Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 22 i BBC World Histories Magazine

Reading about seismic events of the past is one thing; living through them turns out to be quite another. As I write this at the end of March, nations around the globe are struggling to cope with the consequences – social, economic, political and, most of all, medical – of the coronavirus outbreak. Given the exponential spread and severity of the pandemic, it’s hard to predict the situation you’ll be experiencing when you read this a month from now. We’ve always endeavoured to place the headlines within their historical context, so I spoke to Laura Spinney, author of a major history of the 1918 flu pandemic, about what that contagion can teach us today. You can read her thoughts on page 12, and hear the full interview on our podcast at…

“In many ways Shakespeare speaks more clearly and directly to American preoccupations than to English ones” Shakespeare’s work spoke to Elizabethan preoccupations – but in many ways he speaks more clearly and directly to American preoccupations than to English ones. America embraced Shakespeare as its national poet even after the US broke with England in 1776, and he’s never really had a rival as the writer that everyone in the nation reads. One of the things I learned while writing my new book Shakespeare in a Divided America is that America’s Shakespeare is not England’s or Britain’s Shakespeare. Certain plays, such as Othello, take on a distinctive political and social meaning here that they don’t in England, and works such as Twelfth Night matter in terms of class in the…

ACCOMPANIES THE BBC RADIO 4 SERIES THE CALIFORNIAN CENTURY In the late 1940s, a Los Angeles newspaper declared that California was “an unarticulated collection of factors looking for a common denominator”. Around the same time one of the state’s great chroniclers, Carey McWilliams, coined the phrase “the great exception” to describe a place that was subdivided by north and south, by newcomers and carpetbaggers, and by a rural hinterland distinct from its metropolitan centres. This was the California of the mid-20th century: a state not yet fully formed or organically unified, yet one powerful and influential enough to claim a regional identity all of its own, separate from its other western neighbours. How had this California come to be, nearly a century since its incorporation into the Union – and…

In the early 1920s, DH Lawrence set out on a short tour of Sardinia, coming to Italy’s second-largest island to discover somewhere “outside the circuit of civilisation”. On arriving, it seemed to the author that he was in some “strange and wonderful” land. The Sards he encountered seemed equally wild and inscrutable, rousing in him an “uneasy sense of blood-familiarity”. Sardinia engendered a primal response – perhaps unconsciously reflecting its turbulent past. Lying in the centre of the western Mediterranean, Sardinia is as close to Africa as it is to Italy. Control of the island passed from Carthage to Rome in ancient times, then to Pisa and Spain during the Middle Ages, before falling into the possession of the dukes of Savoy (in what’s now south-east France and north-west Italy)…

Globalisation is a phenomenon that defines and challenges the modern world. Trade, technology, culture, conflict: today, all span continents and hemispheres. And the roots of this global connectedness stretch back much further than we might imagine. A new system of global pathways formed in the year 1000, following the arrival of Vikings in what’s now north-eastern Canada. Trade goods, people and ideas moved along these newly discovered routes. Globalisation affected both those who went to new places (traders, explorers, slaves) and those who stayed at home (who experienced religious change, riots, and onerous labour conditions to produce goods for overseas markets). There’s no single historiographical view of when globalisation began but, rather, two dominant paradigms: one locates the start of globalisation in the late 1970s, the other much earlier, around…

In April 1768, two French ships, the Boudeuse and the Étoile, rode at anchor off the coast of Tahiti. Until that time, France had been unaware of the existence of the volcanic Polynesian island that later gained a reputation as an earthly paradise, but the 330 officers and men taking their first shore leave in nearly a year would have appreciated its natural – and human – beauty. The two ships constituted an expedition, under the command of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, to make the first French circumnavigation of the globe and to find natural resources of use to an imperial power. Bougainville’s published account of the voyage is careful to emphasise French shyness in the face of Tahitian sexual freedom – looking with desire rather than acting upon it. Yet…

