History Today back issues from April 2008:
Editor's letter.(racial issues and minorities)(Editorial)
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] How should a society acknowledge the history of minority communities within its borders, particularly minorities that have suffered at the hands of the majority? The issue has been in the news recently, as the new Australian prime minister has made a high ...
Mao and Kissinger.(Mao Zedong and Henry Kissinger)
Apr 01, 2008 ... Mao Zedong offered to send ten million Chinese women to America in 1973, according to newly released transcripts of talks with Henry Kissinger. Papers detailing the discussions in Beijing have been made available by the US State Department. US National Security Adviser Kissinger and the ...
Who killed King Charles?(investigation of King Charles XII's death)(Brief article)
Apr 01, 2008 ... Scientists in Sweden hope to exhume the body of King Charles XII to determine if he was killed by one of his own soldiers in 1718. Researchers from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm applied in January to study the remains in the ...
Auschwitz visit?(educational travel in Poland's concentration camp)(Brief article)
Apr 01, 2008 ... Every sixth form and college in England will have the opportunity to send two pupils on a visit to Auschwitz. Two-thirds of the fund of the daylong trips to the Nazi concentration camp in Poland will be paid for by the government while the schools would contribute 100 [pounds sterling] ....
Tolkien auction?(of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit )(Brief article)
Apr 01, 2008 ... The 1937 first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit is to be auctioned in London with an estimated value of 30,000 [pounds sterling]. The Bonhams sale in London on March 18th includes the first foreign language edition of the book, translated into ...
Great Escape veteran.(Bertram James )(Brief article)
Apr 01, 2008 ... The funeral has taken place of Sqn Ldr Bertram 'Jimmy' James, a survivor from the 'Great Escape' of Allied prisoners-of-war from Stalag Luft III in the Second World War. James died on January 18th, aged 92. He was among 76 PoWs who tunnelled out of the camp in Silesia on March 24th, 1944, ...
Do you know a heritage hero?(nominations for volunteers)(Brief article)
Apr 01, 2008 ... Volunteers in the UK heritage sector will be rewarded by the Nationwide Building Society and Heritage Lottery Fund, who are seeking nominations from the public for people or groups who have given their time voluntarily to conservation projects across Britain. Nominations for the Nationwide ...
Gandhi's ashes.(Mahatma Gandhi's sixtieth death anniversary )(Brief article)
Apr 01, 2008 ... Mahatma Gandhi's ashes have been scattered at sea on the sixtieth anniversary of his death. His great-granddaughter, Nilamben Parikh, was at the ceremony off the coast of Mumbai with ten other relatives of the Indian ...
Lego anniversary.(LEGO A/S)(Brief article)
Apr 01, 2008 ... Danish toy manufacturer Lego celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in January by featuring in the Google logo. The brick design was patented on January 28th, 1958. The concept was started in the 1930s by carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen who began ...
Apology for the stolen generation.(Kevin Rudd's speech on the Aboriginal population )(Brief article)
Apr 01, 2008 ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Australian Prime Minister apologized for the 'past mistreatment' of the Aboriginal population throughout the country's history. Recently elected Kevin Rudd made the speech in debates on the first Act of Parliament, passed unanimously by MPs on ...
CND: the story of a peace movement: Sue Donnelly introduces the archives of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 50 years old this spring, and a project make them accessible to a wider audience.
Apr 01, 2008; ... We shall seek to persuade British People that Britain must: a) Renounce unconditionally the use or production of nuclear weapons and refuse to allow their use by others in her defence. b) Use her utmost endeavour to bring about negotiations at all levels for agreement ...
Liverpool through the lens: Charlotte Crow tells how a remarkable photographer will be celebrated in two exhibitions organized by the National Trust during Liverpool's European Capital of Culture year.(Edward Fitzmaurice Chambre Hardman)
Apr 01, 2008; ... In 1979 an elderly man living on his own came to the attention of Liverpool social services after suffering a fall. Since his wife had died nine years earlier he had become a practical recluse and was now finding it increasingly difficult to move about his Georgian townhouse close to ...
Sir Howard Colvin: Geoffrey Tyack remembers the renowned architectural historian who died on December 27th, 2007.(In memoriam)
Apr 01, 2008; ... Sir Howard Colvin was the last survivor of a triumvirate who dominated English architectural history during the second half of the twentieth century. Together with Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and Sir John Summerson, he rescued the subject from amateurs and dilettantes, gave it academic ...
London's Olympics, 1908: Stephen Halliday recalls the first occasion on which the Olympic movement visited Britain.
Apr 01, 2008; ... The London Olympics of 1908 should have been the Rome Olympics. The decision to award the fourth Olympics to Rome was taken in the belief that its fame and accessibility would encourage competitors to attend from all over the world, attendance at the St Louis Olympics of 1904 having been ...
The Polytechnic Harriers and the Olympics.(Brief article)
Apr 01, 2008 ... In 1908, when the Olympic Games came to the White City Stadium, the opening and closing ceremonies and the Marathon race were all organized by the Regent Street Polytechnic. This institution had been created by the vision of Quintin Hogg (1845-1903), a man who believed in the education of ...
