Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2024 i History Extra

“There are few historical subjects as evocative as the Seven Wonders of the World. From the Great Pyramid of Giza to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes, these ancient marvels continue to fascinate and inspire people today. In her cover feature this month, the historian Bettany Hughes guides us through these incredible monuments, intermixing their stories with her experiences of visiting the sites today. You'll find that on page 20. BBC History Magazine is not quite as venerable as the Seven Wonders, but we have reached a significant milestone with the publication of our 300th issue. We're hugely grateful to all of you for engaging with the magazine, and I'd also like to extend my thanks to our regular contributors, without whom a magazine like this…

THE CONVERSATION “Women risked their lives defying Germany's occupying armies” 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) EVERY OCTOBER AT LIFE'S GREEN, OUTSIDE THE south transept of Norwich Cathedral, a graveside service is held. It remembers a remarkable British nurse, who treated wounded soldiers – on both sides – in German-occupied Belgium during the First World War. Edith Cavell had been working in Belgium since 1907. During the war, she helped Allied soldiers and civilians of military age escape to neutral Netherlands. This was an offence under German military law, and carried the death penalty. Cavell was one of many women in Belgium and…

1 Scotland's greatest author discovered its crown jewels During the early 19th century, Scotland and its history was looked upon through a distinctly romantic lens. And that was largely due to the genius of Walter Scott, whose poems and historical novels – among them The Lady of the Lake (1810) and Waverley (1814) – placed Scottish history on centre stage. Scott's connection to the image of Scotland and its history was such that, in early 1818, the Prince Regent (the future George IV) charged him with recovering the Honours of Scotland, also known as the Scottish crown jewels. When Oliver Cromwell had been targeting royalist supporters in Scotland during the interregnum, the Honours had been hidden away. They were then put under lock and key after the 1707 act of…

In 1890, a Field magazine reader was so irritated by the phenomenon of squirrels eating “young pheasants” that he picked up a pen and composed a letter of complaint. But the squirrels he was bemoaning weren't grey. They were red. Long before the introduction of the grey in 1876, most rural dwellers had no time for the native squirrel, which they usually called the ‘common’ (or ‘brown’) squirrel. Sciurus vulgaris leucourus was widely viewed as a fast-breeding vermin species akin to rats, mice or rabbits – and gamekeepers, foresters and farmers hunted them accordingly. By 1800, in northern Scotland, a combination of pest control and deforestation had driven the red squirrel to the edge of extinction. The population did mount a recovery, before being slaughtered again – this time falling…

The Swedish historian Peter Englund made his name internationally in 2011 with The Beauty and the Sorrow, a stunning study of the First World War. Now he has done the same with the Second World War, in a book that is likely to be similarly acclaimed. What makes Englund's work original and remarkable is his narrative technique, which could be called ‘the mosaic method’. He builds up a complete picture of conflict by presenting eyewitness accounts from a large cast of characters experiencing the war across the globe in widely differing roles during the month – November 1942 – that Englund sees as the crucial turning point of the war. That month saw a succession of defeats for the Axis on fronts from the Pacific to the Atlantic, via Stalingrad…

THE MEDIEVAL ERA 1 Æthelberht of Kent 2 St Hild 3 Lindisfarne 4 William Rufus 5 John 6 13th 7 Master James of St George 8 Ely 9 Owain Glyndŵr 10 Pontefract GLOBAL CITIES 1 Prague 2 Lord Byron 3 Paris, called Lutetia by the Romans, from the word lutum – mud 4 Rome. Monte Testaccio is a huge ancient Roman rubbish tip of shards of discarded amphorae used to store and transport olive oil 5 Madrid. Gato is a nickname for a Madrileño, from the traditional story of a lithe soldier who, during the 1085 Christian attack on the Moorish stronghold of Magerit, scampered up a wall and put up the Christian flag. He became known as El Gato – ‘the cat’ 6 Amsterdam 7 Dublin 8 Split. The…

IN PROFILE Bayard Rustin was a key figure in the civil rights movement, usually working behind the scenes. A pacifist from a Quaker background, he advocated non-violent resistance. In the context of the decades he lived through, he was unusual in being a public figure who acknowledged his homosexuality and, in the 1980s, he leant his voice to the gay rights movement. “With a group of kids in their late teens and 20s, he staged what was the largest-ever peaceful protest. He did it all” When did you first hear about Bayard Rustin? I probably first heard about Bayard in college. Then, around 2008, I became involved in the creation of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights museum in Atlanta. In my research about the civil rights movement,…

