Sommaire pour No. 74 de All About History

SHIRTS AND UNDERSHIRTS The clothes wore by miners depended on where they had come from but they were always durable and practical. Americans wore woollen Henley-style shirts as undergarments covered by a coloured or patterned loose-fitting shirt typically made of linen, cotton, wool or flannel, with two or three buttons at the neck. They’d also wear a hat to protect their head from the sun as well as a neckerchief. SLUICING IT OPEN Within a short timeframe, miners sought less labour-intensive methods of extracting gold. Sluice boxes would separate gold from gravel using running water: the gold would be slowed and become trapped by obstructions called riffles. In doing so, they’d process 200 times the amount of gold than panning. Prospectors would also use rocker boxes – a high-sided box…

When Sparta conquered Messenia in a series of wars in the 8th century BCE, the entire population was enslaved becoming the Helots. The rest of the ancient world had slaves, but they were the property of individual masters. Helots, however, belonged to the Spartan state and were assigned to an individual by the state. The master could not therefore treat a Helot as they liked. In this the Helots had certain rights. Their duties were to farm the land (the kleros) of their masters and to work in all aspects of life that the Spartans did not. As Spartans were full-time soldiers, this meant all other aspects of farm and land management. Helots also had certain freedoms, could marry and have families and even work some land of their own…

Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata was produced (probably at the Lenaea Festival) in February 411 BCE and reveals several remarkable things. Firstly it shows that Athenian cultural life continued during the war. Comedy, tragedy and (as the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon show) philosophy continued and even thrived in Athens during the war. At the same time, the nature of Athens’ democracy was such that Aristophanes (and others) could offer criticisms of the conduct of the war, and Athens’ political leadership (Peisander in this case), in an astonishing way. Lysistrata tells of the eponymous heroine (her name means ‘disbander of armies’) calling a meeting of women from all around Greece (mirroring the various meetings of the male politicians running the war). They decide to end the war by withholding sex and other…

Professor Gaines is the author of Uplifting The Race: Black Leadership, Politics, And Culture During The Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1996) and American Africans In Ghana: Black Expatriates And The Civil Rights Era (UNC Press, 2006). His current research is focusing on the challenges of racial integration during and after the civil rights movement and the projects of activists, artists and intellectuals to redefine the black experience in America and highlight structural and ideological forms of racism, patriarchy and homophobia.…

1 February, Osborne House, Isle Of Wight A short service is held at Osborne House with the family of Queen Victoria before the coffin is placed on a gun carriage to begin its journey. The queen’s coffin is taken by carriage to the HMY Alberta at Trinity Pier on the River Medina where it would be transported across the Solent to Gosport, Portsmouth, passing the British fleet on the way, lining the journey from Cowes to Portsmouth as it fired a salute. Vessels from Germany and France were also present to see the queen off. The Alberta is lead by six torpedo destroyers. 2 February, Portsmouth The coffin of the queen is loaded onto a train at Portsmouth to be taken to Victoria Station in London. Green wreaths have been…

CHANGLING Work started on this in 1409, when the 49-year-old Yongle had been on the throne for seven years. It remains the largest of the tombs. Steps lead up a three-storey marble base to the Blessing and Grace Palace, where sacrifices were made to the emperor and his empress Xu. This huge hall, 67 metres long, is the only tomb palace from the Ming Dynasty, unique also in that it is made of camphor wood. One of its 16 pillars is 13 metres high and over one metre wide. A fine bronze statue of the emperor has him sitting on a throne. Exhibits recall his achievements, notably building the Forbidden City and despatching admiral Zheng He in seven great voyages of discovery. DINGLING Dingling is the only Ming tomb to…

NUMBER OF TROOPS APPROX. 3,000-4,000 NUMBER OF KNIGHTS 375 KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 80 KING BALDWIN IV Baldwin came to the throne of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1174 as a 14 year old. Already afflicted with leprosy, he ruled until 1185. Determined and single minded to preserve the kingdom Afflicted with leprosy and just 16 years old at time of battle KNIGHTS TEMPLAR The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, known as the Templars, was a Catholic military order founded in 1119 to protect pilgrims in Jerusalem. Strong and dedicated with ample resources Zealous and overly combative KNIGHTLY ARMING SWORD The most typical weapon of the knight in the Crusades a straight, double-edged, single-handed, sword with a cross-shaped hilt. Slender, strong and well balanced One-handed and relatively…