A Century of Olympic posters.(exhibition of Olympic posters)(Brief article)
Apr 01, 2008 ... May 17th--September 7th, 2008 V&A Museum of Childhood, Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9PA. Telephone: 020 8983 5200 www.museumofchildhood.org.uk Historic posters showing how past Olympics have been represented feature in ...
Round & about: April 2008.(art exhibitions)(Calendar)
Apr 01, 2008 ... Life and Death of a Kingdom: East Anglia 500 to 869 AD Until November 2nd Tranmer House, Sutton Hoo Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DJ Telephone: 01394 389700 The National Trust has joined forces with the British Museum and the Norwich ...
Quebec at four hundred: Patricia Cleveland-Peck visits the capital of French Canada which is celebrating its 400th birthday this year.
Apr 01, 2008; ... Quebec City is 400 years old in 2008 and is holding a birthday party which cannot fail to interest the history-lover. Hundreds of events are scheduled: tours, plays, concerts and exhibitions--including 'Passagers/ Passengers' which traces some of the five million people, Amerindian, ...
The Death of the Dream.(MONTHS PAST)(Martin Luther King)
Apr 01, 2008; ... April 4th, 1968 In a country with a history of great oratory Martin Luther King stands high. His spellbinding 'I Have a Dream' speech to a huge crowd in Washington DC in 1963 was admired all over the world. He had first come to public attention as an inspiring leader during the ...
Queen of Scots, Dauphine of France.(MONTHS PAST)(Brief biography)
Apr 01, 2008; ... April 24th, 1558 Mary became Queen of Scots when she was less than a week old, on the death of her father, James in December 1542. Crowned at nine months, she was in the charge first of the Earl of Arran and then of her redoubtable mother, Mary of Guise, who was from one of the ...
Good ship Lollipop is launched.(MONTHS PAST)(from Bright Eyes, Shirley Temple performs what was to become her signature song)(Brief article)
Apr 01, 2008; ... April 23rd, 1928 Shirley Temple, the pretty little moppet who charmed her way into the sentimental hearts of 1930s filmgoers was born to a comfortably-off family in Santa Monica, California, handy for the Hollywood studios. Her father George worked in a bank. He and his ...
The case for conscription.
Apr 01, 2008; ... Many who supported the campaign for compulsory military service in Edwardian Britain saw it as a necessary measure against the threat of invasion and the shadow of German militarism. Others identified it as a valuable counter to 'softness, indiscipline and unmanliness' in young men of the ...
Which way Cuba? As Fidel Castro finally hands over the reins of power after forty-nine years, Michael Simmons finds his country poised between past and future.(HISTORY BEHIND THE NEWS)
Apr 01, 2008; ... Since I was frequently in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the last two decades of the Cold War, a recent visit to Cuba brought uncanny reminders of that other multi-nation community. There were the routine queues outside what might or might not have been small department stores, or ...
That magnificent man in his flying machine: Richard Stoneman investigates the strange but widely held belief in the Middle Ages, that Alexander the Great had conquered more than the land, taking to the air and travelled to the ocean depths.
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) is one of the most famous names of antiquity In just twelve years he created by conquest the largest empire the world had yet seen, stretching from Macedon in the west to the River Indus in the east, and to Egypt and ...
Bad blood: Powell, Heath and the Tory party: forty years after Enoch Powell was sacked from the shadow cabinet by Conservative leader Ted Heath for his 'Rivers of Blood' speech, Robert Pearce investigates the fierce rivalry of two very different Conservatives.
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In April 1968 Tory leader of the opposition Edward Heath sacked his shadow defence secretary Enoch Powell after the most memorable and infamous speech of the second half of the twentieth century. Powell, vaunted by friends and foes alike as the soul of ...
Foreign tastes: continental chefs dominated London's restaurant world in the nineteenth century.(HISTORY BEHIND THE NEWS)
Apr 01, 2008; ... Today no high street in London is without its restaurants and takeaways selling food from all around the world--China, Thailand, South Asia as well as southern Europe and the Middle East, Mexico and South America. While such establishments have proliferated in recent decades, the origins ...
Polite accomplishments: Anthony Fletcher delves into the diaries of teenage girls in the Georgian and Victorian eras to explore the little-changing constraints, punishments and occasional delights of being brought up a girl in upper-class Britain before the Great War.
Apr 01, 2008; ... Many of the novels that appeared in Britain between the years 1814 and 1865, featured a governess. The best known fictional governesses are Becky Sharp, in William Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847), who rose in Regency society through her own energetic and amoral efforts, and Charlotte ...
Reds under the bed: international alarm over the terrorist threat is not new. Anthony Read relates how the appearance of Bolshevism created a state of near hysteria throughout the western world.(HISTORY BEHIND THE NEWS)
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] At 10.45 pm on December 30th, 1918, a bomb exploded at the home of Ernest T. Trigg, President of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce. Ten minutes later another went off at the apartment of Acting Superintendent of Police Captain William B. Mills, throwing ...
