History Matters

Anonymity can be a powerful shield. Tracing the culprit when it came to libellous letter-writing in the early 1900s was not straightforward

When it arrived on the Victorian stage, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre had a cast of new characters and a new social order.

What was there to fear from a medieval inquisition? For the inquisitors themselves, quite a lot.

A Black Jewish man arrived in Venice with stories of a lost Jewish kingdom that could save Europe’s Jews. Why was he believed? 

When a Victorian celebrity sportsman was found to be taking performance-enhancing drugs it caused a sensation, not a scandal.

Privatisation of Chile’s natural resources was a pillar of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.

Evelyn Cheesman travelled to Vanuatu and brought back a poison-tipped spear and a new understanding of the natural world.

Hollywood’s Cold War dissidents in Ireland.

A now commonplace device, Joseph Priestley’s timeline revolutionised how we view history. 

The anti-Russian poetry of Frances Browne, the ‘Blind Poetess of Ulster’.