When Virginia seceded in April 1861, departing Union defenders hastily destroyed the Gosport naval dockyard, and the ironclad USS Merrimack was left wrecked at the bottom of the harbour. The Confederates salvaged then restored her, and by March 1862, rechristened the CSS Virginia, she was ready for action. Sailing across... More
In the First Punic War (264–241 BCE), the Romans emerged victorious from a largely naval conflict. In 218 BCE the Carthaginian general Hannibal decided to take the war to Rome with an unprecedented overland invasion, which involved taking his troops, including cavalry and war elephants, across the Alps. The strategy... More
Harlem’s black population numbered about 10,000, concentrated in tenements around 130th Street, in a prevailingly Jewish and Italian neighbourhood. The property price crash of 1904-05 created a glut of housing in the area which black real estate entrepreneurs remedied by the mass supply of black tenants: by 1910, 10 per... More
The Japanese Hawaii Operation, which saw an unprovoked aerial attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor, marked the beginning of hostilities between the US and Japan. The attack was a pre-emptive strike aimed at disabling the US Pacific fleet so that Japan could carry out its territorial expansion... More
Before the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Helmand province was the epicentre of Afghan poppy cultivation, with 40,000 hectares being grown in 2000. In 2001 the Taliban, a hard-line Islamic movement that had emerged in the early 1990s in northern Pakistan in the wake of the withdrawal of Soviet... More
Captain Henry Hudson, an English explorer and navigator, was employed by the Dutch East India Company to sail the Northwest passage and find a faster route to the Orient. Once his boat, the Discovery, passed Greenland, its closeness to the magnetic Pole rendered its compass useless and Hudson ended up... More
Henry Hudson was born in around 1565 in England, possibly London. He became a sea captain and explorer employed by the Muscovy Company of London, Dutch East India Company, English East India Company among others. In 1607 and 1608 Hudson had made two voyages attempting to find the rumoured northern... More
Under the patronage of Mark Antony, then in control in Rome, Herod was appointed king of the Jews by the Roman Senate in 40 BCE, and set out to claim his kingdom from his rival, the usurper Antigonus. Until his dizzying elevation, Herod had been a provincial governor in Galilee,... More
After the Jacobite defeat at Culloden in 1746, the British government were determined to erase the culture of the Scottish Highlands. They banned the speaking of Gaelic, playing of the bagpipes, the wearing of tartan and gatherings in public places. These deprivations were cruelly compounded by the Highland Clearances, described... More
The summit of the Hill of Tara is ringed by oval Iron Age earthworks, known as the Fort of the Kings. Within the enclosure, the oldest construction is the Mound of the Hostages, a Neolithic passage-tomb dated to c. 3400 BCE. At some point, the portal stone of the tomb... More
The Bourbon dynasty in Spain tried, like the British Government of the time, to recoup some of the costs of its various military entanglements by rendering its colonies more profitable. The promotion of free trade made the colonies more self-sufficient, but the introduction of royal monopolies and increased taxes were... More
The Holiness movement traces its origins to notions of perfectionism within Methodism, which emerged during the early 19th century. It is focused on the ‘second work of grace’ (or ‘second blessing’), which refers to a personal experience of regeneration, in which the believer is cleansed of original sin. It flourished... More