Reading time: 5 minutes
Viking age Scandinavia as a hub for migration from all over Europe.
In a study published in Cell, we show this is exactly what happened. The Viking period (late 8th century to mid 11th century) was the catalyst for an exceptional inflow of people into Scandinavia. These movements were greater than for any other period we analysed.
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Reading time: 7 minutes
A major holy land for three of the world’s largest, most influential religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the area of the levant has long been hotly contested.
After several centuries of ownership and Christian domination under the Roman Empire and later the Byzantine Empire, the holy land of Jerusalem and the surrounding area fell into the hands of the Muslims in 969 AD under the Fatimids, and later the Seljuq Turks.
Reading time: 4 minutes
In 1663, Europeans called Australia ‘New Holland’, New Zealand was considered one land mass and Tasmania had only been sighted by Abel Tasman – it would be another hundred years before Europeans would set foot there.
1. In the years leading up to 1871 how many states were unified to become the modern country of Germany?
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1. The Battle of the Monitor and Merrimack was part of which conflict?
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Weekly 10 Question History Quiz.
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1. Which battle did King Harold II fight in the days prior to the Battle of Hastings?
Reading time: 5 minutes
In September 1941 the British press enthralled its readers with a story of naval heroism that the public, battered by German bombing and strict rationing, was crying out for: a tale of survival against the odds.
Reading time: 46 minutes
The French historian Ernest Renan described forgetting as “an essential factor in the creation of a nation”, since patriots do not want to remember the “deeds of violence” at the origin of all political formations. In the Australian context, a strange contradiction contributes to the ongoing amnesia about slavery and its consequences. From the very beginning, enslavement shaped white settlement in Australia – and so, too, did abolitionism. That paradox, a peculiar entwinement of two ostensibly antagonistic impulses, makes for a complicated narrative, one that cannot be grasped simply as a local version of the better-known American story.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Nomadic animal-herders from the Eurasian steppe mingled with Copper Age farmers in southeastern Europe centuries earlier than previously thought. In a new study published in Nature, we used ancient DNA to gain new insights into the spread of culture, technologies and ancestry at a crucial juncture in European history.
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Reading time: 6 minutes Holiday in Hawaii and one of the birds you’re most likely to encounter is...
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1. The ancient city of Salzburg was founded on which industry?
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1. What was the name of Francis Drake’s flagship on his Pacific expedition?
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ROME’S AUGUSTUS AND THE ALLURE OF THE STRONGMAN Reading time: 8 minutes The Roman emperor Augustus...
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1. The siege of Kohima was part of which conflict?
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Reading time: 8 minutes
On 23 August 1720 at the Council Chamber in Whitehall, the Privy Council issued an order to the commissioners of His Majesty’s Customs ‘to prevent the landing any goods, passengers, or seamen from on board any ships coming from the Mediterranean’. Diplomats and statesman had been in correspondence for weeks about the worrying state of affairs developing in the south of France. Writing to Secretary of State James Craggs, the diplomat Robert Sutton related ‘the melancholy news of a pestilential distemper being crept into Marseille by the infection of some bales of cotton brought from Sidon (in modern day Lebanon)’. Other letters reported that the seamen on the said voyage had died, with many others taken sick and transported to infirmaries. Four porters, who had opened the goods carried on the ship, died suddenly as the distemper spread from ship to shore killing as many as 24 people in one street. Quarters of the city were barred up and houses and their contents were burned. The plague had hit Marseille.
Reading time: 6 minutes
It was ‘the biggest currency black market in history’, a secret operation under the auspices of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Britain’s Second World War clandestine warfare organisation. This was Operation Remorse, a deeply imperial venture, dedicated to maintaining the commercial interests and prestige of the British Empire – sometimes acting in direct competition with its allies. Most significantly, it was a dramatic success. It returned over 15 times the money invested, a return totalling £77,741,758 at the time – about £2.5 billion today. It achieved this feat by smuggling valuable luxury items, trading wartime goods, and most profitably by manipulating exchange rates in illicit currency transactions on the Chinese Black Market. The money financed several British operations and organisations in China.
Who Discovered What When? Five hundred years of great scientific discoveries by David Ellyard: an absorbing and easy-to-read book about the growth of scientific ideas and knowledge since 1500.
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Weekly 10 Question History Quiz.
See how your history knowledge stacks up!
1. The ancient city of Salzburg was founded on which industry?