Social

Sydney: A Colonial Capital

Alan Birch visits mid-nineteenth century Sydney, a city formally incorporated in 1842 after fifty-four years of rapid and dramatic development.

The Small Gardens of Pompeii

Wilhelmina F. Jashemski visists the heart of the Pompeian house: the garden. While some gardens were splendid and spacious, others were crammed into minute courtyards “no larger than a professor's desk,” but rich with flowers and enclosed by painted walls.

The Saracens in the Alps

Robin Fedden takes us on a visit to snowy Alpine passes where, for three quarters of a century, at the end of the Dark Ages, Saracen forces dominated the chief land routes between Italy and France.

The Spice Account: From Eleanor de Montfort’s Household Rolls

The year 1265 marked the climax in the fortunes of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. Having defeated the forces of King Henry III during the previous summer, and captured his son and heir, Prince Edward, the Earl was the effective master of baronial England. But his dominance did not endure for long. In May, Prince Edward escaped from his guards and, on August 4th, he overwhelmed Montfort's army at the Battle of Evesham; the Earl himself was killed in the engagement. For six months of this period, the Montfort household rolls have survived. Originally compiled for his wife, the Princess Eleanor, sister of Henry III, they present a remarkably intimate picture of domestic and social life in a powerful thirteenth-century nobleman's family, writes Margaret Wade Labarge.

A Peasant on Helicon: a Study of Hesiod and his Society

Peter Green introduces Hesiod, a Boeotian farmer who, towards the end of the eighth century B.C., wrote his poem known as The Works and Days. His cantankerous, radical, earthy views present a remarkable contrast to the stylised grandeur of the contemporary Homeric vision of Greek society.

Parisian Life in the Sixteenth Century

Proud, turbulent, fiercely Catholic, the citizens of sixteenth-century Paris played an important part in French history. Here N.M. Sutherland depicts them at home against the background of their daily work and pleasures.

All Men are Created Equal: the American Experiment

J.R. Pole describes how the idea of equality, when applied to the new multi-racial, multi-lingual, multireligious America of vast industry and teeming cities, was destined to conflict with some of the deepest existing preconceptions about the fundamental character of American society.

Going to America

J.W. Blake describes how, during the colonial period, just over half a million emigrants—English, Scottish, Irish, French, German, Dutch, Swedish and Finnish—are calculated to have left Europe for a new home in America. Often they reached their goal only at the cost of hideous suffering.