Table of contents for January 2023 in History Revealed

The Crimean War – fought between Russia and an alliance of Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia in the mid-19th century – is widely regarded as the first ‘modern’ war. From telegraphs and steamships, to weaponry and care of the wounded, a host of innovations were brought to the battlefield, ushering warfare into a new age. In this month's Essential Guide, we've enlisted the help of Professor Andrew Lambert, who takes us through the fascinating story behind the conflict – from the road to war and key battles, to the impact of household names such as Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole. Turn to page 27 to get started. Elsewhere, we talk to award-winning poet Raymond Antrobus, whose recent BBC World Service documentary saw him travel to Sierra Leone to trace the…

Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon By 49 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar had amassed enormous power, prestige and fortune in the Roman Republic, and, with his conquest of Gaul, enshrined his name as a great military commander with enduring loyalty from his soldiers. His political instincts and voracious quest for glory instilled in him a determination to reshape the GrecoRoman world anew. Yet by capitalising on the Republic's fragility, Caesar made enemies, and it would be his decision at a small river called the Rubicon that would seal the fate of Rome. A decade earlier, he had served his year-long term as one of two consuls, the most senior public office in the Republic, after helping forge the First Triumvirate, a political alliance with the famously rich Marcus Licinius Crassus and…

YOUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO THE HISTORICAL CONSULTANT FOR THIS MONTH'S ESSENTIAL GUIDE ANDREW LAMBERT is Laughton professor of naval history in the Department of War Studies at King's College London. His books include The Crimean War: British Grand Strategy against Russia, 1853–56 (Routledge, 2020). PODCAST Professor Andrew Lambert answers questions about the Crimean War on the HistoryExtra podcast: historyextra.com/crimean-war-qa…

YOUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO THE CRIMEAN WAR ORIGINS OF THE CRIMEAN WAR Mention the Crimean War to most people, and many will immediately think of the Light Brigade charging into a blizzard of Russian bullets and Florence Nightingale tending stricken British troops. Yet the incident that made this brutal 19th-century conflict all but inevitable involved monks not Redcoats, crucifixes not sabres – and there wasn't a nurse in sight. Just a few years before the Crimean War broke out, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, believed by many to sit on the very spot where Jesus Christ was crucified, found itself at the centre of a vicious brawl between two sets of opposing holy men. On one side stood Jerusalem's Orthodox monks; on the other its Catholics clerics. The…

Among the subjects that William Nightingale taught his daughter Florence was mathematics, and it is clear that she was a gifted and willing student since, in her career as a nurse, she pioneered the use of statistics to analyse health issues and outcomes. During her service in the Crimean War, she gathered information on her patients: the number of soldiers being killed and injured, or who were diseased. Nightingale did not do this work herself: in an approach that is now commonplace, she ran a team that gathered statistical data. How to convey her findings would be a major concern for her. After returning to Britain, she knew the widespread anger over mismanagement of the war would inevitably fade as time passed from the guns falling silent. Nightingale needed to…

In January 1982, the Conservative Party of prime minister Margaret Thatcher was trailing in third place in the opinion polls, behind the Liberal-SDP Alliance, which stood at 40 per cent, and Labour at 30 per cent. By June of that year, the polls had been turned on their head: Labour were still second, but the Conservatives now had the approval of 51 per cent of the country. The Falklands War had been fought between these polls, and the events in the South Atlantic, where Britain's naval taskforce had evicted the invading Argentinians in a bloody conflict, transformed Thatcher's political fortunes. As the taskforce sailed home in triumph, her future in Downing Street was assured. The following year, she recorded the biggest landslide victory in a general election since 1945. But…

c1860 WOOLLY DISPLAY Is that an elephant in the room? Well, not quite. While sharing similarities with modern-day pachyderms, the beast shown in this mid-19th century photograph is in fact a woolly mammoth, excavated from the permafrost of Siberia and displayed to awestruck visitors at St Petersburg Museum. Siberia has certainly provided its fair share of woolly mammoths over the centuries, with the first recorded example being uncovered in 1799 near the delta of the Lena River. But, when institutions first began exhibiting the creatures, they mistakenly displayed them with their tusks pointing outwards; in fact, they were naturally inclined inwards. St Petersburg still boasts the world's largest museum collection of mammoth remains to this day, from calves to fully mature adults. 1967 RAISING RED FLAGS Roused by Chairman Mao's call to…