The dramatic and brutal execution of the Russian imperial family in a remote house by the Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1918 captured the world’s gruesome imagination. Rumours and speculation spread in equal measure as to whether all the family had actually died, and for many years there were claims and counter claims around the survival in particular of one of the tsar’s daughters, Anastasia. With the discovery of bodies, modern techniques of DNA, and closer cooperation between east and west it was possible to finally draw a line under the family’s traumatic fate. But what if things had been different and the Romanovs had survived? How could that have happened? And what, if any, effect would it have had on the mood in Europe and events in Russia in particular? Would…

Author Simon Winder Publisher Picador Price £20 Released 7 March 2019 Simon Winder’s personal journey through the lost kingdoms of Europe concludes with Lotharingia, a hugely entertaining stroll through one of the most intriguing stories in the history of the world. In 843 CE, the three grandsons of Charlemagne carved up the family lands. One took what would later become France, the second claimed what is now Germany and the third became ruler of “the lands of Lothar”, or the territory that stood between that of his brothers. Lotharingia was a vast area that swept from the North Sea to the Alps and within its borders, history was made. In his new book, Winder leads the reader on a romp through 12 centuries of history that shaped modern Europe. It…

THE RISE OF THE THIRD REICH Author Robert Lyman Price £20 Publisher Amberley Publishing Out now! Robert Lyman’s well-documented history follows events from September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Germany, to Pearl Harbor and the USA’s declaration of war in December 1941. Lyman tells his story from the perspectives of contemporary accounts by expatriate Americans caught up in the conflict. His skills as an entertaining storyteller and his erudition as a historian bring to life the experiences of those who witnessed the early days of World War II.…

Author Adrian Tinniswood Publisher Head of Zeus Price £18.99 Released Out now On 28 November 1660, 12 men gathered at Gresham College in London and drew up a plan to meet every Wednesday for the better of “the advancement of various parts of learning”. From these relatively humble beginnings the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge emerged and almost four centuries later, the Royal Society continues to flourish. In his new work, The Royal Society And The Invention Of Modern Science, Adrian Tinniswood returns to that first fateful meeting as the starting point for a fascinating study of the birth of the Royal Society. Coming as it did in the year of Charles II’s restoration, Tinniswood considers not only the world that fostered this new society but also the scientists…

The Real Sparta It was fantastic to speak with ancient-world expert Philip Matyszak this issue, breaking down some of the misconceptions around Sparta and Athens Mona Lisa Jack Parsons, formerly of this parish, takes us through the incredible tale of the theft that helped to make Leonardo da Vinci’s painting a household name The Sultanate Of Women Ottoman expert and author Jem Duducu walks us through the incredible period when the harem of the Ottoman empire held as much power as the sultans themselves…

1803 THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE The United States buys 828,000 square miles of land from France This DOUBLES the country’s size 15 STATES will be created out of this territory A year later Thomas Jefferson commissioned the now-famous Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the new land 1830 INDIAN REMOVAL ACT When Americans started moving west, Native Americans were already there. As a result, the government decreed that the tribes could roam the Great Plains freely and a permanent Indian frontier was established, forcing the movement of many people. 1843 THE GREAT MIGRATION The event that arguably made the Oregon Trail famous saw about 1,000 people in 120 wagons spend five months trekking west in search of new lives on the frontier. 1844 JAMES K POLK Polk’s presidency saw the United…

JOHN WESLEY HARDIN AMERICAN 1853-1895 Aged just 15 John Wesley Hardin killed his first man, a former slave. Over the next ten years he would kill at least eight Union soldiers and four black policemen. Finally, in 1877, he was caught and put on trial for murder. Sentenced to 25 years hard labour he served his time and then retired to Gonzales, Texas, with his children. But it wouldn’t be long until he was back to a life of crime. He remarried, then abandoned his wife and began thieving, only to be shot in the back of the head in Acme Saloon, El Paso. CHEROKEE BILL AMERICAN 1876-1896 Crawford Goldsby, better known today as Cherokee Bill, was 18 at the time of his first murder. The victim was a 35-year-old…

In your book, Sparta: Rise Of A Warrior Nation, you describe Sparta as “remarkably unremarkable”. Could you tell us what made it so different as a city from other major centres of population at the time? My comment refers to early Sparta before 700 BCE. At this time most contemporaries would not have ranked Sparta as one of the great cities of Greece. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Archaic Sparta was that the ‘city’ consisted of four villages alongside the River Eurotas. Unlike most Greek cities, Sparta was unwalled, though in another sense geography provided all the barriers the Spartans needed – and then some. The only other oddity was that the early Spartans had imposed a state called ‘helotage’ – somewhere between serfdom and slavery – on some…

