Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2024 i History Extra

“This month's issue is published on the same day as the UK general election and by the time many of you are reading this the result may already be known. Elections are historic moments and their outcomes have often represented or reflected significant shifts in the country's trajectory. In this month's Conversation section, historian Richard Toye highlights what he believes are seven of the most consequential results from our past – and do feel free to write in with your own choices too. His piece is on page 11 and it's followed by an article from Sarah Richardson, which examines the impact of opinion polls on our political history. History will also be made in the sporting arena this summer as the Olympic Games arrives in the French capital. It…

13 AUGUST 1521 Spanish Conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés capture the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City), toppling the Mesoamerican empire after weeks of intense fighting – a turning point in the Spanish colonisation of the Americas. 21 AUGUST 1831 Nat Turner launches a bloody rebellion An uprising of enslaved people kills dozens across Virginia In the early hours of a summer morning in 1831, Nathaniel (‘Nat’) Turner – an enslaved preacher and self-styled prophet – launched the bloodiest slave revolt in US history. The idea had been fermenting in Turner's mind since 12 February, when he saw a solar eclipse as an omen. When the sun over Virginia turned bluish-green on 13 August, he was convinced it was a divine signal to prepare for rebellion. Turner and…

“Nehru's idea of a secular India has begun to be seriously questioned” AFTER THE INDIAN ELECTIONS OF 2004, Sonia Gandhi was, technically, prime minister in waiting. She was the widow of Rajiv Gandhi, who had – like his mother, Indira Gandhi, and grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru – led the Indian National Congress party and served as prime minister. But Sonia's succession was queried, as she wasn't born in India. So we witnessed the extraordinary sight of an Italian Catholic woman giving way to a Sikh, Manmohan Singh, who swore the oath to a Muslim president – in a majority Hindu nation. Where else on Earth, one wonders, could that have happened? That story flashed into my mind last month as I watched the Indian elections unfold over six weeks when more…

In 1923, the New World Gas Cooker with a Regulo Thermostat made its debut. The appliance revolutionised cooking, as its temperature could be controlled by a dial. 72% The percentage of homes supplied with electricity when the National Grid was completed in 1938. Previously, the adoption of electrical appliances was held back by variances in the voltage between towns. In 1959, only 13% of UK households owned a fridge; by 1970, that number had soared to 58%. The first domestic model of the microwave was sold in the UK in 1974. British kitchens would never be the same again. 49.5% The percentage of British households that owned a dishwasher in 2023, almost a century after William Howard Livens invented a small non-electric dishwasher for the UK domestic market in 1924.…

Robert the Bruce's grandfather had gone on crusade with Prince Edward of England in 1270, and the king's desire to go himself seems entirely genuine. But by the time he signed a treaty ending the war with the English in 1328, he was too sick. He had a plan, though. After Robert's burial, “The good lord [Sir James] Douglas then had a case of fine silver made, cunningly enamelled; he [put] the king's heart in it [despite papal edicts against evisceration] and wore it always round his neck.” Douglas, long Robert's trusted commander, travelled by boat – in great style, with an entourage of nearly 30 – to Seville to help Alfonso XI of Castile in his war against the Muslim ruler of Granada, seeing it as a staging post…

Matt Elton: At the start of your book, you note that Roman roads are fascinating but also mundane. How should we make sense of this apparent contradiction? Catherine Fletcher: Right from the very beginning, Roman roads did two different things. First, of course, they were designed to get people from point A to point B – and, quite importantly, to get the Roman army from A to B. In doing so, they made everyday life a lot easier for a lot of people. If you lived on a road, you'd be able to get to market more effectively, for instance, or to go to vote – if you were the kind of person who was allowed to vote in Roman society, at least. But, from the start, Roman roads also…

How many of her readers, Catherine Hanley enquires, have ever heard of King Louis I of England? Or know that, exactly 150 years after the Norman conquest of 1066, a French army spent a year occupying most of southern England? The answer, she suggests, is very few. Perhaps because our ‘island story’ has room for only one French conquest, itself safely distanced nearly a millennium ago, the civil war that ended the reign of King John is today remembered for Magna Carta but little else. Readers will perhaps have heard of John's disastrous loss of his treasure while crossing the Wash – still the object of Indiana Joneslike ventures, almost certainly doomed to disappointment. They perhaps know the rumours that John died of poisoning, or alternatively – according to one…

