Reading time: 6 minutes
King Arthur is probably the best known of all British mythological figures. He is a character from deep time celebrated across the world in literature, art and film as a doomed hero, energetically fighting the forces of evil. Most historians believe that the prototype for Arthur was a warlord living in the ruins of post-Roman Britain, but few can today agree on precisely who that was.
Reading time: 4 minutes
More than 300,000 Australians visit Vietnam annually. With the ongoing growth of tourism, it is likely that tourists’ experiences at Cu Chi and other war-related sites in Vietnam will increasingly influence how we commemorate this conflict, and encourage Australians to see it from both sides of the frontline.
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Reading time: 6 minutes
Our views of war are sanitised today. In an age of professional armies trained for increasingly technical tasks, few of us have witnessed combat, much less taken part in it. In that vein, commemorations of the 200th anniversary of Waterloo will focus on the battle’s strategic significance. There are, though, individual accounts that give us a glimpse into what sword fights and cavalry charges must have been like – and the deadly consequences of defeat.
Reading time: 7 minutes
As we undertake our annual remembrance of Australians at war, some attention should be paid to those personnel who were taken captive by the enemy and then faced long years in brutal conditions. Enduring starvation, beatings, disease, death marches and forced labour in extreme climatic conditions, many of them died from casual neglect, deliberate abuse and untreated medical conditions. And I’m not talking about prisoners of the Japanese in World War Two, but Australians taken captive by Ottoman forces during The Great War.
Reading time: 5 minutes
There are few geographical areas that have seen as much military action as the Gallipoli region, the site of the Anzac landings in 1915. The conflicts in the region include some of the most renowned wars from Greek antiquity.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Type “Holy Grail” into Google and … well, you probably don’t need me to finish that sentence. The sheer multiplicity of what any search engine throws up demonstrates that there is no clear consensus as to what the Grail is or was. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of people out there claiming to know its history, true meaning and even where to find it.
Reading time: 12 minutes
When a plan to overthrow English rule in Ireland was foiled in the 1860s, hundreds of Fenian rebels were arrested and convicted. A handful of those were condemned to transportation to Australia with no hope of pardon or of ever seeing their families again.
Reading time: 10 minutes
This article will make use of a particularly interesting case study of pit brow women in Lancashire, to explore the complexities and opportunities associated with archival work. The women’s lives can be revealed through analysis of documents from sources in the Copyright Office, and the Ministry of Power collections. By identifying strengths and weaknesses of records, they can be analysed with greater depth and nuance, so that they are used most effectively during an exploration of the past.
Reading time: 7 minutes
The world loves a good April Fools’ Day prank – from telling your schoolmates it’s non-uniform to assuring a coworker the boss has definitely given everyone the day off, April 1st is a day of big and small pranks all around the world.
While mostly celebrated in Western countries such as Northern Europe, America, and other English-speaking countries like the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, much of the world knows of and sometimes takes part in the light-hearted tradition of April Fools.
But where does it come from?
Reading time: 5 minutes
This has been cited as evidence that some people believed that lunar eclipses were caused by magicians or moon-hungry monsters. However, it is important to remember this comes from a source written by an educated churchman who may have exaggerated evidence of superstitious beliefs in order to then condemn them. Yet even if we allow for these beliefs, the range of ideas surrounding lunar eclipses in medieval Europe reveal it was not the dark age of superstition and ignorance it is often assumed to have been.
Reading time: 8 minutes
While very few exist today, the world’s history books are filled with hundreds of thousands of empires, ranging from a handful of islands to near-global domination.
A select few stand as the most infamous, such as the Roman Empire or the British Empire, yet many of history’s largest empires are less well-known. So, what were the world’s largest empires across history?
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Reading time: 6 minutes
The ships HMS Erebus and Terror, which sailed from England in the summer of 1845, were aiming to chart the north-west passage. They disappeared into what is now the Canadian Arctic. Stranded in the ice north-west of King William Island in the summer of 1846, the ships were abandoned by the surviving officers and men in the spring of 1848.