The Ottoman Empire lasted 600 years. It began at the tail end of the crusading movement in the Middle East and finished in the 1920s. This means that there are still a few people alive today who were born subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The peak of the empire began with Suleiman I, known as ‘The Lawgiver’ in the east and as ‘The Magnificent’ in the west. Intriguingly, while he was in charge of an empire in its prime and undeniably the most powerful man in Europe in the 1500s, it’s his reign that also begins the era of the ‘Sultanate of Women’, a time when the harem became the focal point of political power. ‘Harem’ is a Turkish word from the Arabic ‘haram’, which means forbidden or sacrosanct. It…

Ghent Altarpiece Stolen in 1934 The 12-panel Renaissance artwork has the reputation for being the world’s most pilfered painting. Both Napoleon and Hitler looted the treasure as they conquered Europe. A renegade cleric sold off scenes in 1816, and another panel went to a museum decades later. The artwork was reunited for the first time in a century after World War I. But it was not to last – two panels were snatched in 1934. One was anonymously returned, but the ‘Just Judges’ panel remains at large. The Scream Stolen in 1994 While most of Norway was watching the opening of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, two thieves broke into a gallery in nearby Oslo and took Edvard Munch’s surrealist icon. Though they tripped an alarm,…

Dressed in white Victoria was clear that she was to wear white and have a white veil over her face, not black. It is noted in the recollections of many who attended that with the military in their traditional colours and many of the royal men in uniform also, only the princesses wore black to the funeral and stood out as a result. Many rings As well as her wedding ring, a diamond guard ring, and a ring that was a gift from her mother, Victoria had many other rings of varied significance. She particularly noted her engagement ring with an emerald in the head of a golden snake, which she said matched one Albert was also buried with that she gave to him. Remembering Albert As well as her…

In the mid-1950s, only six years after the revolution that brought Mao’s communists to power, the eminent scholar and writer Guo Moruo suggested the excavation of Changling, the tomb of the Yongle Emperor, the largest and oldest of the Ming tombs. Moruo, president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, carried authority, but archaeologists were nervous, given the importance of Changling, and instead focused on Dingling, the third largest tomb, as a trial site prior to excavating Changling. The work, undertaken in 1956-57 by the Beijing Institute of Archaeology, revealed that grave robbers had tried to enter the tomb but failed. The first job was to find the tomb’s wall and the door. Fortunately, the original builders had left a stele with instructions on where the wall was to be found.…

NUMBER OF TROOPS 9,600 HEAVY CAVALRY 2,600 LIGHT CAVALRY APPROX. 6,000 MAMLUK BODYGUARDS 1,000 SALADIN Saladin was a Kurdish Sunni Muslim, sultan of Egypt and the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty who warred against the Crusader states. A brilliant military leader Ambitious, the sheer number of rival Muslim dynasties meant an almost perpetual state of war TAWāSHī The Tawāshī were a body of heavily armed, professional elite cavalry used in Saladin’s armies. Heavily armed and armoured they provided a solid core to Saladin’s cavalry. Their relative low numbers meant they could be undermined by other troop-types SCIMITAR Swords were just as common in Muslim armies as they were with Crusaders, the curved single-handed shamshir began to be introduced from the 9th century. Light and strong suited to both infantry and…

There are reports of more riots in many of our major cities up and down the country as ordinary men and women protest against the extravagance of the Russian Royal family in exile. Whilst workers are expected to tighten their belts and make do, there is anger that the arrogance of former Tsar Nicholas and his family, having escaped the clutches of the Bolsheviks with the help of their British royal cousins, show little or no regard for the plight of the honest working man by flaunting the comfortable lifestyle afforded to them at the expense of the British taxpayer.…

From the first imperial nation, the Akkadian Empire, to the fall of British rule around the world in the 20th century, empires have risen and fallen for centuries and reshaped the map of the world both physically and culturally. In this new collection from All About History, learn about the bloody battles, brutal rule and wide expansions of civilisations that have helped to create the world we live in today. Featuring the rise of Rome, the Aztecs, the Russian Revolution and so much more, this is a fantastic compendium of some of the biggest moments in world history you could ever ask to explore. Buy All About History: Greatest Empires in shops or online at myfavouritemagazines.com Price: £12.99…

