The little Ice Age
From about 1550 the climate again grew colder with the intensification of what is known as “The Little Ice Age”...
17/02/2014
MODERN HISTORY
Bear River massacre in 1863
Four miles north of Preston, Idaho, the Bear River quietly ambles through green valleys and sagebrush covered mountains, the Shoshone...
29/01/2014
Coffee-houses in 17th century England
Coffee was one of the fancy new comestibles introduced to England in Stuart times. The first coffee-house was opened in...
26/01/2014
Napoleon: Saint, Sinner or Both?
Seventy years ago, interned by the Germans in Buchenwald concentration camp, the Dutch professor Peter Geyl tried out on the...
13/01/2014
Reform in England, 1820-1850
The years immediately following the peace settlement of 1815 are known as the restoration era. However, it was impossible to...
13/12/2013
A survival manual for Georgian coutiers
The great drawing room, crammed full of courtiers, lies at the heart of the Georgian royal palace. Here the king...
03/11/2013
The coming of the French Revolution
Although it was the American revolution that set the French Revolution vibrating, no two countries could have been less alike...
06/09/2013
Robert Owen’s social experiment at New Lanark
One of the Scotland’s great social reformers was a Welshman, Robert Owen, born in 1771. He would have been saddened...
01/09/2013
The time of Maori
So far as we know, the original inhabitants of New Zealand were a dark-skinned race called Maoris, a people lithe...
08/08/2013
Sweet and incomparable Josephine
The love of Bonaparte’s life was an enchanting Creole – the term then used for all white West indians –...
02/08/2013