1. Moneybugs Among the unusual views westerners once held of the east was a belief that India was home to gold-digging ants that were larger than foxes (page 70). 2. Wellington got the boot I learned plenty from Lizzie Rogers’ piece on the Regency, including the fact that the victor at Waterloo was turned away from an event for wearing the wrong trousers (page 40). 3. A massive achievement The scale of the Seven Wonders of the World was often staggering. I hadn't realised before that the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed of an astonishing 2.3 million blocks (page 23).…

LETTERS LETTER OF THE MONTH Interesting as your feature on Napoleon's “many faces” was (Christmas), it surprisingly omits his fascination with ancient Egypt. In 1798, a large party of French savants, including scientists such as Joseph Fourier, accompanied Napoleon's military expedition to Egypt. Back in France, they launched Egyptology and published the nine elephantine volumes of the Description de l'Egypte between 1809 and 1828, initially by order of Napoleon as emperor. As for Ridley Scott's film Napoleon, it shows his army in Egypt firing cannons at the Pyramids of Giza – a grotesque distortion of history. In fact, when the French army first encountered the great temple of Luxor with its highly inscribed obelisks of Ramesses II, it was so struck by the unfamiliar spectacle that, according to a witness, “it…

In August 1865, details of a grisly killing appeared in the pages of many British newspapers: DREADFUL MURDER IN CHESHIRE – On Saturday night, a boatman in the employ of Shropshire Union Canal Company committed a most brutal murder on his wife at Calveley, six miles from Crewe. He severed her head with a razor, all but a ligament of skin. It was a disturbing tale, but the main problem was that it was actually a work of fiction. This was by no means an accident: 19th-century newspaper editors knew that gruesome crimes sold extra copies, and so deployed wildly exaggerated stories as weapons in the circulation wars, which were then picked up and copied by their competitors. Indeed, when the truth about the aforementioned ‘murder’ was revealed, the Cheshire…

Matt Elton: What do we know about the first encounters between the west and Asia? Christopher Harding: If we head back to, say, the fifth century BC, there was nothing at all known about China or Japan – it was really only India that people in the west had any knowledge of. The Persian empire – which at this point stretched from the Greek-speaking world all the way to north-west India – was an incredibly important conduit for information between the ‘west’ (using that phrase quite loosely) and India. We think maybe the first known westerner to go to India would have been an explorer called Scylax of Caryanda. In the fifth century BC he was asked by the Persian emperor to sail down the Indus river, basically to see…

“What needs to be proved today is that as long as a man has a car, he can do anything and go anywhere.” So claimed the Paris newspaper Le Matin in January 1907. The paper then went on to throw down a gauntlet to its readers: “Is there any person… who will accept the challenge of travelling from Paris to Peking… by automobile?” It was summer 1907 when Le Matin's challenge was answered. Five vehicles – one of them a three-wheeler ‘cyclecar’ – set off from the Chinese capital in what was the first running of the now legendary Peking to Paris motor race. Ahead of them lay a 9,317-mile odyssey that took in mountains, deserts and rivers – not to mention an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of creeds and cultures. Given…

You're Dead to Me is back in January. What are some of the highlights in the new run? We've got a live special about the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart where, as with our show about Leonardo da Vinci, we'll have members of the BBC Concert Orchestra joining us. It's fun to be behind the wheel of a podcast that occasionally gets quite glamorous. Suddenly there are musicians on stage! One fascination with Mozart is that he started so young. There are intriguing biographical details, too. His sister, Maria Anna, is his double-act partner throughout his childhood. The programme is a way to put his music in context. Which city is he in? How old is he? Is he setting musical trends or responding to them? It's interesting to figure out…

Christopher Harding “The west has always been intrigued by Asia. Early on, that fascination involved stories and golden jewels, whereas into our own age, it's much more about spiritual salvation and the renewal of Christopher traces the west's fascination with India, Japan and China on page 70 Hannah Skoda “Breastfeeding in the Middle Ages lay at the heart of a much more expansive notion of parenthood and care-giving, with mothers, fathers, relatives and the wider community all involved.” Hannah reveals what breastfeeding can tell us about medieval society on page 35 Peter Coates “During the first Covid lockdown, from my home office I could see a big tree full of (grey) squirrels. Their distracting presence prompted me to write a book about this controversial species.” Peter chronicles Britain's love-hate relationship with squirrels…

