Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2020 i National Geographic History

Historians like to debate about “watershed moments.” I won’t go into the origins of the phrase here, but it’s often used to describe an important moment in history. But true watershed moments are more than important. They are events where a hard line can be drawn between before and after. On one side of the line is life as we knew it, on the other is life as we know it, and the two look nothing like each other. It’s not often that HISTORY has one issue feature multiple watershed moments, but this one does. The eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii, passage of the 19th Amendment, and deployment of the nuclear bomb all qualify. Each one of these events is a marker that clearly divides history into…

Since its discovery several centuries ago, few archaeological sites have fascinated the world as has the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. After the first major excavations in more than 50 years, Pompeii is revealing a surprising abundance of buried treasures. The new finds are coming from intensive work in a small sector known as Region V that has nevertheless yielded giant insights into the final days of the doomed city. Along with the complete excavation of two houses—the House of the Garden and the House of Orion—the dig has yielded frescoes, murals, and mosaics of mythological figures in gorgeous colors, skeletons with stories still to be unraveled, coins, amulets, and show horses in the stable of a wealthy landowner. The new finds are also sparking debate about Pompeii’s tragic story.…

Spectacular ruins cluster on the island of Kilwa Kisiwani, more than a mile from the coast of modern-day Tanzania. The remnants of a palace and a great mosque, built partly of coral stone, are reminders of the time when the gold trade of east Africa flowed through this tiny island. During its medieval heyday, Kilwa was the principal port in a string of coastal trading cities that formed along what became known as the Swahili coast. Swahili is derived from an Arabic word meaning “coastal dweller” and became the name for the regional language. The local inhabitants, descendants of the Bantu people, blended their mother tongue with adopted words from Persian and Arabic. Arabian and Persian customs are also reflected in the architecture, art, and religion of Swahili culture. All…

Painters in the Western tradition strive for “originality,” stamping a style on their work to ensure their name will be remembered forever. The painters of ancient Egypt could not have been more different: Creators of some of the world’s most iconic art, they worked anonymously, continuing a style whose precepts were laid down at the dawn of Egyptian culture in the third millennium B.C. From its distant origins to the peak of its splendor in the grand tombs of the Valley of the Kings and Queens, Egyptian painting was not created to please a public, but for more transcendent needs. The ka, the vital essence of the deceased, needed nourishment in order to survive in the afterlife. To supply it, Egyptians looked to the magic (heka) of painting. By representing…

American women had been fighting for the vote for nearly 70 years when Woodrow Wilson won the presidential election in November 1916. It would be Wilson’s second term, and suffragists were disappointed. Wilson first took office in 1913, and one day prior to his Inauguration, they had staged a huge woman suffrage parade of more than 5,000 people marching up Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Almost four years had passed, and U.S. women still did not have the vote. Wilson’s reelection felt like a major setback, but the suffragists, led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, decided to turn their grief into action. They met on January 9, 1917, at the new headquarters of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, Cameron House, located just steps from the White House. There…

A BATTLE TOLD IN TAPESTRY THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS of 1066, in which the old Anglo-Saxon order was overthrown by William the Conqueror of Normandy, irreversibly changed England’s law, hierarchy, and language. The buildup to this most celebrated of English battles is told most eloquently in the Bayeux Tapestry, discovered in the cathedral of the same name in Normandy. An amazing repository of historical testimony, this delicate strip of linen has survived the perilous journey to the present to tell its amazing story. MASTER OF MACHINATIONS FOR NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI (1469-1527), politics came down to power—how to get it and, most important, how to keep it. Today, many link the wily Florentine with cunning, and even outright immorality, in politics, while others see Machiavelli as a pragmatist, shaped by his environment:…

Around 225 b.c. a Greek engineer, Philo, produced a list of seven temata—“things to be seen”—that are better known today as the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: the Pyramids at Giza; the Statue of Zeus at Olympia; the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus; the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus; the Colossus of Rhodes; the Pharos of Alexandria; and, most mysterious of all, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Many revisions of Philo’s list followed, and other sites were added and removed according to the tastes of the times. But the Philo seven have become canonical, a snapshot of the monuments whose size and engineering prowess awed the classical mind. Only the Pyramids at Giza (built in the mid third millennium b.c.) remains intact today. Although five of the others have disappeared, or…

Warfare changed forever in the summer of 1945, when the United States detonated the world’s first atomic bombs. One was tested in the New Mexico desert, and the other two devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Entire cities and their populations could now be wiped out with one strike. But until Japan’s final surrender offer, five days after the Nagasaki bombing, the atomic bomb’s reputation as a “war ender” would not take hold. During that time, the question of how the next atomic bomb would be used was a real one. One of the most persistent claims about the end of World War II is that the United States had no more atomic bombs after the second attack and that President Harry Truman was bluffing when he promised…