History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘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.
George Stephenson was only too pleased to save the Government from its scientific advisers.
When a line from London to Newcastle was first planned in the 1840s, Brunel recommended an atmospheric railway, which pulls carriages along with vacuum tubes laid between the rails instead of locomotives. The decision lay with the Government’s chief engineer, Robert Stephenson, but his father George made sure the idea got no further than Robert’s outer office.
Fursey was a 7th-century Irish monk whose visions of the afterlife made a great impression on St Bede.
Shortly before Lent each year, the Church dedicates one Sunday to reflection on the Last Judgment. For the seventh-century monk Bede, the go-to authority on the matter was Fursey (?597-650), an Irish missionary to the Kingdom of the East Angles just a generation earlier, who had received several visions of the soul’s journey to heaven.
Oldham’s firebrand MP William Cobbett rips into the the City of London for blocking economic and political progress in India.
In 1813, the East India Company held a Government-sponsored monopoly over all trade between London and her colonies, but a history of scandals and mismanagement led to calls for free trade. The City of London objected strongly in a Commons debate in January 1813, and William Cobbett MP could hardly believe his ears.
Henry Mayhew, co-founder of ‘Punch’, tells two anecdotes about the Victorian cabbie.
‘London Characters’ was a tissue of light-hearted observations on everyday life in the capital written by Henry Mayhew, co-founder of the satirical magazine ‘Punch’. Mayhew made a career out of satisfying the middle classes’ curiosity about the working man, something the working man did not always appreciate.
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.