The Y-shaped plume that was strewn across the sky as the space shuttle Challenger disintegrated just 73 seconds after launch on 28 January 1986 is an image burned into our collective memories. It's so well known that even the casual space enthusiast can point to the O-ring as the culprit. But few people know how we got to the point where the world watched tragedy unfold live on their television screens. This is the complex story Adam Higginbotham deftly weaves. Nasa's Apollo era, lauded as the golden age of space flight, wasn't without setbacks, most notably the Apollo 1 fire in 1967 that killed three astronauts on the launch pad during a routine test. It's here that Higginbotham begins his narrative – the moment when Nasa faced its fallibility, and…

We need to pay more attention to what we don't know. That is the message of writer, podcaster and former MP Rory Stewart in his new six-part series The Long History of Ignorance: From Confucius to QAnon (BBC Radio 4, Thursday 11 July). Stewart's central thesis here, which draws on history and philosophical writings, is that ignorance is not simply an absence of knowledge but a fundamental state of being for humankind. Could an appreciation of this idea improve our decision-making? The 1983 Maze breakout, in which 38 prisoners escaped from H-Block 7 of the infamous HM Prison Maze in Northern Ireland, was a propaganda coup for the IRA. But how was this allowed to happen? Built around the height of the Troubles, the Maze was reputedly the highest-security prison…

Across 1 One of a body of slave-soldiers whose gradual control of Egypt and other states was ended by Muhammad Ali in 1811 [one spelling] (8) 5 Where Octavian defeated the combined forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra (6) 10 Ernest ___, influential 19th-century French philosopher and religious historian (5) 11 Term applied to the final period of the Stone Age (9) 12 ___ II of Aragon, joint ruler of Spain with Queen Isabella (9) 13 Unit of area, derived from the Old English for ‘tilled field’ (4) 15 William Henry Fox ____, best known as a British pioneer of photography (6) 17 Term for Gorbachev's more open approach to the media etc in the mid-1980s (8) 19 William ____, 17th-century Anglican minister and mathematician credited with inventing the slide rule (8) 21 John ____, bishop of Worcester, reputed…

IN PROFILE Sister Rosetta Tharpe (born Rosetta Nubin) was an American singer, songwriter and guitarist who's been dubbed ‘the Godmother of rock'n'roll’. She found fame in the 1930s and 1940s, becoming gospel music's first great recording star. Her singing style and guitar virtuosity also influenced early rock'n'roll stars such as Little Richard and Elvis Presley, as well as British blues guitarists in the 1960s. She died in 1973, aged 58, three years after suffering a stroke. She was posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2007. “People don't realise how much the likes of Elvis Presley and Little Richard owe to her – Chuck Berry was just one long impersonation!” When did you first hear about Tharpe? I heard the song ‘Up Above My Head’ when I was…

1. Cow about that Little about Bovril suggests science-fiction, so I was surprised to discover that the name for this beef extract was actually inspired by a sci-fi novel from 1871 (page 37). 2. Take a break I was interested to learn in our interview with Catherine Fletcher that the Romans introduced an ancient form of motorway service station where you could bathe and change horses (page 70). 3. Chilling out In our feature on the history of kitchens, I was intrigued to find out that in 1959 only 13 per cent of UK households owned a fridge – it would rise to over 50 per cent within a decade (page 44).…

“It's hard not to feel emotional about the vast loss of life” WHEN YOU PUT AN OVERLOOKED HISTORY – especially one within living memory – into the public space, it unlocks so many other stories. You are never sure, though, exactly what those may be. Earlier this year, BBC Sounds launched my series Three Million, exploring the Bengal famine of 1943. Around three million Indians – British subjects – died in the famine, yet it's not well known in Britain. After hearing the podcast, many people shared personal stories. One friend told me that his father, a British soldier stationed in India during the war, had witnessed the famine and, shocked by what he had seen, blamed British politicians at the time. Despite being friends for 20 years, I had…

What was the Erfurt Latrine Disaster? In the summer of 1184, German king Henry VI convoked a Hoftag (informal assembly) at Erfurt, capital of Thuringia, in what's now central Germany. This gathering aimed to bring to an end the bitter conflict between Conrad of Wittelsbach, archbishop of Mainz, and Louis III, Landgrave of Thuringia. In a period when political tensions between the Holy Roman Empire's patchwork of bishoprics, princedoms and myriad city-states were rife, Henry was determined to resolve this. So he summoned numerous aristocrats and high-ranking officials from across the empire to the meeting, which was held in St Peter's Church. Delegates flooded into the town, some arriving the day before the meeting commenced, on 26 July. However, soon after proceedings began, catastrophe struck. The ageing wooden floor of…

