For over a hundred years until it closed in 1981, Henry Tate’s flagship sugar refinery at Love Lane dominated the Liverpool skyline – and was the beating heart of the local community. More than 10,000 workers passed through the doors of the factory during its lifetime, with some families counting four or even five generations […]
Review: Later Stuart Queens, 1660–1735
Linda Porter reviews a new and timely book about the later Stuart queens. This is an important and interesting collection of essays, she says — but how many will be able to afford to read it? Historia readers may be taken aback by a review of a book with the eye-watering price of more than […]
The Rooster by Sibel Roller
This poignant story begins when the author discovers a secret manuscript by her late father about his incarceration in Jasenovac, the notorious WWII concentration camp run by Croatian ultranationalists. Thus begins her painful journey into the realities of the terrifying secrets her father kept from his family during his lifetime. The Rooster: Discovering My Father’s […]
The 5th century: the fall of Rome, the birth of legends
What links the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the invasions of Attila the Hun and many Norse sagas? The first half of the 5th century, says Tim Hodkinson, a time of tumult when legends were born; stories which still inspire us 1,600 years later. It was a time of legends… Of […]
Secret Missions of the Suffragettes by Jennifer Godfrey
Over two evenings in March 1912, more than 250 women – old and young, rich and poor, strong and delicate – were arrested and charged with using hammers and stones to smash the windows of shops and offices across London. The youngest amongst them was 19-year-old teenager glass-breaker and Kent working maid, Ethel Violet Baldock, […]
Felo de Se: the gruesome punishment that led to me writing The Low Road
Katharine Quarmby’s investigation into the gruesome burial of a suicide victim — for felo de se — with links to her home town inspired her first novel, The Low Road. For Women’s History Month, she explains why this punishment fell disproportionately onto poor women, and what made her want to tell this story. On a […]
Those Absent on the Great Hungarian Plain by Jill Culiner
A Hungarian village on the Great Plain: a microcosm reflecting this country’s history from early tribal invasion to Soviet subordination to European Community membership. Here, peasants, herders, party girls, former Nazis and lapsed communists share gossip as well as love stories; and unscrupulous leaders, totalitarian or freely elected, decide behaviour. Like a fly in amber, […]
PT Barnum and the Circassian girl
It was a shock for RN Morris to discover that PT Barnum, the famous showman, was a people-trafficker. Yet the facts are well documented. For Historia Roger investigates Barnum’s attempt to buy a ‘beautiful Circassian girl’. One of the things I discovered while researching my novella, The Crimson Child, is that PT Barnum, the famous […]