Reading time: 5 minutes
The first Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea was prompted by the sinking of RMS Titanic. An attempt to establish basic rules became the most important international treaty about the safety of merchant ships and sea travel.
Reading time: 2 minutes
What happened to art in the great Age of Discovery when civilisations encountered each other for the first time? A look at the book Civilisations: First Contact / The Cult of Progress, by David Olusoga.
Reading time: 12 minutes
As famed as American commanders like Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur are today, one of the most important is the relatively little-known Joseph Stilwell.Â
He was one of its leading experts on a country that was to play a pivotal role in the history not just of the war, but of the 20th century: China.
Reading time: 11 minutes
From the moment it took power, the Nazis ruled over a German state possessed of two armies. One was the inheritor of the imperial lineage of the First World War, and the second was the Waffen-SS, which grew from a tiny band of Hitlerâs most hardened antisemites to a force of nearly a million men from over two dozen nations before its demise.
Reading time: 11 minutes
This is the first of a planned series of blogs charting the progress of the Royal Navy Captainsâ letters volunteer project. In it I make reference to letters which use terminology and refer to practices that may cause offence.
This project, scheduled for completion in 2024, involves cataloguing letters written by Royal Navy Captains to the Admiralty during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1793-1815). The National Archives holds these letters in 564 boxes in the record series ADM 1, archived by year and the initial letter of Captainsâ surnames.
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Reading time: 5 minutes
Prior to the Romans, Greece was the only part of Europe to have had toilets. But by the peak of the Roman Empire in the 3rd century AD, the Romans had introduced sanitation to much of their domain, stretching across western and southern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Their impressive technologies included large multi-seat public latrines, sewers, clean water in aqueducts, elegant public baths for washing, and laws that required towns to remove waste from the streets. But how effective were these measures in improving the health of the population?
Reading time: 9 minutes
Sir Thomas More was among the leading statesmen of the Tudor period and his legacy has long survived his execution for treason in 1535. He has been portrayed on screen, stage and in literature and in his own time was at forefront of the English humanist movement.
Reading time: 8 minutes
Prehistoric men hunted; prehistoric women gathered. At least this is the standard narrative written by and about men to the exclusion of women. The idea of âMan the Hunterâ runs deep within anthropology, convincing people that hunting made us human, only men did the hunting, and therefore evolutionary forces must only have acted upon men. Such depictions are found not only in media, but in museums and introductory anthropology textbooks, too.
Reading time: 5 minutes
The Australian Wars is a new three-part TV series directed and produced by Arrernte and Kalkadoon nations filmmaker Rachel Perkins. Perkins travels across vast territory to capture key aspects of a war that lasted more than 100 years, from the landing of the First Fleet in 1788 until the 1920s.
The series traces some of the key phases, sites and underlying features of frontier wars here on home soil.
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Reading time: 6 minutes
The railways, and the men and women who worked on them, made a significant and varied contribution during the First World War. Some railwaymen joined up to fight, and others helped to run the railways in France and Belgium, delivering men and supplies to the front line. One requirement considered early on in 1914 was the necessity of having to treat sick and wounded servicemen urgently, and the task of moving them away from the Front to hospitals and other places of recuperation.
Reading time: 7 minutes
A relatively unknown name in contemporary Britain, Sir Seretse Khama left an indelible mark on southern African politics. From 1966, he served four terms as the first president of newly independent Botswana. Under Khama, Botswana took immense economic and socio-political strides, leaving a multiracial, democratic, and prosperous nation behind him. He provided a real-world example of how racial equality could function in a part of the world that saw apartheid South Africa just beyond its southern border.Â
Reading time: 5 minutes
On the night of 1 November 1963, President Ngo Dinh Diem of the Republic of Vietnam (commonly known as South Vietnam), and his brother and chief political adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were assassinated during a coup executed by a military junta, acting with the knowledge and support of the United States.
Reading time: 4 minutes
On the one hand, history is one of the struggling liberal arts disciplines. When we look at undergraduate majors, history is in decline almost everywhere. Of course, there are exceptions. In The New Yorker, Eric Alterman examined the âdecline of historical thinkingâ as an example of inequality. People at the most prestigious universities still do study history. But the overall decline is significant enough that it may be irresponsible to send your best students to grad school. According to recent numbers, of the 1,799 new history PhDs between 2019 and 2021, only 175 found full-time work as faculty. This is beyond bleak.
Reading time: 5 minutes
The way historians have viewed the causes of WWI has changed in the hundred years since war broke out. This article explores the origins of the Great War.
How could the death of one man, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was assassinated on 28 June 1914, lead to the deaths of millions in a war of unprecedented scale and ferocity? This is the question at the heart of the debate on the origins of the First World War. Finding the answer to this question has exercised historians for 100 years.
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Reading time: 10 minutes
This is an appropriate time to reflect on what we have learned from 50 years of political argument and scholarly study about the war. How has a half-century of controversy, reflection and research affected presentations of the war for general audiences, such as the 18-hour documentary series The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick and the British historian Max Hastingsâs book Vietnam: An epic tragedy, 1945â1975?
Reading time: 5 minutes
The initiative in this lengthy, but intermittent war has tilted each way over the decades. In the 1980s, Armenia was the big winner, annexing the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and integrating the so-called Republic of Artsakh into Armenian territory.
Reading time: 5 minutes
When we think of the Romans, gift-giving, carol-singing and celebrating the birth of Christ donât immediately present themselves. Waging wars, general oppression and a never-ending desire to rule the world are more likely to spring to mind.
But various Christmas traditions come from ancient pagan festivities, including the Roman celebration of the Saturnalia.
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Reading time: 5 minutes
The actual reasons for celebrating Christmas at this particular time in the year have long been debated. Links have often been drawn to the winter solstice and the Roman festival of Saturnalia. Some people have also associated it with the supposed birthday of the god Sol Invictus, the âunconquered sunâ, since a fourth-century calendar describes both this and Christâs birth as taking place on December 25.
Reading time: 6 minutes
The Onna-Musha played an important role throughout Japan’s history. Yet, their stories are not well known.
Reading time: 9 minutes
In the wake of the rise of the Soviet Unionâs AK-47 and the USAâs litany of rifles during the Cold War, South Africa needed a modern automatic service rifle. After trialling several different guns, the South African government settled on the Belgian FN FAL battle rifle. As a result, the âRifle R1â was born – the bush gun of Southern Africa.