History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
A rowdy but good-humoured crowd gathered in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to protest against electoral malpractice and Government cronyism.
As the Nineteenth Century opened, workers in England’s rapidly growing industrial centres were driving national prosperity. But they had few MPs to represent them, electoral malpractice was rife and most of them were not allowed to vote anyway. The feeling that Government was a hostile enemy from whom neither justice nor sympathy could be expected was only confirmed in August 1819.
Two years into America’s Civil War, cotton workers in Manchester defied current opinion among politicians and the press, and pledged their support to the Union.
Two years into the American Civil War (1861-65) many in England believed that economic self-interest may yet lie with the South. Nevertheless, the day before Lincoln’s historic declaration of emancipation on January 1st, 1863, cotton workers defied an urgent editorial in the Guardian and met at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall to approve a message of support for the Union.
In replying to a letter of support from Manchester’s cotton workers, US President Lincoln showed how deeply touched he had been.
Washington’s embargoes on cotton from the American South during the Civil War (1861-1865) hit the British cotton industry hard. Nonetheless, on New Year’s Eve, 1862, the day before the historic Emancipation Proclamation took effect, workers defied scare-mongering politicians and journalists to gather in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, and pledge their support to Abraham Lincoln. On January 19th, he replied.
On July 4th, 1776, a group of American colonists gathered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to present delegates of the Thirteen Colonies with a historic document.
At a meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 4th, 1776, Thomas Jefferson and four colleagues presented to the Second Continental Congress a document setting out why the Thirteen American Colonies held themselves to be “absolved from all allegiance to the British crown”. It marked the birth of the United States of America, grudgingly recognised by King George III in 1783.
The day after the Great Fire of London finally burned itself out, John Evelyn walked through the charred streets.
In 1665, an epidemic of plague claimed some 70,000 lives in London alone. Then on September 2nd, 1666, fire broke out in Pudding Lane, and raged for five days. Casualties were low, but dozens of churches and civic buildings were destroyed, and over 13,000 houses went up in flames leaving some 80,000 Londoners homeless. On the 7th, John Evelyn went wandering among the ashes.
Sir Henry Craik had heard such glowing reports of Agra’s Taj Mahal, that he was afraid it might prove to be an anticlimax.
In 1907, Sir Henry Craik MP went on a tour of India. That December, he made his way south from New Delhi to Agra, where he marvelled at the sixteenth-century fort and the Pearl Mosque of Shah Jahan (r. 1628-58) before following the River Yamuna for a mile or so towards Shah Jahan’s legendary monument to his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Would it be all that report had made it?