Canute was King of England, Denmark and Norway. There are various distinct ways of spelling his name, but he will always stay in the memory because of something he did which has either been misconstrued intentionally by historians and jesters, or properly interpreted, which I hope we will do here. (more…)
Jacob Fugger / redroom.com
Now before the bloodhounds of Google get hot about the collar and assume I am using a form of Anglo-Saxon four-letter-word in the plural, give me time to assure them I am talking about a German family of bankers. (more…)
The new SIS headquarters on the Embankment, London / en.wikipedia.org
Where dictators or democratically elected governments rule, they need organisations dedicated to the gathering and evaluation of information, mainly concerning the intentions of other states that may not have their best wishes at heart. These are the intelligence services, and they have been in active operation for much longer than many students think.
Some historians insist that it was Queen Elizabeth I, with her faithful Walsingham and his ring of spies, who was the first absolute ruler to insist on full intelligence gathering. This is patently untrue. (more…)
Roanake: what happened to the settlers? / sonofthesouth.net
In Albemarle Sound off the northern coast of North Carolina there is an island which was the first English colony in North America. This is Roanoke, where a small group of settlers financed by Sir Walter Raleigh had tried to establish themselves in 1585. The local natives had had other ideas, and the beleaguered settlers were ‘rescued’ by Francis Drake, who had been engaged in one of his buccaneering expeditions in the Caribbean. (more…)
As villeins or servants of a medieval lord serfs were not actually slaves, though many writers of historical novels would have them so. Peasants they were, and by no means free. They were there to work the land of the lord (from which comes the more modern expression ‘landlord’). Serfs represented the lowest possible level of society. (more…)
Dr. Beeching: not even Hitler could have done so much to change the face of Britain / mirror.co.uk
One of the greatest achievements of the Victorians took place in the home country, not abroad somewhere in the over-large Empire. A railway network second to none, not even the massive transcontinental railroads of the United States, sprang up linking every part of the United Kingdom. Just before the First War there were over 20,000 miles of railway in Britain.
As part of the great nationalization craze after the Second War under Clement Atlee, great names of railway companies vanished: GWR, LNER, LMS and other acronyms for rail companies were not to be heard again, though with the de-nationalisation at the end of the 20th century, old companies were revived under new names. (more…)
The Scottish island of Iona, where the real Macbeth is buried / southernhebrides.com
Macbeth is the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays and probably the work most associated with that playwright’s well-known sense of imagery. His vivid imagination is also shown hard at work. Hardly a detail in the play’s structure is historically correct, but as in the same writer’s Richard III it really does not matter as the play’s the thing, and though both works might have been composed by a sixteenth century Hollywood scriptwriter, they are towering monuments to the power of the imagination. (more…)
River Phoenix was one of the really tragic child stars /cainepatas.com
Since cinema started small children with the talent (and courage) to act in front of a camera team have been popular with cinemagoers. In the Twenties Mary Pickford charmed everyone by staying childlike as long as she could, and sometimes after. And before you could say “Action!” she had grown up and part-owned her own production company (United Artists). (more…)
Statistics tell us we seem to have the good fortune to be read by a respectable number of thousands of history students every month. We say Happy and Merry Christmas and the Best of new Years to our loyal watchers, and may we have many more of them! This history website is entirely free, and no-one gets paid – let us call it a ‘community service’. The idea is and was to provide accurate history B.C to A.D. in the briefest doses possible, with a few memorable dates, a sense of humour, and permanent acknowledgment to our dozens of sources, principally Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Shortly we hope to publish in hard-back book form an edited version of the three hundred-odd articles already posted on general-history.com
Very best wishes,
‘Dean’
Sir Gerald Templer / sahr.co.uk
Gerald Templer, a boy destined for military honours if ever there was one, was born in 1898. After joining up as a boy soldier he rose rapidly through the ranks to become a Field Marshal. He was a fighting soldier as opposed to a headquarters mapman, and commanded the 6th Armoured Division in World War II.
He was vice-chief of what used to be called the Imperial General Staff when there was still an Empire needing a general staff, and then he was made High Commissioner in Malaya (1952 – 54) during the high moments of the Malayan Emergency. (more…)