Violence and the law in medieval England: how dangerous was life in the Middle Ages? Sean McGlynn gets to grips with the level of violent crime, and the sometimes cruel justice meted out to offenders.
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The medieval world has an understandable reputation for brutality. In 2002, during the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the war crimes tribunal at The Hague, the chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, accused the Butcher of the Balkans of 'medieval savagery'. A ...
Going Ape over Darwin: Mark Bryant on cartoons of the man who shook Victorian society to the core.(CARTOON TIMES)(Charles Darwin)
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Charles Darwin was a gift to Victorian cartoonists and caricaturists, both in Britain and overseas. His bushy eyebrows, bald head, deep-set eyes, short nose and long beard made him look like some ancient species of monkey, a perfect target for those who ...
Gladstone: God and Politics.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Gladstone: God and Politics Richard Shannon Hambledon Continuum 550 pp 80 [pounds sterling] ISBN 1 847 25202 8 Richard Shannon has made a distinguished contribution to the study of Victorian politics and of ...
The Monopoly of Violence: Why Europeans Hate Going to War.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Monopoly of Violence Why Europeans Hate Going to War James J. Sheehan Faber & Faber 304 pp 25 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 571 22085 1 This is a history of twentieth-century Europe with two ...
Warsaw 1920: Lenin's Failed Conquest of Europe.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008; ... Warsaw 1920 Lenin's Failed Conquest of Europe Adam Zamoyski Harper Press 224pp 14.99 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 007 22552 0 Unlike Australia, Poland has never been called 'the lucky country' and understandably so. Devoid of defensible ...
Contesting the German Empire.(Contesting the German Empire, 1871-1918)(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Contesting the German Empire, 1871-1918 Matthew Jefferies Blackwell 242pp 19.99 [pounds sterling] ISBN I 405 12997 2 At least in the perception of a wider public, the second German Empire has always been ...
The Forbidden City.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Forbidden City Wonders of the World Geremie R. Barme Profile Books 224pp 15.99 [pounds sterling] ISBN 1 846 68011 5 Chinese politics and Chinese buildings are equally difficult to present to the ...
In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century.(Brief article)(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century Geert Mak Vintage 864pp 9.99 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 099 51673 6 Dutch journalist Mak offers a sprawling and anecdotal journey through sixty-six sites at which history was made ...
Decency and Disorder.(Brief article)(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Decency and Disorder The Age of Cant 1789-1837 Ben Wilson Faber 502pp 12.99 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 571 22469 2 This flamboyant and confident history of the plain-speaking and boisterous world of the Prince Regent and Byron by a ...
Inquisition The Reign of Fear.(Brief article)(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Inquisition The Reign of Fear Toby Green Pan Macmillan 450pp 8.99 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 330 44335 7 The Spanish Inquisition is a by-word for the public control of spiritual life through institutional persecution that induced ...
No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War.(Brief article)(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War Helen Rappaport Aurum Press 270pp 7.99 [pounds sterling] ISBN I 845 133146 Helen Rappaport, who recently discovered the only-known portrait of Jamaican nurse Mary ...
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin Atlantic Books 736pp 25 [pounds sterling] ISBN 1 843 54704 X The story of Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist, is one of ...
Royal lookalike.(Letter to the editor)
Apr 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Marc Morris, in 'Edward I: Best of Kings, Worst of Kings?' (March 2008) comments, 'Small wonder that that no one has been tempted to erect any new statues of Edward I in the past century.' On July 3rd, 2007, a new statue of Edward I was ...
Hair raising.(Letter to the editor)
Apr 01, 2008; ... 'History As it Happens', March 2008: 'a lock of hair from Catherine Parr, the only wife of Henry VIII to survive him ...' Henry died on 28th January 1547, and ...
England and Britain.(Letter to the editor)
Apr 01, 2008; ... Is it 'cos I'm Welsh that I'm not convinced by Alan MacColl ('England and Britain', March 2008)? He refers to Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, of which he says that it allowed the English and the Welsh to claim his narrative as the foundation of their national ...
Norway's gold.(Letter to the editor)
Apr 01, 2008; ... I was interested to read Janet Voke's 'Snow Treasures' (February 2008), recounting the high adventure tale of the extracting of Norway's gold reserves from under the noses of the Nazis in April 1940. I am completing a history of Halifax during the Second World War when the ...
Spaces in the past: Martin Evans talks to Helen Dunmore, whose historical novels range from the worst horrors of twentieth-century, warfare to the luxurious world of late Republican Rome.(POINT OF DEPARTURE)
Apr 01, 2008; ... Helen Dunmore does not limit herself to one genre. She has an impressive reputation as a poet, children's novelist and short-story writer. Yet, she is perhaps most famous for her historical fiction such as Darkness at Zennor, about D.H. Lawrence and his German born wife Frieda living in ...