2 January 1492 ISLAMIC SPAIN COMES TO AN END After a decade of war, the Emirate of Granada capitulates to Isabella I of Castille and Ferdinand II of Aragon, bringing an end to centuries of Islamic rule on the Iberian Peninsula. Muhammad XII becomes the last sultan of the Nasrid dynasty, surrendering the city of Granada and his fortified palace, the Alhambra. An era of religious persecution begins, with Jews and Muslims forced to convert to Christianity or face expulsion. 18 January 1871 GERMANY IS UNIFIED King Wilhelm I of Prussia is proclaimed kaiser of the newly formed German empire inside the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles (pictured right). War with Napoleon Ill's French empire in 1870 had provided an opportunity for the Prussian chancellor, Otto von…

Elizabeth Báthory: 17th-century ‘serial killer’ The Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory is said to have murdered hundreds of girls and bathed in their blood to keep herself beautiful. But is there any truth in the gory story or is it just a malicious lie? In the first decade of the 17th century, some disturbing claims swirled around the Kingdom of Hungary: of young girls’ disappearances, of torture and of murder. At the centre of them all was one woman accused of wanton cruelty and sadism, a countess named Elizabeth Báthory. Seemingly, she targeted poor girls from the local villages, either by kidnapping or luring them to her many castles with the promise of work. Nothing was initially done about this, however, not least since the victims were mere peasants, while Báthory…

WEAPONRY When the Crimean War broke out in 1853, fewer than 40 years had passed since the Napoleonic Wars. Yet the methods and technology used by both sides were a world apart from those in that earlier conflict, which had pockmarked Europe in the opening decades of the 19th century. Many new weapons and technologies were deployed for the first time, hence Crimea later being defined by many observers as the ‘first modern war’. One major advance was in rifle technology. The Enfield Pattern 1853 rifle-musket had been swiftly approved by the British government and put into mass production. In combination with the Minié musket ball, a hollow-based bullet that expanded when fired, Enfields put the allies at a distinct advantage over the Russians when it came to accuracy and…

In April 1982, the Argentinian military invaded the British-held Falkland Islands, repeating the mission the following day on South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands. The Royal Navy swiftly dispatched a heavy taskforce to the South Atlantic and, after 74 days of bloody conflict that took more than 900 lives, Argentina surrendered. The Argentinian military junta would fall in 1983, the same year that British prime minister Margaret Thatcher went on to record one of the largest electoral victories of recent times. Britain's sovereignty over the Falkland Islands – known as Islas Malvinas in Buenos Aires – is still contested by some people today, more than 40 years later. DID YOU KNOW? THE PEOPLE'S WAR While the war had its detractors, it received wide support from Britons overall. On 5 April…

The Cuban Missile Crisis: World on the Brink bit.ly/CubanPod116 This new HistoryExtra series charts the escalating tensions that saw the US and the Soviet Union reach the brink of nuclear disaster in 1962. Drawing on expert insight to reveal the key players, historical faultlines and strategic missteps that almost led to catastrophe, it's a dramatic deep-dive into a terrifying chapter in international relations. Writing the history of the modern monarchy bit.ly/CrownPod116 The fifth season of The Crown was one of 2022's big hits, with commentators debating whether its plotlines offered fair depictions of real life. But how straightforward is it to tell the recent story of the British monarchy? Expert historian Professor Philip Murphy shares his insider secrets, and reveals why it might be more difficult than you'd expect. The…

THE BLACK DEATH Discover what it was like to live in the shadow of the plague – from efforts to contain and cure the disease, to its devastating impact on families and communities PLUS… TOP 10 HISTORICAL STATUS SYMBOLS THE REAL ROBINSON CRUSOE PAULI MURRAY: HUMAN RIGHTS CHAMPION NINE THINGS YOU (PROBABLY) DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT LONDON'S FIRST ZEPPELIN ATTACK WHAT IF… HANNIBAL HAD TAKEN ROME? AND MORE… CROSSWORD WINNERS The three lucky winners of the prize crossword in issue 113 are as follows: A Emery, Essex I Smellie, Surrey J Wells, Lincolnshire Congratulations! You've each won a copy of When There Were Birds by Roy and Lesley Adkins. We will post your prizes out as soon as possible.…

When one member of a family is killed in horrible circumstances, that is a tragedy. But in the ease of the Money family, when a second member died seven years later – killing four others along the way – it raised questions about who might have killed Mary Sophia Money, and how appearances can be very deceptive. Mary Sophia Money was a young woman who was highly thought of by those who knew her. The youngest of 10 children, she had been named after her eldest sister, who had died aged 13. This ominous naming did not stop her from being a cheerful soul, who enjoyed her work as bookkeeper at a south London: dairy, and had many friends. She was particularly close to the sibling next in age to…

