Reading time: 7 minutes
Right now, it’s Bitcoin. But in the past we’ve had dotcom stocks, the 1929 crash, 19th-century railways and the South Sea Bubble of 1720. All these were compared by contemporaries to “tulip mania”, the Dutch financial craze for tulip bulbs in the 1630s. Bitcoin, according some sceptics, is “tulip mania 2.0”.
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.
See how your history knowledge stacks up!
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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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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1. What was the name of Francis Drake’s flagship on his Pacific expedition?
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