“Zo set out with the microfilms hidden inside the shaft of a door key and a brass cigarette lighter” Leaving her coat on her seat, Elżbieta Zawacka – AKA Zo – shuffled out of her train compartment and along the dark corridor. Despite the blackout, glancing over her shoulder she saw a man's pale face lean out to watch her. She had boarded the train knowing that the Gestapo had been following her. Now it was clear they were still on her tail. “Shit,” she thought, pressing on. It was May 1942. Two days earlier, Zo had been smuggling military intelligence from Nazi-occupied Warsaw to her resistance contacts in Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich. From there the material would be sent west with a friend's diplomatic post. It…

Catherine de’ Medici's reputation has, it's fair to say, been blackened over the centuries. Even in popular media – such as the STARZ television series The Serpent Queen – her dark legend is emphasised, from her interest in dark magic to her alleged involvement with murders and poisons. Yet little by little, biographers and historians work to rehabilitate her legacy. The subtitle of Mary Hollingsworth's new book, The Life and Times of the Serpent Queen, threatens to perpetuate old tropes. It's clearly just a marketing ploy, though, because the book thoughtfully reassesses her reign. Hollingsworth's knowledge of Catherine's life, as well as her mastery of Italian history, enables her to portray Catherine as the true European Renaissance queen she was. Right from the prologue, Hollingsworth sets out to reinstate Catherine…

The race for space Forged in the Cold War era, the early space race revealed as much about 20th-century tensions as it did about our enduring urge to explore. In this 2021 instalment of the podcast's long-running Everything You Wanted to Know series, historian Tom Ellis tackled listener questions and popular search-engine queries on the subject. historyextra.com/space-race-pod The great beyond By November 2023, only 676 humans had ever travelled into space. In this podcast episode recorded the same year, British European Space Agency astronaut Tim Peake charted six decades of space exploration, the key forces and figures that shaped our first tentative steps away from Earth in the second half of the 20th century, and his own experiences of reaching for the stars. historyextra.com/tim-peake-pod Heavenly creatures It's not just humans…

With politics on my mind, I remembered a recipe, ‘To make a Westminster-Fool’, that I once stumbled upon in Hannah Glasse's bestselling 18th-century book The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy. A fool is, of course, a silly person or an idiot. But a fool is also a type of dessert that appeared in English recipe books at the turn of the 17th century. Simple, sweet and fun, the name is apt for a whimsical, trivial dish served at the end of a more substantial meal. There are many types, the most famous perhaps being the gooseberry fool. In the mid-19th century, this dish was so popular that English poet Edward Lear penned a nonsensical limerick about it: There was an Old Person of Leeds, Whose head was infested…

Catherine Fletcher “Part of the story of Roman roads is as a space for dreaming and imagining. Writer after writer has used the metaphor of treading in the dust of the ancients, and walking in their footsteps allows us to imbibe Roman culture in a way that reading a book simply doesn't.” Catherine discusses Roman roads on page 70 Onyeka Nubia “Avebury has always been a place of fascination for me, reminiscent of a Wessex fairy tale. And yet there is also disappointment that some aspects of England's past have clearly been better preserved than others.” Onyeka explores the beauty of Avebury, and its neglect by past generations, on page 86 Deborah Sugg Ryan “The kitchen has been subject to change more than any other room. Often changing location and…

LETTER OF THE MONTH Alternative education Michael Wood cites Shakespeare's “lack of education” (July) as a reason some people give for doubting that he wrote his plays – but many people achieve great things through self-education, which often does not show up in their academic record. Shakespeare undoubtedly falls into this category, although he also began with a good grammar-school grounding. Other examples include John Clare, the 19th-century ‘peasant’ poet who received only the most basic of village educations. But he became obsessed with literature and poetry, fuelling his appetite with frequent trips to town libraries and gathering what he needed to fulfil his talents. He went on to become one of the major poets of his time. Edward Elgar, meanwhile, received a decent school education but never studied music…

Cromwell's postal spies A month before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the Government Code and Cypher School moved into Bletchley Park, a stately home and estate in Buckinghamshire. There it established a centre dedicated to intercepting and decoding enemy communications, playing a pivotal role in the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. But this was not the first time an operation dedicated to the interception and decoding of messages had been set up in England. Indeed, in 1655 – nearly three centuries earlier – a smaller, but remarkably similar operation had been established on the orders of England's Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. It was christened the General Post Office. Until the 1640s, intelligence gathering in the British Isles was a matter of individual spies reporting to their…