“Amid the torrent of fake news, a critical mind is our greatest resource” 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 In the Footsteps of Du Fu (Simon & Schuster 2023). He is on X at @mayavision IN MY HOME TOWN OF MANCHESTER, THE university is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year, and preparations are well under way for events and talks including our annual Manchester Histories festival. This year I'm sure we will all be thinking, too, about the story of the university itself. The idea of the university, as we understand it today, evolved in western Europe – in Bologna, Paris and Oxford. There were predecessors elsewhere in the world;…

Medieval breastfeeding In the late 13th century, a little boy crawled out of his crib while his parents were at a funeral. He was two years old. His name was Roger, and he was the son of one of the cooks at Conwy Castle in north Wales. The curious toddler crawled out of the house, through the dark, and tragically fell off the drawbridge and into the moat. A passer-by spotted his apparently lifeless body: he swiftly prayed and promised a pilgrimage to Hereford if the miracle-working late bishop Thomas Cantilupe would help. The boy's mother arrived and began to wail and beat her breast: it was all onlookers could do to prevent her from hurling herself into the moat after her son. When the child's body was handed to…

On 2 January 1997, readers of the Los Angeles Times woke up to news of an outbreak of hostilities between Britain and America. “British Wage War on US ‘Invaders’,” screamed the headline in LA's leading daily. Yet the invaders weren't human, they were small and furry. “Imported gray squirrels, reviled as ‘tree rats’, are pushing the native red variety toward extinction,” the article continued. “In scarcely more than a century, gray squirrels, imported from America, have toppled the British red squirrels from the perch of treetop privilege they have enjoyed since the Ice Ages.” The article, written by the paper's London bureau chief, William Montalbano, conveyed to its American readers Britons’ love and hate relationship with the nation's two squirrels, the red and the grey. Yet it did more than…

This book will surprise even those familiar with the Dreadnought Hoax. The nub of the matter, Danell Jones reminds us, is that “in 1910 Virginia Woolf put on a blackface and pranked the British navy”. But Virginia, yet unmarried, was still ‘Miss Stephen’, the navy had for some years been the Royal Navy, and Virginia was far from the only prankster. In fact, the hoax was the brainchild of Horace de Vere Cole. Cole realised he could fool the Royal Navy and gain access to its flagship, HMS Dreadnought, simply by sending a short telegram announcing the arrival that same day of a party of Abyssinian princes. By signing the telegram ‘Hardinge’ – after Charles Hardinge, head of the Foreign Office and a stickler for propriety – Cole sent the…

RECIPE Second World War Potato Piglets ELEANOR BARNETT makes the most of simple ingredients in this nutritious and creative meal Wearing a green hat and chewing a piece of straw, the anthropomorphised potato character, Potato Pete, proudly jaunts across the front of his self-titled recipe book, published by Britain's Ministry of Food during the Second World War. “The more you serve me the better I can serve you,” he tells a smiling housewife on the first page. “Follow me madam I'll show you a thing or two…” Sharing information on the benefits of potato eating, and recipes for potato-based breakfasts, dinners, teas, snacks and desserts, Potato Pete's Recipe Book aimed to educate those on the home front on the benefits of potato-eating. Potatoes could be easily grown at home or…

Across 1 Anne Bonny and Mary Read were tried and convicted for this crime in Jamaica in 1720 (6) 4 First name of popular historical author of eg The White Queen (Elizabeth Woodville) (8) 10 Royal house that provided three kings of England in the 14th and 15th centuries (9) 11 ____ castle, near Wrexham, built in the late 13th century by Roger Mortimer, an impressive symbol of English power (5) 12 That part of England, colonised by Viking invaders in late ninth century, with its own legal and administrative system (7) 13 Nation in dispute with Britain during the 1970s ‘Cod Wars’ (7) 14 Julius ____, one of the last Western Roman emperors (474–75) (5) 16 German battleship scuttled by its captain after being damaged by the British in the South Atlantic in 1939 (4,4) 19 Fast…