenging alternative reading of Britain and its Royal Navy in the relatively unsuccessful war against revolutionary France opens fresh perspectives on a critical period in British history, highlighting the challenge of radical politics in the 1790s. He argues that the impressment of sailors exposed deep rifts between officers and men, state and society, sparking widespread and violent resistance. Persistent tensions over pay, conditions and recruitment culminated in the mutinies of 1797 at Spithead and the Nore, and continued after the war ended in 1802. Critically, naval protests interacted with slave risings in the Caribbean, rebellions in Ireland and popular protest in Britain - events that polarised society, empowering radical extra-parliamentary politics to challenge the legitimacy of the existing order. The new ‘total’ war - of long duration, mass…

The subtitle of this book tells you everything you need to know about its contents. Written by two journalists and originally published in German in 2020, the English language version is an expanded edition supported by historian and journalist Nigel Jones. It’s all about Salon Kitty, a “sophisticated and stylish” brothel in wartime Berlin frequented by senior officials of the Nazi Party. It was, the authors maintain, more than just a sex joint - in fact, they point out, it was the hub of a spying operation through which vicious SS officer Reinhard Heydrich could extract information from and about his colleagues. The ‘Kitty’ of the title - brothel madam Kitty Schmidt - has already been the subject of several books and films. But, as the authors observe, many questions…

Your new documentary begins in 1903 with US-born émigré comedian Julian Rose [1868-1935], who became famous in the UK. Why is he important? At a relatively early point, he did Jewish humour in English, and therefore made it accessible to the host community. That wasn’t usual, because most Jewish immigrants were Yiddish speakers. He played on… shall we say, problematic stereotypes [Rose was billed as ‘Our Hebrew Friend’], but it’s a good place to start, in as much as he found celebrity. What are the differences between Jewish humour in the US and the UK? There’s a boldness about Jewish humour in America that precedes by three or four decades a boldness we’re now finding in the UK. Historically, that was partly because of the Jewish impresarios who started Hollywood…

Separation and survival In South Carolina, during the 1850s, an enslaved woman named Rose packed a sack containing a few precious items for her nine-year-old daughter Ashley. Ashley was then separated from her mother and sold, and it’s likely the two never saw each other again. Tiya Miles joined me to unpack the contents of Ashley’s sack, exploring what each of the items it held - from a handful of pecans to a braid of hair- can tell us about women’s experiences of slavery. historyextra.com/ashleys-sack-pod Unwelcome inheritance While researching his family history, author Alex Renton made a troubling discovery: his ancestors had owned plantations in Tobago and Jamaica that were worked by enslaved people. Renton joined me in 2021 to discuss the process of uncovering this history for his book…

Bridgerton author Julia Quinn chooses IN PROFILE Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist. Born into slavery, she escaped in 1849, and subsequently escorted many other enslaved people to safety in free states and, later, Canada, where slavery had been abolished. After the outbreak of the American Civil War she served in the Union Army as a cook, nurse, scout and spy. In later life she was active in the women’s suffrage movement. She died in 1913, aged about 90. “She undertook 13 missions in all, leading more than 70 enslaved people to freedom along the Underground Railroad” When did you first hear about Harriet Tubman? I can’t remember not knowing about her. In the US, she’s regarded as an iconic figure in the struggle for black emancipation, particularly through her work with…