Conservative History Journal

On August 24, 1814 Washington burned. Soldiers and marines under Major-General Robert Ross and Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn put Washington’s public buildings, including the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Library of Congress, the Treasury building, the State and War Departments, the historic Navy Yard and the President’s House (as the White House was then known), to the torch. Mr Madison's war seemed of little importance to the British who were fighting Napoleon and many Americans have preferred to forget what...

It is possible that the remembrance season we entered two days ago will last the four or five years until it will be time to commemorate the tragic peace that followed the unusually tragic war but it is much more likely that there will be a complete exhaustion of commemoration all round and even politicians and media hacks will stop reminding us about the need to remember those who died for us and to draw the necessary lessons. It seems very unlikely that people will remember the dead of the various wars of the last century...

The National Portrait Gallery has a particularly good collection of small-scale displays dotted round the various rooms at the moment. One of them is a memorial of the fact that a hundred years ago one of the slightly insane followers of the reasonably sane Emmeline Pankhurst attacked one of the portraits in the Gallery about the same time as another member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Mary Richardson, attacked Velasquez's...