Modern History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Modern History’
Lord Byron could not have hoped for a better omen in his support for the oppressed people of Greece.
George Gordon Byron, one of the greatest of all English romantic poets, died in 1824, aged just 36, in Missolonghi, Greece. Yet he played a key part in liberating Greece from almost four hundred years of oppression by the Ottoman Empire.
The cruelty of the Ottoman Turks so shocked Europe that the tide of opinion turned against them.
In 1823, early in the Greeks’ desperate fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire, English poet Lord Byron brought welcome public attention to the town of Missolonghi near Corinth just after it had endured two draining sieges. Two years later, however, the Turks came a third time.
Armistice Day is the anniversary of the end of the First World War on the 11th of November, 1918.
Armistice Day is an annual commemoration of the end of the First World War in 1918. Public ceremonies are kept on the nearest Sunday, which is now renamed Remembrance Sunday in recognition of other conflicts.
The ruthless diamond magnate and Prime Minister of the Cape divided opinion in his own lifetime as he still does today.
Basil Williams sat on the board of inquiry into the infamous ‘Jameson Raid’ of 1895 that was instigated by Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) and helped to ignite the Boer Wars. He came to know Rhodes quite well, and just after the Great War published a biography of him in which he suggested ways for the reader to respond constructively to the challenge of Rhodes’s controversial life and vision.
General Gordon’s death was a sensation and a scandal in its day.
In 1884, General Charles Gordon was sent to the Sudan, then under British control, to deal with a revolt by Muhammad Ahmad, who claimed to be a figure of Islamic prophecy, the ‘Mahdi’. Gordon found himself cut off in Khartoum, and the events that followed forced Prime Minister William Gladstone to resign.