1 COFFEE MAY HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED BY ‘EXCITED GOATS’ Legend has it that Kaldi, a lonely goat herder in ninth-century AD Ethiopia, discovered the energising and invigorating effects of coffee when he saw his goats getting excited after eating some berries from a tree. Kaldi told the abbot of the local monastery about this, and the abbot came up with the idea of drying and boiling the berries to make a beverage. He threw the berries into the fire, whence the unmistakable aroma of what we now know as coffee drifted through the night air. The now roasted beans were raked from the embers, ground up and dissolved in hot water: so was made the world's first cup of coffee. The abbot and his monks found that the beverage kept…

Q What was the Crimean War, in a nutshell? A: For Britain and France, the Crimean War lasted between 1854 and 1856, although the Russians and Turkish were officially at war from October 1853. It was a conflict that concluded a 40-year period of heightened tensions between Britain and Russia – essentially a 19thcentury Cold War. The war was about global influence, economic power, strategic position and, ultimately, it was about the future of the declining Ottoman empire and whether the Russians could punch through out of the Black Sea into the Mediterranean and become a western European power. The British backed Ottoman Turkey because it wasn't a threat, and it was a very good economic partner. As the name suggests, the war was fought famously in the Crimea, but…

To see photographs taken during the Crimean War is to catch a glimpse of a world on the cusp of military modernity. Not that this is immediately obvious, however. The most famous image caught by pioneering British war photographer Roger Fenton, titled Valley of the Shadow of Death, is of nothing more than a stark landscape pebbled with cannonballs. And his pictures of the soldiers show men in uniforms often not so different from the Napoleonic Wars era. Yet to understand how one of the war's undeniably most famous figures, Florence Nightingale, had such an enduring influence on the history of medicine both in terms of trauma treatment and the wider profession – it is important first to understand that this was a conflict of new technologies. Russia's use of…

After a siege that lasted nearly 11 months, the fate of Sevastopol was settled when the Royal Navy occupied the Sea of Azov, cutting Russian supply lines to the Crimea. Without food, ammunition and fodder for the cavalry, Russia could no longer hold the fortress. It fell on 9 September 1855 after a brilliant French assault. This triumph was enough for Napoleon III: having restored military glory, he wanted to end the conflict and focus on redrawing the map of western Europe and expanding the borders of the French empire. Also, among his subjects, the war had become deeply unpopular as the human cost had mounted. As for the British, they concentrated on destroying Sevastopol dockyard to ensure that Russia would not command the Black Sea for a generation. With…

HIDDEN HISTORIES ÖTZI AND THE GEBELEIN MAN Buried in ice and desert respectively more than 5,000 years ago, these natural mummies were preserved – as were their tattoos The oldest preserved tattoos yet discovered are on Ötzi, the socalled ‘Iceman’ excavated from the Alpine permafrost at the border between Austria and Italy in 1991. Otzi lived around 5,300 years ago during the early Bronze Age, and his serendipitously preserved body is covered with 61 small tattoo marks made with ash. Since next to nothing is known about Otzi's cultural tradition, deciphering his tattoos with any certainty is not possible, but the dashes and crosses are tattooed primarily on sites of the body where he seemed to have suffered from particular ailments, inflammation or pain. Their locations suggest that they may…

HISTORY'S GREATEST CONUNDRUMS AND MYSTERIES SOLVED What happened to the Donner Party? SHORT ANSWER Snowed in and out of food, the pioneers had no choice but to turn to cannibalism LONG ANSWER The band of American pioneers bound for the frontier – known as the Donner Party after one of its chief families, led by George Donner – set out from Illinois in April 1846. This was where their problems began as it meant joining the well-trod trail from Missouri to California in May, quite late in the migration season. A man named Lansford Hastings therefore convinced them to take a shortcut he had worked out, despite having never traversed the route and it going over tough terrain not suitable for wagons. The so-called ‘Hastings Cutoff’ put the party a…

ONE TO WATCH This woman's work Call the Midwife / BBC One, January Perhaps because its annual Christmas special has become a fixture of Yuletide programming, Call the Midwife has a reputation among some viewers as being undemanding fare. Or perhaps this perception is down to plain old sexism. Begging the forgiveness of Stephen McCann's Dr Patrick Turner, this is a drama that focuses primarily on women's experiences rather than manly goings-on. Without suggesting that every moment of every episode is an exercise in gritty social realism, it's also a show that's unafraid to tackle big issues – including the grinding effects of poverty, alcoholism, abortion and the Thalidomide scandal. The new and 12th series is a case in point, in that it begins in 1968. This was the year…