Category Archives: History

Scents of history: study hopes to recreate smells of old Europe

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Researchers plan library of scents from plague repellents to early tobacco

From the pungent scent of a cigar to the gentle fragrance of roses, smells can transport us to days gone by. Now researchers are hoping to harness the pongs of the past to do just that.

Scientists, historians and experts in artificial intelligence across the UK and Europe have announced they are teaming up for a €2.8m project labelled “Odeuropa” to identify and even recreate the aromas that would have assailed noses between the 16th and early 20th centuries.

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Dark hair was common among Vikings, genetic study confirms

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Research reveals Vikings were genetically diverse group and not purely Scandinavian

They may have had a reputation for trade, braids and fearsome raids, but the Vikings were far from a single group of flaxen-haired, sea-faring Scandinavians.

A genetic study of Viking-age human remains has not only confirmed that Vikings from different parts of Scandinavia set sail for different parts of the world, but has revealed that dark hair was more common among Vikings than Danes today.

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Top public school accused of ‘toxic culture of racism’ among pupils

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Letter from Westminster alumni demands changes to teaching of black culture

More than 250 former pupils at Westminster School have signed a letter demanding that it combat the “toxic culture of racism within the student body”, promote the teaching of black culture and confront its links with the slave trade.

It is one of the first indications that Britain’s public school system is now coming under pressure to follow the example of many universities and examine how it tackles racial and colonial issues.

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Toppling Edward Colston’s statue is unlikely to be enough to stop public anger

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Few imperial icons, including Churchill, will escape the need to reappraise Britain’s past

The toppling of slaver Edward Colston’s statue has electrified a longer term – and already deeply polarised – debate among British historians and academics, with some celebrating a “moment of history” as others warned of dark consequences for society.

Inaction over figures such as Colston had bred anger that would be felt “all over Britain”, said Andrea Livesey, a historian specialising in the study of slavery and its legacies and who described the events in Bristol as “wholly justified”.

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Mary Tiffen obituary

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My colleague Mary Tiffen, the distinguished economic historian, who has died aged 88 from Covid-19, will best be remembered for the groundbreaking African drylands research she conducted from the 1970s to 2000, successfully demonstrating how much farmers’ own skills and capacity to innovate had been undervalued.

Her 1976 monograph on Northern Nigeria, The Enterprising Peasant, the work she led on Kenya in 1994 (More People Less Erosion) and the final comparative studies she undertook around 2000 comparing dryland areas of Kenya, Senegal, Nigeria and Niger, all focused on the ingenuity of the farmers who made a living from these difficult environments. Her research challenged, and continues to challenge, careless assumptions about the causes of desertification and appropriate policy responses.

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Bill Liddell obituary

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My husband, Bill Liddell, who has died aged 82, came from a mining area in Tyne and Wear, but became an expert on the history of somewhere much further south – Essex.

Having moved to the county in the early 1960s, he played an active part in the Essex Society for Archaeology and History and provided material for some of the many volumes of the encyclopedic Victoria County History of Essex book series. He also edited Essex and the Great Revolt of 1381, published in 1982 and, with me, wrote Imagined Land: Essex in Prose and Poetry (1996).

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Left to rot: the new global effort to preserve lost monuments

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From a railway run by children in Ljubljana to brutalist monuments in the Balkans, the Nonument Group maps abandoned 20th-century architecture

When he was 14, Ljubljana resident Janko Vrhunc spent every Sunday training to drive a steam locomotive. “We had to sign in, then check all the wagons, check the train, then talk to all the workers,” recalls Vrhunc, now 84. “I asked the train driver: is the fire strong enough? I asked the conductor: did we sell enough tickets to depart? Are the uniforms in order?”

After three months Vrhunc and about 20 other schoolchildren were deemed ready to run the small-gauge Pioneer Railway under adult supervision. “We moved the train from Ljubljana main station,” says Vrhunc. “The train driver stepped aside and let us do it. This is how … one of us fell under the wheels and lost a leg.”

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Public re-enactment to mark 200th anniversary of Peterloo massacre

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Free tickets issued on Thursday for 16 August event including 3,000 members of the public

More than 3,000 members of the public will play a part in marking the Peterloo massacre on the 200th anniversary of the bloody protest for parliamentary reform and political representation at St Peter’s Field in Manchester.

There will be no passive spectators at From the Crowd, an immersive experience which will weave together eyewitness accounts of those present at Peterloo in 1819 and the words of contemporary protesters and poets.

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China wants us to forget the horrors of Tiananmen as it rewrites its history | Louisa Lim and Ilaria Maria Sala

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The state is enforcing a collective amnesia about not only recent political events but those that happened thousands of years ago

Remembering the deaths of 4 June 1989 is no neutral task. It is a civic duty, a burden and an act of resistance in countering a state-level lie that risks spreading far beyond China’s borders.

On that day the Communist party sent tanks to clear protesters from Tiananmen Square in the centre of Beijing, killing hundreds of people, maybe more than a thousand. In the intervening years, China has systematically erased the evidence and memory of this violent suppression using its increasingly hi-tech apparatus of censorship and control.

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Archaeologists discover ‘exceptional’ site at Lake Titicaca

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Underwater haul of Tiwanaku ceremonial relics is unprecedented, say academics

An ancient ceremonial site described as exceptional has been discovered in the Andes by marine archaeologists, who recovered ritual offerings and the remains of slaughtered animals from a reef in the middle of Lake Titicaca.

The remarkable haul points to a history of highly charged ceremonies in which the elite of the region’s Tiwanaku state boated out to the reef and sacrificed young llamas, seemingly decorated for death, and made offerings of gold and exquisite stone miniatures to a ray-faced deity, as incense billowed from pottery pumas.

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A brief history of concrete: from 10,000BC to 3D printed houses

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The Romans used concrete in everything from bath houses to the Colosseum. Our modern concrete structures will never last as long

“Unlike the Pantheon … virtually all the concrete structures one sees today will eventually need to be replaced,” writes Robert Courland is his weighty tome Concrete Planet, “costing us trillions of dollars in the process.”

While there is some debate over when and where the first concrete was used – the Göbekli Tepe temple in modern-day Turkey was built using T-shaped pillars of carved limestone approximately 12,000 years ago, desert traders used early concrete to make underground water cisterns 8,000 years ago, and the ancient Egyptians used gypsum and lime to make mortars – there is little dispute that the first people to use concrete in the way we do today were the Romans.

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‘Redefine the skyline’: how Ho Chi Minh City is erasing its heritage

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The next 15 megacities #7: More than a third of the Vietnamese city’s historic buildings have been destroyed over the past 20 years. Can it learn from mistakes made by other fast-growing Asian cities before it is too late?

“People don’t realise what they’ve lost,” says Candy Nguyen as she peers through the locked gates of what was until recently the historic Ba Son shipyard. “Many don’t even know what was here before.”

Ho Chi Minh City’s oldest and most important maritime heritage site is hidden from the street by high blue hoardings peppered with slogans such as “Never still” and “Redefine the skylines”.

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The dark history of Santa’s city: how Rovaniemi rose from the ashes

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After the Finnish city was razed to the ground by the German army in the second world war, architect Alvar Aalto rebuilt it to a reindeer-shaped street grid. Then Santa came to town …

As soon as you land at Rovaniemi airport in Lapland you see a reindeer. Not a real one, admittedly, but somebody in a Rudolf suit cheerily greeting passengers who have just arrived. A couple of miles from “Santa’s official airport” lies Santa Claus Village, an amusement park complete with elves, real reindeers, huskies, shops and restaurants that draws more than 600,000 visitors a year to this isolated spot at the edge of the Arctic Circle.

There are reindeer everywhere in Rovaniemi: humans dressed as them at the airport, real ones pulling sleighs at Santa Claus Village and statues of them throughout the city centre.

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