1 NUNAVUT CANADA Brush with the past Recovered artefacts including a brush retaining strands of human hair may shed light on the last days of an ill-fated mission through the Northwest Passage. HMS Erebus and HMS Terror became icebound in Arctic Canada in 1846; two years later, all 128 members of the expedition led by Sir John Franklin were dead. More than 350 objects retrieved from the sunken Erebus by underwater archaeologists are now yielding clues about life on board. Among the objects being studied are a lieutenant’s epaulettes and a lump of sealing wax bearing a sailor’s fingerprint. 2 PARIS FRANCE Imperial return requested French historians have requested the return of the remains of Napoleon III, last emperor of France, as part of a post-Brexit deal. Exiled in England…

Casualty of war A US marine is buried at sea from the attack transport ship USS Hansford during the American invasion of Iwo Jima in February 1945. A large American fleet carried landing craft, vehicles and three divisions of marines across the Pacific, delivering them to the beaches on this island on 19 February following three days of heavy US bombardment of Japanese positions. Despite that preparation before landing, Iwo Jima was captured only after five weeks of bitter fighting, on 26 March. The end is nigh Workmen rig up loudspeakers in Trafalgar Square, central London, in early May 1945, in readiness for an anticipated speech by King George VI marking the end of the war in Europe. News of the German surrender had emerged on 7 May, shortly after…

Whether there’s a box-set you’ve always been meaning to start, or you’ve recently signed up for an on-demand service, the enforced domesticity brought about by the current pandemic offers the chance to catch up on a wealth of historical documentary and drama highlights. A trove of factual TV programming is available via BBC iPlayer, not least 2018’s world-spanning Civilisations series. Mary Beard, David Olusoga and Simon Schama (right, top) are your guides to thousands of years of visual culture, ranging from ancient Mexico to 10th-century China and Renaissance Italy. And, if that’s not enough, you can also watch all 650 minutes of Kenneth Clark’s earlier groundbreaking Civilisation, first broadcast in 1969. The BBC’s Arena strand is a reliable source of thought-provoking documentaries, and the 2019 instalment A British Guide to…

At the time of writing, the coronavirus COVID-19 continues to dominate headlines worldwide. Why are we so afraid of pandemics? I think it’s something very primitive in us. We’ve had to deal with epidemics of infectious disease – plagues, to use a more ancient and Biblical kind of term – since we settled down in semipermanent settlements and started farming, about 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. Infections that adapted to big groups of densely living people, known as crowd diseases, evolved in parallel with us as we adopted those new, more sedentary lifestyles. So a kind of arms race between these microorganisms and humans has been ongoing for a very long time. They know us very well and unfortunately, because they’re small and they reproduce much faster, they tend to…

VIRTUAL VIRTUOSI This c1510–15 work by Renaissance artist Piero di Cosimo depicts Greek hero Perseus slaying the sea monster Cetus and freeing the beautiful princess Andromeda – who, inevitably, became Perseus’s wife. Displayed in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, it’s among works now available to view online as institutions find new ways to bring history to the public during the coronavirus outbreak. Other online galleries and virtual tours have been set up by New York’s Met Museum, the Louvre in Paris and the Jewish Museum Berlin. There are very few upsides to the current pandemic, but the chance to view some of global history’s finest creations without the queues (and from the comfort of your own home) is, perhaps, one. For details of more online exhibitions, see historyextra.com/article-type/visit LOST CIVILISATIONS If…

Pillar talk A gargantuan forest of 134 columns up to 21 metres high and 10 metres in circumference fills the Great Hypostyle Hall in Karnak’s Temple of Amun. This precinct at Thebes, site of the modern city of Luxor, had modest beginnings in the 20th century BC. Over the following centuries it was expanded vastly to span some 5,000 square metres, becoming the greatest temple in Egypt. These columns and surrounding walls are etched with friezes, many showing pharaohs making offerings to Amun, who became the country’s principal deity during the 18th Dynasty (from c1550 BC). His importance is reflected in the precinct’s ancient name: Ipet-isut – ‘most select of places’. Guardians of the gate Seated colossi, believed to represent the pharaohs Amenhotep I and Thutmose II, flank the Eighth…