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Showing posts with label History Today. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History Today. Show all posts
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 was a serious national humiliation created by a series of misjudgements on the part of the President and the Secretary of War.
An interesting account and analysis in History Today, as ever.
Last July this blog had an anniversary posting of Daniel Defoe's stay in the pillory for publishing The Shortest Way With Dissenters. As today is the anniversary of his death, History Today has reprinted (well, on the net so, maybe, that is not quite the right word) an article from 2003 about Defoe and that stay in the pillory.
Today is the anniversary of James VI of Scotland becoming James I of England in 1603, thus uniting the two kingdoms in the monarch's person. The anniversary is not a particularly notable one but History Today is celebrating it by reprinting a 1999 article by Roger Lockyer, whose name must surely be familiar to anyone who has ever studied that period. Can one even envisage school and university courses without Professor Lockyer's books, particularly Tudor and Stuart Britain? My own well-worn copy is still on my shelf, to be consulted from time to time.
The article, which gives a largely positive view of King Jamie, is well worth reading. Of course, it is no longer completely de rigeur for historians to say merely bad things about the King but the bad press that has been his fate since the first half of the seventeenth century is still accepted by many. Not by Roger Lockyer.
However TH can fully agree with one point that Professor Colls makes: George Orwell, despite his loudly proclaimed preference for socialism, was in reality a conservative. Indeed, this has been mentioned in a previous blog on Dickens and Orwell who shared certain attitudes.
Tim Stanley's article in History Today says what we all think: a good funeral creates and propagates myths. He tries to lay to rest some of the myths that surround Margaret Thatcher on both sides but one cannot help feeling that it is a lost cause. At least, in her case, there are arguments, discussions and books that are more or less objective being written now. Not so with Churchill or not so for a good long time after his funeral.
As Tim Stanley rightly says, Churchill's funeral produced no discussions, no debates, only a general mourning across the country as people were saying goodbye to their own youth but also to a certain period in the country's history whose end, ironically, Churchill had helped to bring about.
It took a little time for some historians to start recalling that in his lifetime and during his active period as a politician Churchill was very unpopular in his party and in the country. Even after the war during which he had led the country to victory against many odds he managed to lose two of the three elections he fought as leader of the Conservative Party and barely won the third one.
Churchill's overwhelming popularity that amounts to secular sainthood for many people emerged and flourished in the decade between his enforced retirement and his death. It is interesting that there were no discussions about his political legacy while Thatcher's legacy remains a matter of furious debate.
History Today has a wonderful timeline of English and British monarchs. You click on one of them and get a brief summary (with a couple of dates) and their immediate predecessors and successors. You can then click on the name and get a list of articles on the monarch in question that is in the magazine's online archives. Then you have to subscribe to get to the archives but even without that subscription one can have a great deal of fun.
As a (one-time) contributor to History Today I was invited to their grand annual party and award giving ceremony, held at the Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace, a place and terrace full of historical connections.
The prize for the best picture research went to Pauline Hubner in The Great Builders, a book that looks well worth reading; the Longman/History Today Book of the Year award went to the first volume of Memories of Empire, titled The White Man's World, which looked interesting enough though, for myself I thought one of the others that received a special mention, a biography of John Dee, was more appealing.
The special Longman Trust Prize to a body or book or person who had contributed most to the study of history in the last year went to the Pevsner Architectural Guides published by Yale (formerly called Pevsner Buildings of England/Scotland/Wales/Ireland and published by Penguin but always and for ever known as Pevsner).
Well, here we are, a week into 2013 and no postings yet. Tsk, tsk. Worse than that, this posting will be a link to an excellent blog by Paul Lay, Editor of History Today on whether Christianity should be taught at schools as researchers from Oxford University Department of Education say on the basis of opinions expressed by people questioned by YouGov.
Yes, is his resounding answer for very good reasons:
In a YouGov poll commissioned by the university, sampling the views of 1,832 adults in England, 64 per cent agreed that children need to learn about Christianity in order to understand English history.
They are not wrong, but it is also true that it is impossible to engage fruitfully with the vast swathe of European history between Marcus Aurelius and Voltaire – a millennia and a half – without some understanding of the beliefs of the people, high-born and low, during this crucial period in the history of mankind. The perils of ignorance were brought home to me when I accompanied a very bright, well-educated and successful friend around the Renaissance rooms of London’s National Gallery and was shocked by questions such as: ‘Who’s the man dressed in red carrying the big book.’ The answer, St Jerome, was met with a blank look.Richard Dawkins and his cohorts and followers, all those militant atheists, should not fret, says Mr Lay. We are not talking about evangelization but education.
