Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 4 i BBC World Histories Magazine

Each issue, for our Big Question feature we ask leading global experts to discuss a contentious historical issue – and few issues are as contentious as Africa’s turbulent past. Marred by hundreds of years of external exploitation, warfare and slavery, the continent still bears the scars of this legacy today. But how can we best understand this history in the 21st century? And are the continued misunderstandings by some in the west just as damaging as the events of centuries past? A panel including Hakim Adi, Martin Meredith and Emma Dabiri tackles these and other aspects of the debate from page 36. Another historical episode with long-lasting global repercussions was the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–20, which infected a third of the global population and left at least 50 million…

Clive Myrie is a BBC world affairs correspondent and presenter DISCOVER MORE From Our Own Correspondent is broadcast every Saturday at 11.30am on BBC Radio Imagine waking up one morning to find that the world you knew has vanished. There’s a banging on the door, and you’re ordered, on pain of death, to leave your home and head to the local square. On the way you meet others making the same journey – in fact, the whole village is on the move. Marshalling the throng are armed men, pushing and shoving you. What once passed for law and order – the local militia, police, the nearby army unit – has disappeared. You join hundreds of others gathered in the square. In the middle you see several men and boys, their…

Which historical figures have you been most interested in over the past 12 months? That’s the question at the heart of our annual History Hot 100 poll, set to return to the pages of our sister title BBC History Magazine this summer. Now in its third year, the survey offers the chance to explore changing historical tastes: are members of the Tudor dynasty as in vogue as ever? Which figures have fallen from grace? And who are the newcomers carried to prominence thanks to recent anniversaries or film portrayals? The rules are simple: choose three people, from any nation and historical time period, so long as they died more than 30 years ago (in other words, before 1 January 1987). We will compile the results to produce a shortlist of…

“It is far easier to continue the centuries-old trope of African barbarity, or at best incompetence” Emma Dabiri During a recent appearance on Irish television, controversy ensued after I suggested that we don’t need any more “white saviours” in Africa. To my great surprise, I was immediately met with a comment about “darkest Africa” from a fellow panellist. Though this is a phrase with which I am all too familiar, I have not heard it employed with any degree of seriousness in years. Nonetheless, it was a stark reminder that many continue to perceive the continent thus. As Hugh Trevor-Roper, the eminent Oxford professor of history, declared in 1962: “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at the present there is none – there…

Emigrants: Why the English Sailed to the New World by James Evans Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 352 pages, £20 Migration is a topical issue for an era in which populist politicians in Europe and the United States have successfully fuelled hostility to incomers in an attempt to boost their own electability. This new book by James Evans provides a timely reminder that those of British lineage in the modern US are themselves the descendants of migrants. In the 18th century, the migration of Scottish and Protestant Irish people was particularly notable, but in the preceding century the English dominated the roster of settlers. About 180,000 crossed the Atlantic in the 100 years after the first permanent settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607; 200,000 more went to the English Caribbean islands. The…

Lesley Downer is a journalist and author of Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World (Headline, 2000) and The Shogun’s Queen (Bantam, 2016) The most spectacular sight in Kyoto – and the ideal spot from which to begin exploring this ancient city – is Kiyomizu-dera 1 . Founded in AD 778, pilgrims gazed into its sacred gloom and breathed the incense smoke of this Buddhist temple for over 1,000 years. Stand on its magnificent balcony to gaze out over the valley in which Emperor Kammu founded his capital in 794. He named it Heian-kyo – ‘Capital of Peace and Tranquillity’ – and it became studded with temples, shrines, gardens and palaces. Later it was known simply as Kyoto – ‘the capital’, as it remained until 1868. For a glimpse…

Jago Cooper Curator of the Americas at the British Museum in London, Cooper has written and presented several documentary series on ancient civilisations for BBC Four. On page 76 he explores seven ‘lost’ cities that “remind us both how easily the truth about the past can be lost, and of the power of history in forging the future”. Emma Dabiri Social historian, writer and broadcaster Dabiri is among the experts debating the continued legacy of Africa’s often violent history, from page 36. “The continent’s past has been almost entirely obscured by an infrastructure that sought to – that seeks to – legitimise the damage that Europe did to it and its people,” she argues. Caroline Moorehead On page 24 journalist and author Moorehead introduces the inspiring band of resistance agitators…

Why do wars occur? Are they ever justified? Is any act permissible in the struggle to defeat an enemy? What, indeed, is war, and how does it differ from other kinds of violent conflict? What does history teach about the effects that wars have on individuals and societies? Are these effects universally bad? And if they are not, does this consideration enter into the justification for war, as some indeed claim? These are the main questions we have to ask about the phenomenon of war. If we are ever to rid ourselves of it we have to try to understand it; and we have to understand our own attitudes to it, too. An important point that must be made about war is that it represents failure – failure of diplomatic…

