‘The Stab in the Back’ – Myth or Reality
/ snipview.com After the Normandy Invasion of 1944, the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, and during the last few months of the Third Reich, with Russian and Allied armies closing on Berlin, Hitler [...]
20th century Chinese warlords
/ history.cultural-china.com These provincial military self-appointed rulers were one of the collateral results of the Taipan Revolt (q.v.). Their power base was a private army, which each lord raised and maintained. Government of [...]
The Taiping Revolt
/ mason.gmu.edu This uprising, which started in 1850 and ended fourteen years later, was the greatest peasant rebellion in China in the 19th century. The 18th had seen a rise in China’s population [...]
The 12 basic verb English tenses (with examples)
Present: I work = I work hard all day Past: I worked = I worked hard all last year. Future: I will work = I will work hard after I have finished my exams. Present [...]
1811: W.M. Thackeray is born
/ sk.wikipedia.org One year before the birth of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta. It was 1811, and William was the son of a prosperous official on the Board of [...]
1572: Ben Jonson is born
/ etc.usf.edu Jonson was born, a Londoner, a month after his father died, and nine years after the birth of Shakespeare. His mother re-married, to a bricklayer, for whom Ben became an apprentice [...]
1564: Shakespeare and Marlowe are born
Rupèrt Everett as Kit Marlowe in the film ‘Shakespeare in Love’ / moviestarspicture.com If Christopher Marlowe had not been killed in a tavern brawl at the age of twenty-nine, he might have equalled [...]
Revolutionary Lajos Kossuth
/ britannica.com One of the great Hungarian heroes, about whom much fact and fiction has been mixed, Kossuth was born in 1802. His family was poor but noble. He was part Slovak, part [...]
US President Monroe & his Doctrine
/ biography.com James Monroe was born in Virginia in 1758, and became the 5th President of the United States. He did not shine as a diplomat but he did manage to orchestrate the [...]
The wit of two conductors
Sir Thomas Beecham / dailymail.co.uk It is possible that many players in orchestras have heard very funny comments made to them during rehearsal, or even during the actual performance of an orchestral piece. [...]
The demise of the Church of England
Dr. Michael Ramsey A distinguished elderly gentleman on a professional foreign tour, lay on his hotel bed waiting for news of a cancelled flight. His press secretary found him there, hands clasped behind [...]
Four Sforzas
Carlo Sforza / en.wikipedia.org It would be hard to think what the history of Italy would have been without the Sforza family. We have already studied the Visconti, the Medici, the Este and [...]
The Girondins
Jacques Brissot / en.wikipedia.org In the General History blogsite many posts have appeared dealing with different aspects of the French Revolution; there will have been many references to Jacobins and Girondins, both being [...]
An error in author names
Our editor has noticed that on Wikipedia, one of the pieces on Winston Churchill originally appeared, with a new link, under the author name of JAMES DEAN instead of DEAN SWIFT. In case this error [...]
Errata in the printed version of General History
After the successful publication of three edited volumes of General History, we have discovered to our astonishment that errors abound! Prepositions and full stops have vanished. There are unwanted spaces between words. In Volume Three [...]
Fascism – a dreaded word
Fasci or Fasces / britannica.com Fasci, literally meaning ‘bundles’, and perhaps descending from the fasci of thin staves of wood carried by Roman officials as symbol of authority, were established in Sicilian towns [...]
William the ‘Sailor King’
/ paranormalx.yolasite.com William IV King of Great Britain and Ireland was born in the eighteenth century (1765) and died seventy-two years later. He was also King of Hanover from 1830 to 1837, because [...]
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