Blogs about History

Doodles in medieval manuscripts are often interpreted as idle and mindless scribbles. But is this an accurate assessment? Could doodles instead reveal a hitherto unexplored way that people in the Middle Ages interacted with their …

Welcome back to the (very) occasional newsletter Working On It. It has been 277 days since the last issue. Antisemitism, U.S.A. A couple of years ago, my colleague John Turner and I bounced around ideas …

Around 2 million people visit St Paul’s Cathedral every year and see its stunning nave, monuments to great figures from British history such as Nelson and Wellington, or possibly walk up to the dome. I …

Review: London: A History of 300 Years in 25 Buildings by Paul Knox. A guest post by London Historians Member Jane Parker. We often read the soundbites on a book jacket and, after buying it, …

One of the most famous hotels in the world, the Lanesborough on Hyde Park Corner was previously St George’s Hospital between 1733-1980. Hyde Park Corner was mostly fields right up un the late 18th century. …

I am migrating my website from WordPress.com to Micro.blog in order to simplify its maintenance, reduce costs, and streamline my online communication. Please pardon my many hiccups during this transition. The post Website Changes appeared …

In medieval England, land was conventionally held in return for either rent (in the form of money or other items) or service (acts performed by one party to the other). These items could range from …

A couple of weeks ago I said on social media that I would blog about the very earliest origin of the plagiarism accusations against Carla Rossi, so here it is.In several of her many attempts …

Happy 2024, everyone! I don’t know if there’s some symbolism behind this year’s J.C. Leyendecker New Year’s baby that I’m missing, or if it’s just a baby knight riding a mechanical horse and using a …

A few weeks ago, the database publisher Gale organised an online symposium on the archives of social movements called ‘Power to the People‘. I took part with a talk on online radical archives. You can …

Hi,I read this morning, with great interest, your Old Deptford History, very good, so much information. My reason for looking on your site was because I am starting a novel which begins in Deptford High …

Classroom interior circa 1910-1930 (Library of Congress) What will the world look like 50 years into the future? That was the question posed in 1930 to 25 faculty members at Long Island University, along with …

Source: Harry Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera (London: Elek Books, 1974), pp. 29-30 Text: So many of my highbrow associates think they can ‘meet the working man’. Malcolm Muggeridge, for instance, my revered and …

Sòrgono is a long village between the mountains of Barbagia in Sardinia. In fact, it is the gate of Barbagia. The narrow gauge railway from Cagliari – a former miner’s railway – also struggles up …

Our review of Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State, by Caroline Burt, first published in April 2024. Burtington takes us through the narrative of English history from 1199 and the …

While Friedrich Nietzsche popularised the notion of an “eternal return” — in which one’s life would occur again, forever, exactly as it did before — the concept was itself a repetition. Claire Hall explores various …

These early photographs, taken by Émile Béchard in Cairo, Egypt during the 1870s, present vivid portraits of local figures such as shopkeepers, street merchants, workes, and dancers. Béchard, active in Cairo from 1869 until 1880, …

Mathematics and literature ran on parallel tracks throughout much of my life. I fell in love with mathematics, or at least numbers, when I first entered primary school at the age four and I had …

There was a time when many Americans considered inexpensive French or Italian restaurants naturally bohemian – wild and crazy, not too clean, filled with oddball characters, and offering menus of unfamiliar and dubious dishes. But …

In the late 1990s, I was working at a job writing computer code. It was a nice job, and one of the perks was exposure to other tech-minded people. One day, a co-worker brought something …