At 3.30 on the afternoon of 10 June 1924, a small boy playing near the river Tiber in Rome saw a man leave his house and walk along the road. This was Giacomo Matteotti, a socialist deputy (member of the Italian parliament) from the Po valley, setting off for his office. It was very hot, and the streets were deserted. A black Lancia pulled up alongside Matteotti, and the boy watched as a man got out of the car and hit the deputy in the face then dragged him, struggling, into the car, which drove off. The following day, Italy’s Fascist prime minister, Benito Mussolini, publicly denied all involvement in the crime. He told journalists that the attack was a “diabolical outrage”. A few days later, the Lancia’s registration number…

THE HEART BYPASS PIONEER Almost half a century ago, on 3 December 1967, the world’s first heart transplant was performed – perhaps the most celebrated feat in the history of surgery. Yet a few months earlier an Argentinian surgeon had made a breakthrough that was arguably even more significant: he pioneered coronary artery bypass grafting, a procedure known colloquially as a ‘heart bypass’, to treat patients with blocked arteries. Almost a million people around the world undergo this lifesaving operation every year – compared with just 5,000 who receive a heart transplant. The man who developed this procedure was not just a visionary surgeon; he was also a great humanitarian. René Favaloro was born in 1923 in La Plata, 30 miles south-east of Buenos Aires. He became interested in medicine…

Books, exhibitions, films and more THE CONVERSATION “The perception is that the Germans were at the cutting edge of military advances, and they just weren’t” In The Allies Fight Back, 1941–43, the second volume of James Holland’s The War in the West trilogy, he explores the central, pivotal years of the Second World War, charting the conflict as it developed throughout the various theatres. A bestselling historian and broadcaster, Holland’s previous work includes The Battle of Britain (2010) and Burma ’44: The Battle that Turned Britain’s War in the East (2016, both Bantam). He has also presented a number of history TV series for the BBC. Holland met the historian and author John Buckley at the Imperial War Museum in London to discuss the arguments and themes of his book.…

In what ways did Martin Luther’s actions change the course of world history? Accidentally but profoundly. He had a very personal spiritual breakthrough, which led him to challenge the medieval church’s teaching. He should have been burned for heresy but instead, thanks to political chance and his ability to appeal to the masses, he blew apart western Christendom’s unity and established the principle that individual conscience trumps religious authority. We’re still working out the implications today. What other figures were key in spreading Protestantism around the globe? We could name John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and others, but this is a story with a cast of thousands. Protestantism’s achievement was to empower individual believers. The ‘nobodies’ – the uneducated, the enslaved, women, children – were often at the leading…

Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest by Beth Macy Macmillan, 432 pages, £18.99 Older readers will remember the travelling fairs that dotted the calendar of popular entertainment. Among their offerings were ‘freak shows’ starring bearded ladies, wild men of Borneo, tiny people, giants – a host of people with physical deformities and medical conditions who made a miserable living as ‘freaks’ for a gawping public. Truevine tells the story of one such show. In 1899, brothers George and Willie Muse were kidnapped from their poor, illiterate black mother near the town of Truevine, Virginia. For years they were exhibited by small circuses, then by more famous ones, as objects of curiosity. Eko and Iko, as they were billed, had albinism, and were variously described as “sheep-headed” (they…

“Belief in an interconnected humanity should be measured by the degree to which we take pride in our differences” Recently I was greeted by a man who shook my hand in the limpest possible way. I’ve always preferred to be met with a firm handshake and a straight look in the eye. For me – perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly – that’s what makes a good first impression. So what did I make of this man? We all like to pigeon-hole – to form an impression that helps us position the person to whom we are talking within a context, or to help us establish some understanding of the relationship between us. I have to admit that, as a result of his (to me) lacklustre greeting, I initially paid less attention…

ONE MOMENT, DIFFERENT VIEWPOINTS At 7.45am on 5 June 1967, Israeli warplanes hit Egypt’s air force on its home airfields. This was the dramatic start to the Six-Day War in which Israel fought first Egypt then Jordan and Syria. By the end of the conflict, Israel held the Sinai Peninsula, Jerusalem’s old city, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. The destruction of Egypt’s air force left the army of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in the desert of the Sinai without air support – doomed. Israel’s warplanes bombed, strafed and napalmed retreating columns of Egyptian soldiers; thousands died in combat and from thirst. Israeli tanks and infantry then spread out into the Sinai and pushed the Egyptians back to the Suez Canal. It was during this push, on 8…

Born in Feldkirch in Vorarlberg (now in Austria), Hieronymus Münzer (1437 or 1447–1508) studied at the University of Leipzig, where he became a lecturer. He then learned medicine in Pavia, south of Milan, where he qualified as a physician in 1477 or 1478. He then started work as a doctor in Nuremberg, where he became a leading figure in the city’s Humanist circle. Münzer was a real Renaissance man, an expert geographer who also worked extensively in the fields of cosmography and astronomy. He contributed geographical sections – including the first printed map of Germany – to the famous illustrated biblical and world history known as the Nuremberg Chronicle, first printed in 1493, and wrote a booklet on the nature of wine as well as several medical reports. Münzer was…