“Its Name Synonymous with Barbarism”: The Colonial Narratives that Destroyed Dahomey’s ‘Amazons’

Reading time: 7 minutes
Tales of Dahomey’s fearsome female fighting force are writ large across the world, rippling from the far-fetched, bewildered accounts of colonizing Frenchmen to modern-day popular culture, in films like Black Panther and The Woman King. Though they were known in their homeland as the Agojie, their combat prowess and defiance of strict 19th-century European gender norms earned them worldwide fame–and infamy–as the Amazons of Dahomey.

Read More

The enduring lessons of the Iraq War

Reading time: 7 minutes
The US-led overthrow of the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq marked the beginning of a series of events that reshaped the strategic environment of the Middle East. It also had enduring consequences for Iraqi society, and for Arab societies and Arab governments beyond its borders. There was no reason to doubt that the military defeat of Iraq could be achieved. But there were larger questions involved—including what a successor regime should look like; whether such a regime, initially established and maintained under US protection, would prove sustainable; and if not, what the consequences would be.

Read More

Weekly History Quiz No.241

1.The 1915 Gallipoli landings involved soldiers from the British Empire, Australia, New Zealand and which other country?
Try the full 10 question quiz.

Read More

Neutral and Nervous – A History of Sweden’s Now Broken 200-Year Streak of Neutrality

Reading time: 6 minutes
For over 200 years, Sweden has been one of the few neutral states in Europe. From the Napoleonic Wars and Sweden’s declaration of neutrality in 1812 to today, many conflicts have arisen right on its borders.
Despite this, Sweden (until its joining with NATO in 2024) has successfully navigated neutrality, avoiding two world wars and many other conflicts throughout the 20th Century.
But how did Sweden manage to stay neutral throughout the 1900s with two world wars on its doorstep, and why did it become neutral in the first place?

Read More

Farmers or foragers? Pre-colonial Aboriginal food production was hardly that simple

Reading time: 6 minutes
Farmers versus foragers is a huge oversimplification of what was a mosaic of food production. After all, Australian landscapes differ markedly, from tropical rainforest to snowy mountains to arid spinifex country. For many Aboriginal people, the terms “farming” and “hunter-gatherer” do not capture the realities of 60 millennia of food production.

Read More
Loading

Military History

Latest

They Shall Not Grow Old poignantly illuminates the human face of the Great War.

Reading time: 6 minutes Although these feelings of remembrance are now used to commemorate the fallen of all global conflict, it was the First World War (1914-1918), or “The War to End all Wars” , that inspired these heartbreakingly eloquent words and forever enshrined the memory of a lost generation for all time; with this spirit of remembrance and in further recognition of the 1918 Armistice comes director Peter Jackson's, They Shall Not Grow Old, a striking, immersive and emotionally powerful documentary feature unlike anything ever seen before.

Political and Economic History

Latest

The Birth of Modern Iraq: A Historical Odyssey

Reading time: 6 minutes Mesopotamia, now located in the country of Iraq, has been home to some of Earth’s earliest civilizations and urban settlements, from the Sumerians to the Akkadians, as well as the centre of the Islamic world with the city of Baghdad under the Umayyad and Abbasid empires. Yet the modern nation of Iraq is only just over 100 years old – a relatively new nation compared to many in the world. How did Iraq, a home to ancient Empires turned battleground between bitter great powers, become the nation it is today?

History Audiobooks

A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World – Audiobook

On his first journey Cook mapped the east coast of Australia, on his second the British Admiralty sent him into the vast Southern Ocean. Equipped with one of the first accurate chronometers, Cook pushed his small vessel not merely into the Roaring Forties or the Furious Fifties but become the first explorer to penetrate the Antarctic Circle, reaching an incredible Latitude 71 degrees South, just failing to discover Antarctica.

Read More
Loading

History Guild would like to acknowledge the Boonwurrung people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we are based, and pay our respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.