TUG OF WAR American pulling power The Paris edition of the New York Herald was outspoken, to say the least, in its criticism of the organisation of the tug of war competition in the 1900 Olympics, citing it as “an object lesson in how not to do a thing”. The event should have been a contest between Racing Club de France and a US team. However, three of the Americans were also hammer throwers and, with their event clashing with the tug of war, the team withdrew. At the last minute, a Scandinavian team comprising Danes and Swedes was assembled, beating the French in a best-of-three competition. The US press, however, considered their team the winners after the Americans beat the Scandinavians in an unofficial contest a few days later.…

11 July 1274 Robert Bruce, the seventh of that name, is born – probably on his family's property in Essex, or possibly at Turnberry Castle in Ayrshire. 1286-92 Following the death of King Alexander III, competition for the Scottish throne flares between Robert Bruce (grandfather of the later king) and John Balliol (pictured left), eventually being resolved in the latter's favour. Spring 1296 The seventh Robert Bruce takes part in the conquest of Scotland launched by Edward I of England. Two years later, he is named guardian of Scotland but is forced out by his co-guardian, John Comyn of Badenoch. 10 February 1306 Robert kills John Comyn at the Greyfriars monastery in Dumfries, and seizes the throne of Scotland. He is inaugurated in Scone six weeks later. 23-24 June 1314…

Listen ad-free at historyextra.com/podcast or with ads wherever you get your podcasts VICTORIAN Criminal history Was it really possible to get a fair trial in Victorian Britain? That's just one of the questions tackled by Drew Gray in a detailed exploration of 19th-century crime and punishment, which also touches on prison life, courts and transportation. TUDOR The final wife Katherine Parr may be one of Henry VIII's less-famous spouses, but that doesn't mean her story is any less fascinating. Elizabeth Norton, historical consultant on the new Katherine Parr film Firebrand, tells us why the canny and intelligent queen deserves to be better remembered. GREAT LIVES Presidential portrait As the mastermind behind D-Day and the president of an ascendant postwar United States, Dwight D Eisenhower was one of the most influential…

Your debut novel is based on the case of 17th-century Italian poisoner Giulia Tofana. What drew you to this story? Legend says that Giulia brewed a potion called Aqua Tofana, which she dispensed to the abused wives of Rome to rid them of their husbands at a time when divorce was impossible for women. Men were dying like flies – approximately 1,000 were killed – and this came to the attention of Inquisitor Pope Alexander VII. To me, Giulia represented female resistance in a time of subordination. She was a divisive figure: was she a murderess or a saviour? How far would she go to defend the downtrodden women of Rome? What do you hope your novel reveals about these characters and events? The challenge in writing Giulia's story was…

When exploring the world of the Tudors, you encounter a dazzling cast of larger-than-life characters who have proved irresistible fodder for historians, biographers and screenwriters over the centuries. Robert Cecil isn't one of them. He seems a shadowy figure, somehow – always in the background, despite being at the very forefront of political affairs during the reigns of Elizabeth I and her successor, James VI & I. His portrait shows a man who is at best unprepossessing: of a slight, stooped frame (he had a curvature of the spine), pale-faced and dressed all in black. Even Elizabeth – who, in her later years, depended upon him more than any other adviser – called him “pygmy” and “little man”, while her successor referred to him disparagingly as “my little beagle”. But…

Stonehenge may get all the love, but just 25 miles away lies another important stone circle: Avebury. If we wind our way through Wiltshire's rolling hills and keep the Marlborough Downs to our east, we find Avebury Henge (bank and ditch) 7 miles from Marlborough and Calne. It is the most impressive of this island's megaliths and the biggest stone circle in Europe. The circular henge is more than a mile long and the ditch is 9 metres deep. Avebury was probably first occupied by flint workers who walked across Dogger Bank from mainland Europe. But it was not until 3,000–2,400 BC that Neolithic peoples first began to use Sarsen stones to mark this place of veneration. Today, 27 of these ‘singing’ stones remain, carved from distinctive silicified sandstone, and…

September issue on sale 1 August 2024 Masters of illusion Robert Hutton on the deception campaigns used by British forces in the Second World War A shared history Kerry Brown highlights how Britain and China have influenced one another over the past 400 years A new England Caroline Burt and Richard Partington argue that the 13th and 14th centuries were pivotal in the development of the English state Young guns Alice Loxton explores the teenage years of some of history's most important characters King on the run Nathen Amin chronicles Henry VII's early years as his enemies circled around him Art for women Ellie Cawthorne reveals how the suffragettes waged a propaganda war in their quest for the vote…