History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
Michael Faraday’s tour of Europe included a ‘picturesque’ multicultural event on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius.
In November 1813, Napoleon Bonaparte, smarting from his humiliating Retreat from Moscow, was waging war across Europe. This did not stop Sir Humphry Davy (who called him ‘the Corsican robber’) going to Paris to receive the Napoleon Prize, or young Michael Faraday from going with him, and afterwards they went on to the Kingdom of Naples, then under French control.
After a thousand years of uneasy cohabitation, Edward I decided that there was no place for Jews in his Kingdom.
Few countries can claim to have a clean record when it comes to the treatment of Jews, and England is no exception. Confined by law and custom to trade and money-lending, Jews were both indispensable to the economy and the target of suspicion and resentment, leading King Edward I to give an infamous order.
The more that pioneering engineer George Stephenson understood of the world around him, the more his sense of wonder grew.
Many Victorian scientists rebelled against the Church, at that time dominated by a colourless Calvinism that stifled wonder and mistrusted enthusiasm. But in private, many retained a powerful sense of the reality of God through wondering at his creation, as railway pioneer George Stephenson did.
With the aid of a slice of beef, a Perth puss takes feline scheming to a new level.
Charles Henry Ross and his wife Isabelle Émilie de Tessier, alias Marie Duval, were the co-creators of Ally Sloper, ‘hero’ of one of the earliest strip cartoons, and the first recurrent character. Charles also had a fund of anecdotes proving that cats are just as clever as “their much-vaunted rival, the dog”.
Richard Cobden saw Britain’s international standing in terms of peaceful trade rather than military interventions.
In 1855, Cobden urged Parliament to tone down its anti-Russian rhetoric, not out of any fondness for St Petersburg’s domestic or foreign policy but because British influence was better felt in industrial innovation and international trade than in annexing land, toppling governments or rattling the Russian bear’s cage.
Georgian Britain braced for war as relations with France in North America, India and mainland Europe took a turn for the worse.
The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) reached from French and British colonies in North America and India to states in modern-day Germany. It seemed glorious at the time for Britain, but it doubled the national debt, and measures to recover the costs triggered the American War of Independence.