I am not sure Professor Dawkins and his militant atheists are that interested in education if it provides what they consider to be the wrong sort of information, that being anything they do not agree with. As a matter of fact, the good professor could do with a bit of history education himself. I have heard him speak at a meeting that was protesting against censorship imposed by an Islamic student group on another group that was trying to have a debate.
Professor Dawkins used the opportunity to lambast all religion and proclaim resoundingly that all bad things in history came from religion and all good things from anti-religious enlightenment. Having listed several "good" developments, he used one repeatedly as a particular example. Because the meeting was quite close to the Buxton Memorial Fountain that was built to commemorate the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, it was the example of the abolition of the slave trade and then slavery that the good professor referred to several times. Unfortunately, the abolition of the slave trade and, subsequently, slavery was fought for by a group of people who were motivated by feelings of devout Christianity. A little fact that every school boy and girl ought to know.
Historical fiction was the introduction to history for me as it must have been for many people. Somehow, as time went on and I read more history and biography I began to find the fictional version less interesting. I still reach for Georgette Heyer's Regency romances if I want a pleasant comfortable afternoon and there are one or two (not many more) historical detective story writers whose work I enjoy but I doubt whether I would get quite as involved with The Three Musketeers as I did at the age of 10. The real story behind the siege of La Rochelle, on the other hand, is fascinating.
Still, one must applaud historical fiction and its continuing popularity, not to mention the fact that through Hilary Mantel's work it has acquired a literary status it did not possess before. An admission: have not yet read Ms Mantel's books about Thomas Cromwell.
History Today has a list of historical novels published in 2012, starting with Bring Up The Bodies and ending .... well, with a slightly unexpected choice. Do read the short article.
One cannot read it in full on-line (or not for free, anyway) but December's issue of History Today has an article by me on Yelena Molokhovets, the Russian Mrs Beeton.
There is always something interesting in History Today. Sometimes it is very little but always something. Today's e-mail brought two links that were worth following up.
One is to blog posting by Lulu Ramsey, which analyses the history of the term "terrorism" from its first use in the Revolutionary France of the late eighteenth century where the government used terror to control the country to the present usage, taking into account the evolution of perception of the Gunpowder Plot and anarchist terrorist outrages of the late nineteenth century. There are links to previous postings.
However, TH is finding it hard to take any article that does not even mention the use of terror by Russian radicals hard to take seriously.
The second link is highly entertaining. It is to an interactive map of international conflict in history. Not only it is a map, it has a dateline AND you can play with it by looking up various regions and periods. There are problems and missing parts. Where, for instance is the Battle of Mohács of 1526? The defeat of the Hungarian King Louis II opened Central Europe to the Ottomans. Come to think of it where is the second Battle of Mohács of 1687 that drove the self-same Ottomans out of Central Europe? Or the Siege of Vienna a.k.a. Battle of Vienna of 1683? Why exactly do the compilers of this map not think the war between the western allies and the Ottoman Empire was so unimportant (it is mentioned but only just)?
A friend of TH's points out that while the Great Arab Uprising of 1936 - 1939, there is nothing "nothing for Iraq in 1941, although it does cover British and Soviet operations in Iran/Persia in 1941. British troops (including some Arab Legion, and British cavalry (mechanized - incl. Yeomanry) had to rush from Palestine and elsewhere to relieve the RAF bases in Iraq (mainly Habbanyiah) which were defended against the Iraqi 'rebel' forces by the RAF and the RAF Iraq Levies - ground defence troops mainly recruited from the 'Assyrians' (Iraqi Christians) - from memory."
Readers of this blog might like to find some more omissions.
Tory Historian seems to have overcome problems with Blogger but considers modern technology to be somewhat less than it is cracked up to be. In the meantime, History Today's June issue has come out and it has an excellent "contrarian" article by Tim Stanley on the subject of apologies for historic events and actions.
Not a good idea, opines Mr Stanley, as it over-simplifies historic events (dumbs history down, would be TH's comment) and he proves it by giving a brief account of the different aspects of the Mau-Mau rebellion and the British suppression of it.
