Julkaisuseuranta
14.9.2021
I have referred for half my post to Chloe Govan’s paper on the controversial life of King Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson (1721–1764) was the daughter of a grotty mother and a penniless fraudster father who was forced to flee the country when she was 4, to avoid hanging for his debts. Jean…
10.9.2021
There were many famous bushrangers during the Gold Rush Australia eg Mad Dog Morgan (1830–65), Captain Moonlight (1842–80), Capt Thunderbolt (1835-70), Capt Midnight (1855-78), Ben Hall (1837-65) and Ned Kelly (1854–80). Many bushrangers were shot on site or hanged after court, for committing murder and theft. Their average life expectancy was only c33 years!Wanted poster…
How can an author frame the life of a paradoxical historical character, particularly one who has almost slipped out of Australian public consciousness? Author Gideon Haigh noted the issue in the first chapter of his book The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the Great Australian Experiment.Min of External Affairs and Attorney General Dr Evatt, with P.M…
To coincide with the British Library's exhibition Paddington: The Story of a Bear, we've put together a series of blog posts about a few other bears (fictional and real) from the collections. Our current Paddington Bear exhibition made me think of one of his forebears in British children’s literature, Mary...
6.8.2021
Hydra HarbourCharmian Clift (1923–69) was born & raised near Sydney while George Johnston (1912-70) was born & raised in Melbourne. They married in 1947 and soon were on the well-worn trek of young Australians to London. In 1951 Clift and Johnston left grey, post-war London for Greece. Settling first on the tiny island of Kalymnos…
Carl Fabergé (1846-1920) was born into a St Petersburg family that created jewellery. Young Carl, trained in Russia and Germany, was in the right place and the right time. When he took over the family business, he created a firm that became closely linked to the romance, glamour and tragedy of the Romanovs. Romanov Tercentenary Egg,made…
16.7.2021
Pieter Brueghel the YoungerPeasant Wedding Dance, 1623Private collection, WikiStrasbourg’s Dancing Plague of 1518 was not the first. Previous dancing plagues had involved people who were in towns and cities close to the River Rhine, along with the merchants, pilgrims and soldiers who plied its waters.A] In the 1020s in Bernburg in Saxony, a group of peasants started…
13.7.2021
Many thanks to "Rapid Relief by Rail", History of Medicine, 2021. Trains had already been used in the C19th and early C20th, in the Crimean War, American Civil War and Boer War. But railways weren’t fully utilised until the first truly industrial war, WW1.Even before WW1, the British government was secretly preparing for battle. By 1912…
2.7.2021
From the 1820s on, rapid development in NSW's Hunter region saw the growth of trade and commerce on the Hunter River. This development also increased the population in Morpeth, 37 ks north of Newcastle, a very busy port on the Hunter River. Morpeth was the stop-off point for settlers heading into the interior and the embarkation point…
25.6.2021
The difference between deserving & undeserving families in Britain was established in the Poor Law 1834. The deserving poor were hard workers who were struggling through no fault of their own. So they deserved state help. The undeserving poor were lazy and not trying hard enough to relieve their own hardship, so didn’t deserve help. Parliamentarians…
7.5.2021
Guest post by Laurentius Alvin Laurentis Alvin is a Master’s student at Bonn University in Germany (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität). They hold a BA in history of art and musicology. Their academic […]