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The Underground Railway - USA's bravest response to slavery
New York’s prosperity before the Civil War was closely tied to slavery and the Cotton South. But it was only in the southern states, where the economy was based on the plantation agriculture, that...
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Boston's Molasses Disaster of 1919: accident, negligence or Italian anarchists?
Thank you to History and Will. When the United States Industrial Alcohol Company/USIA decided to build a huge molasses tank, they put it smack in the middle of Boston’s North End, a community made up...
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Life & death in early English plagues; Covid is "just another" pandemic
The first confirmed outbreak of sweating disease arrived in England in 1485, towards the end of the Wars of the Roses (1455–87). This led to speculation that it may have been brought over from...
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Stella Tennant: friend or relative of famous Cavendish, Mitford, Kennedy,...
Stella Tennant was born (1970-2020) in London, the youngest of 3 children to the Hon Tobias Tennant, son of 2nd Baron Glenconner, and Lady Emma Cavendish. Tennant rose to fame in the 1990s while...
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7 UP: the best longitudinal TV series ever!
The Up series of documentary films followed the lives of 14 Britons since 1964, when they were 7 years old. The first film was titled 7 UP and the series has had 9 episodes, one every 7 years, spanning...
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Restoring beautiful, historically important synagogues in Izmir Turkey.
Bikur Cholim SynagogueThe Jerusalem Post reported that Izmir is Turkey’s third largest city with c4 million people. Izmir aka Smyrna is the principal seaport of Western Anatolia on the coast of the...
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sublime filigreed silver antique boxes from India or South East Asia
Found across S.E Asia, betel nuts were harvested from the Areca palm and were chewed for their stimulating properties. The local Dutch realised how important betel nuts were to the indigenous...
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Adolf Eichmann, Auschwitz death camp and artist Sidney Nolan
Few artists have captured Australian history as convincingly as Sidney Nolan (1917–92); his most iconic old works were synonymous with Australian modernism. Nolan was known as an artist who...
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A maritime mystery since 1872: the Mary Celeste
The 282-ton brigantine Amazon was built in 1861 in Nova Scotia Canada. In Nov 1872, and now called Mary Celeste, the ship sailed from New York Harbour en route to Genoa. It was a merchant ship with a...
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The wonderful decade of American flappers 1919-29
Lost Girls: The Invention of the Flapperwritten by Linda SimonPublished 2017Political, cultural and technological factors led to the rise of women’s independence and the flapper era. In WWI women...
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Angel of the North - UK's most impressive sculpture
It started in the early 1980s when Gateshead decided to take art to the public because it did not have its own contemporary art gallery. The early works were so successful that in 1986 a formal public...
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From Russia with love (or not) - Ayn Rand in the USA
In year 11, I read both Atlas Shrugged & The Fountainhead, and found them full of two revolting qualities: 1] selfish individualism and 2] destructive, laissez faire capitalism. Thus I am relying...
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Brilliant American author living & writing in Britain - Bill Bryson
Spouse and I lived in Britain in 1972 and 1973, and worked in a Herts hospital. American Bill Bryson (b1951) first visited Britain in 1973 and worked in a Surrey hospital. Bill married a local nurse...
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Phaidon Verlag Press' brilliant art publications: from Vienna to London and...
Phaidon Verlag was founded as a history and art-book publisher in Vienna in 1923 by Ludwig Goldscheider (1896–1973), Dr Béla Horovitz (1898–1955) and Frederick Ungar (1898-1988), all Jewish...
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French Impressionist art in Australia - thank you, Boston!
French Impressionism: From the Museum of Fine Arts Boston opens 4th June-3rd Oct 2021 at the National Gallery Victoria. The NGV will host 100+ works by Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste...
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Toronto's historical treasure: the Fairmont Royal York Hotel
The land where the Fairmont Royal York Hotel sits was already a historically important part of Toronto. A respected lake-boat captain, Thomas Dick, build four brick houses on the Ontario Terrace site...
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Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa, 1960 - a violent tragedy
From 1963-66 inclusive, my closest friends outside school were South African teens of my own age. Their brave parents had made the decision to leave the country of their birth, a beautiful land...
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Maxim Gorky - great Russian writer, constantly forced to move
My Childhood by Maxim Gorky, first published in 1913Aleksei Maximovich Peshkov/Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) was born in the Volga city of Nizhny Novgorod. His cabinet maker father died when Gorky was 4. And...
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Working labrador dogs, in Sydney and NSW courts
Labrador puppies ready to go into volunteers’ homesVictims Services began trialling Therapy Dogs in Manly Local Court in Sydney in April 2017, promoted by NSW Attorney General Mark Speakman. He...
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The world's happiest countries in 2021, covid-19 notwithstanding
Northern Europe: Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Switzerland, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, NorwayI have examined the World's Most Liveable Cities before, in 2016 and 2018, but now something different....
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