Author Jane Robinson Publisher Black Swan Price £9.99 (paperback) Released Out now In the heady summer of 1913, thousands of women of differing classes, ages, and political persuasions marched along Britain’s streets to call upon the government to grant them the vote. The Great Pilgrimage was born out of decades of petitions, letters and deputations by suffrage activists who were batted away by governments reluctant to entrust women with the responsibilities of active involvement in the country’s political and social life. “This book succeeds in bringing to vibrant reality the sadly somewhat forgotten Great Pilgrimage” The suffragist groups behind the march seem to have paled in public memory and significance next to the generally more militant suffragettes, yet as Jane Robinson shows in her endlessly fascinating study, to downplay their…

Q. BEING A NATIVE OF BOSTON, WHAT IS YOUR LINK TO COLORADO? A. Although I was born in Boston, I must point out that I was conceived in Colorado, inside the Moffat Railroad Tunnel. Q. WHO GAVE YOU YOUR COLOURFUL MONIKER, ‘DR COLORADO’? A. I received it from Colorado’s star marketing man, the late Lew Cady. He proposed that I become Dr Colorado and make appearances. He set up a booth for me with signs at the front – “The Doctor is In” or “The Doctor is Out” – so I could go for a bathroom or a beer break. Then he gave me a lab coat monogrammed ‘Dr Colorado’. At the time, I was mowing yards for $1 a yard. I asked if the Dr Colorado gig paid. It…

Sparta is known from the earliest periods of Greek history, Menelaus and his wife Helen of Sparta during the Trojan War being a case in point. The Sparta that came to dominate Greek culture for more than two centuries in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE evolved later. It is Sparta’s great rival city, Athens, that we have the most information about. Our most important surviving literary sources from ancient Greece (such as Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon) were written at Athens, by Athenians or for Athenians. Athens was also the city that put itself and its ideas forward most in art and literature. Even among Athenians, however, Sparta was a city that fascinated them. When Athenians, and later writers, wrote about Sparta, they wrote to explain the differences between these…

The passing of Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India was a seismic event that struck the empire and all of Europe. It would ultimately mark the beginning of a dark half-century of events in all the spheres of influence she had once occupied. As the 20th century was beginning, the state of the world was changing, the British empire fraying and the peace of Europe threatening to crumble. Victoria’s connection through blood and marriage to so many powerful families had helped keep the peace. In particular the growing power of Germany was being held back in part through Kaiser Wilhelm II being Victoria’s eldest grandchild. But even so, new unrest was building in many parts of the world for greater political rights…

The Ming dynasty arose from a revolt against foreign rule when Chinese rebels threw out the Mongols in 1368. The Mongol emperors were buried in their northern homeland, Mongolia. But their successors from the Chinese heartland restored the ancient tradition of being buried in state near their capital, Beijing. Though damaged by the Manchus when they seized power in 1644, the Ming Tombs have been restored, and now form one of China’s greatest heritage sites. Since seizing all of China in 1279, the Mongols had ruled as the Yuan dynasty for almost a century. But they never belonged; none of their rulers mastered Chinese and they despised and feared their subjects. Mongol rule depended on power, upheld with ever-stricter laws and ever-fiercer punishments as chaos and violence spread. In 1331,…

Author Edited by Felipe Fernández-Armesto Publisher Oxford University Press Price £30 Released Out now To say that The Oxford Illustrated History Of The World is a monumental undertaking is something of an understatement. In just over 400 pages some of the world’s most noted historians come together to tell the story of human history, from its first breath to the modern age. The result is a triumph, a book that seeks to examine not only how humanity came to be but also cultural divergence, identity and politics. “This is no dry, inaccessible tome but one that seeks to understand the world it depicts” The book starts 200,000 years ago with the very first homo sapiens and really does begin at the very beginning, establishing exactly what makes a recognisable human…

Author Yasha Levine Publisher Icon Books Price £14.99 Released Out now The internet is today a tale of two halves – we are better connected than ever before, able to access content instantly and communicate with people across the globe, yet it also embodies concerns about fake news, and data mismanagement and manipulation, to name just a few. And even in the earliest days of the technology, it went far beyond being a playground for computer scientists. Investigative journalist Yasha Levine’s timely Surveillance Valley weaves a disturbing narrative of the internet’s origins from the 1960s as a tool – or weapon as he describes it – linked to the American military. In a climate of fear about communism and potential social unrest felt among those governing the country, ARPA (the…