Month: December 2017

From 1660 to 1669 the Naval administrator, Samuel Pepys, kept a diary that provides historians with an insight into Restoration London. Pepys was born on Fleet Street, London, in February…

In the late 1960s, student dissatisfaction was not solely confined to capitalist countries. Many students in Yugoslavia shared similar concerns with their fellows at universities in France, the United States,…

In the seventeenth century, an Elizabethan courtier called Sir William Gilbert proposed that the Earth acted like a giant magnet, prior to that accepted wisdom suggested that there was a…

Valerie Solanas was born in Ventnor City, New Jersey in 1936. Throughout Valerie’s childhood her father subjected her to sexual abuse, before divorcing her mother in the 1940s. Valerie moved…

In March 1968 the incumbent President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, declared that he would not be seeking the nomination of the Democratic Party in the upcoming presidential…

Before the pioneering balloon flights of Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne, the Montgolfier family of Vidalon, near Annanoy in south-eastern France, were best known as owners of a successful paper making business.…

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Denmark joined the Second League of Armed Neutrality, which had the aim of protecting neutral shipping from the British policy of searching all…

The industrialisation of Britain the nineteenth century brought many young men from their homes in the country to the towns and cities. Religious organisations provided a salve for the loneliness…

The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in Britain in 1660 did not mean an end to all of the policies of Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth, especially with regard to…

During the mid-morning of 8th June 1783, a Lutheran priest in southern Iceland called Jon Steingrimsson witnessed the first results of one of the most catastrophic volcanic eruptions in history:…