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Related: HistoryStreet Names Old and New Street Signs. PearTree Street 1725 - reminder of the fruit trees once growing here! 1732 faded street sign when Meard Street was Meards Street Some street names were etched into the kerb Victorians The Victorian period in Britain was one of huge industrial and technological change, shocking divisions between rich and poor, sensational crimes, spectacular entertainments for the masses, and grand attempts to combat squalor and disease. Discover Victorian life through the posters, pamphlets, diaries, newspapers, political reports and illustrations that the 19th century left behind... Written by Liza Picard
Hypatia, Ancient Alexandria’s Great Female Scholar One day on the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, in the year 415 or 416, a mob of Christian zealots led by Peter the Lector accosted a woman’s carriage and dragged her from it and into a church, where they stripped her and beat her to death with roofing tiles. They then tore her body apart and burned it. Who was this woman and what was her crime? Hypatia was one of the last great thinkers of ancient Alexandria and one of the first women to study and teach mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. Though she is remembered more for her violent death, her dramatic life is a fascinating lens through which we may view the plight of science in an era of religious and sectarian conflict. Founded by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C., the city of Alexandria quickly grew into a center of culture and learning for the ancient world.
History in Focus: The Victorian Era (Introduction) Introduction This first issue of History in Focus looks at Victorian history and the resources available to study it. To find issues on other topics, go to our home page. In this issue: A New Generation’s Anger Resounds From a Packed Plaza in Paris All through March students and unions took to the streets to demonstrate. The protests spread to the provinces. The government quickly backed down, gutting its own plan. Photo “Our youth feel neglected by society,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls mused carefully in an interview with the newspaper Libération. “Nuit Debout is expressing this, in its own way.” Sex & Sexuality in the 19th century Wilhelm von Gloeden, 'Two Seated Sicilian Youths', about 1900. Museum no. 2815-1952. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London Male anxieties in relation to both physical and mental health in the Victorian era often seem to have concentrated on the supposedly baleful effects of masturbation, which was alleged to cause a wide range of physical and mental disorders, and on venereal diseases, especially syphilis.
Africans in India: Pictures that Speak of a Forgotten History An exhibition on Africans in India, highlighting the long history of African communities in India, opens on March 21 Sultan Muhammad Adil Shah of Bijapur and African courtiers, ca, 1640. Credit: The British Library Board India and Africa have a shared history that runs deeper than is often realised. Trade between the regions goes back centuries – 4th century CE Ethiopian (Aksumite) coins have been found in southern India. Victorians 1850 - 1901 The world's largest empire is governed from Whitehall. Our collections offer an invaluable insight into the politics of empire and the daily lives of its citizens. Our massive photographic holdings covering Britain and its colonies vividly bring the period to life. Topics Selling the Victorians Has advertising changed from Victorian times?
Story of cities #3: the birth of Baghdad was a landmark for world civilisation If Baghdad today is a byword for inner-city decay and violence on an unspeakable scale, its foundation 1,250 years ago was a glorious milestone in the history of urban design. More than that, it was a landmark for civilisation, the birth of a city that would quickly become the cultural lodestar of the world. Contrary to popular belief, Baghdad is old but not ancient. Founded in AD762 by the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur “The Victorious” as the new seat of his Islamic empire, in Mesopotamian terms it is more arriviste than grande dame – an upstart compared to Nineveh, Ur and Babylon (seventh, fourth and third millennium BC respectively). Baghdad is a mere baby, too, when compared with Uruk, another ancient Mesopotamian urban settlement, which lays claim to being one of the world’s earliest cities and which was, sometime around 3,200BC, the largest urban centre on earth with a population estimated at up to 80,000. Some think the Arabic title for Babylonia, al-Iraq, is derived from its name.
At the Circulating Library Begun in 2007, At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837-1901 offers a biographical and bibliography database of nineteenth-century British fiction. Currently, the database contains 10605 titles by 2658 authors (more statistics). The database is hosted by the Victorian Research Web, a major and free research resource for Victorian scholars. How to Use A Crisis of the Middle Ages? Deconstructing and Constructing European Identities in a Globalised World A Crisis of the Middle Ages? Deconstructing and Constructing European Identities in a Globalised World By Michael Borgolte Paper given at the University of Leeds as part of the The Making of Medieval History project (2012) Victorian London A-Z Street Index The third phase of our Victorian London Street Index is now complete and contains over 61,000 references. A note of caution for family and local history researchers. During the latter-half of the nineteenth century, Metropolitan London was rapidly being rebuilt. Slums were demolished and replaced with new houses and a lot of demolition of roads took place to make way for the railways. Without consulting contemporary maps, a named road may not always be exactly the same road throughout it's history.
Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire Help us sue the British government for torture. That was the request Caroline Elkins, a Harvard historian, received in 2008. The idea was both legally improbable and professionally risky. Improbable because the case, then being assembled by human rights lawyers in London, would attempt to hold Britain accountable for atrocities perpetrated 50 years earlier, in pre-independence Kenya. Risky because investigating those misdeeds had already earned Elkins heaps of abuse. Elkins had come to prominence in 2005 with a book that exhumed one of the nastiest chapters of British imperial history: the suppression of Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion.