Modern History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Modern History’
An English sailor became the target of the first worldwide manhunt following an audacious act of piracy.
From 1688 to 1697, William III’s England and Louis XIV’s France were locked in the Nine Years’ War. Louis took the dispute to England’s colonies in North America, the Caribbean, and even India, but the French fleet was not the only peril upon the high seas.
A fierce Victorian rivalry sprang up between two football teams from the industrial heartlands of the North East.
Sunderland AFC is a team in the English Football League with a proud history, six times champions of the top flight and twice winners of the FA Cup. Their first trophy, Football League Champions, came in 1892, but in those days they were not the only league side from the busy industrial town on the Wear.
Ten British POWs in German-occupied Poland decide to help a young Jewish woman escape the SS and a death march to the sea.
As the Second World War came to an end in 1945, the Germans began emptying their concentration camps by ‘death marches’, gruelling, roundabout (dodging the Allied advance) journeys on foot to the Baltic shores, where the SS forced their captives into the sea and gunned them down. But one young woman escaped, with the help of ten British prisoners-of-war.
Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens took his wartime protest straight to the top.
In 1941, the Germans invaded Greece, plunging the country into a four-year nightmare of fear, persecution and famine. As elsewhere in Europe, Jews were targeted, but even in the midst of starvation and suspicion the Greeks hid them, found them food, and tried to frustrate the deportations to the camps of Germany and Poland.
A maths prodigy from Madras became so wrapped up in his sums that he forgot to pass his examinations.
In 1914, a young Indian mathematician with no formal qualifications came to England. Some thought his scribbled theorems were a pastiche of half-understood fragments, or even that he was a fraud, but others sensed they were gazing into the depths of one of the most mysterious mathematical minds they had known.
Adam Smith argued that the Bengal Famine of 1769 would have been much less of a tragedy under a free trade policy.
The Bengal Famine of 1769 was a humanitarian catastrophe and an ugly blot on Britain’s colonial record. Scottish economist Adam Smith, a severe critic of colonial greed and the East India Company, believed that it would have been no more than a manageable food-shortage had the Company pursued a policy of free trade.