Category: Social and Cultural History

Revisiting the “Knickerbocker” Origin Story of Santa Claus

Revisiting the “Knickerbocker” Origin Story of Santa Claus

by | Dec 16, 2024 | | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
In December 1953, Dr. Charles W. Jones, a University of California professor hailed as one of the world’s foremost scholars on St. Nicholas of Myra, gave a speech to the New-York Historical Society that was published the following year in the society’s quarterly under the title “Knickerbocker Santa Claus.” The premise of Jones’ speech was that author Washington Irving invented Santa Claus in an 1809 satire, A History of New York, that was purportedly written by a completely fictional Dutch historian, Diedrich Knickerbocker. “Without Irving there would be no Santa Claus,” Jones wrote. “Santa Claus was a parasitic germ until the Knickerbocker History in 1809; after 1809 Santa Claus spread like a plague which has yet to reach its peak.”

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A History of Drinking with the World’s Oldest Pubs

A History of Drinking with the World’s Oldest Pubs

by | Dec 11, 2024 | | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
Alcohol is one of humanity’s oldest inventions.
Our earliest evidence of humans brewing and drinking alcohol comes from 8th Century BCE China – over 9,000 years ago.
Across the world, from China and India to Mesopotamia and Europe, we’ve brewed many different types of alcoholic drinks, and almost as old as the drinks are the places we drink in.
While most of the world has a long history of drinking establishments, Europe is the home of the pub, which comes from the Roman tradition of establishing tabernaes or wine shops everywhere they went.

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How Florence Nightingale David saved lives during the Blitz – with statistics

How Florence Nightingale David saved lives during the Blitz – with statistics

by | Dec 9, 2024 | , | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
In 1939, Florence Nightingale David was living in the village of Bledlow in Buckinghamshire, alongside a number of her female academic colleagues at University College London (UCL). This included Eileen Evans, a phonetics lecturer, Elizabeth Bigg-Wither, a lecturer in Italian, and Joyce Townsend, research assistant, secretary, and illustrator to the zoologist DMS Watson. Born in Herefordshire in 1909, David’s parents had been friends with the Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale, who she was named after. She would complete her degree in Mathematics at Bedford College for Women in 1931, and joined UCL as a research assistant in statistics, before completing her doctorate in 1938 and continued her work at the college until 1939.

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Allied Outpost: the History of Goodenough Island

Allied Outpost: the History of Goodenough Island

by | Dec 4, 2024 | , | 0

Reading time: 11 minutes
From the most ancient settlers, over 50,000 years ago, to battling empires in the 20th century, Goodenough Island has offered a vantage point over the Solomon Sea and an eastern gateway to the island of Papua. 
A peacefully settled island for much of its history, Goodenough was also the site of one of Australia’s earliest daring successes in the struggle against the Empire of Japan.

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The Worst Predictions Throughout History

The Worst Predictions Throughout History

by | Nov 27, 2024 | , | 0

Reading time: 9 minutes
It’s often said that predicting the future is like betting against God.

Despite this, humans have always loved to try and predict the future -whether it’s dismissing new technology or predicting the end of the world, throughout history there have been some interesting predictions made.

Some have been correct. Most have not.

And then there are those predictions that are so spectacularly wrong they make you laugh. Collating some of the worst predictions throughout history, here’s the most interesting, the most incorrect, and the most ironic.

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

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

by | Nov 20, 2024 | , | 0

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.

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

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

by | Nov 11, 2024 | , , | 0

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.

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

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

by | Nov 7, 2024 | , | 0

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.

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The Birth of Modern Iraq: A Historical Odyssey

The Birth of Modern Iraq: A Historical Odyssey

by | Oct 24, 2024 | , | 0

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?

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