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Anniversaries

ANNIVERSARIES Helen Carr highlights events that took place in April in history 23 APRIL 1349 The prestigious Order of the Garter first gathers Edward III founds an elite club to celebrate war and encourage his nobles to fight in France Honi soi qui mal y pense” – “Shame on him who thinks evil of it”. […]

Welcome

APRIL 2023 In this issue… You only have to browse the TV schedules or the shelves of your local book shop to appreciate our enormous fascination with crime. Whether in fact or fiction, we can’t stop devouring tales of lawbreakers and those who seek to bring them to justice. And this is no new phenomenon: […]

Coming up on HistoryExtra.com

Coming up on HistoryExtra.com Here’s a selection of the exciting content that’s coming up on our website historyextra.com The only woman to rule China For more than 3,000 years, only one woman has ruled China in her own right. Samantha Morris explores how Wu Zetian broke away from the typical woman’s role and ruled through […]

The classic book

The classic book Shrabani Basu on an insightful look at the experiences of women in British India Women of the Raj by Margaret MacMillan (Thames & Hudson, 1988) We have seen them in black-and-white photographs of the time: women in starched gowns and broad-brimmed hats taking tea on manicured lawns, a liveried Indian servant inevitably […]

From fact to fiction

FROM FACT TO FICTION Deadly decor JM Varese on The Company, his Gothic thriller set in the colourful world of luxury Victorian wallpaper-making Your new novel, The Company, takes inspiration from a historical Victorian scandal involving the use of arsenic in fashionable wallpaper. What was the story? Scheele’s Green, a colour invented by the Swedish- […]

History news in brief

History news in brief Haul of rare medieval gold coins identified A dozen gold coins found as part of a hoard in 2019 have now been identified as rare “nobles” minted by Edward III. The cache, secreted in the wake of the Black Death and located by detectorists in Hambledon, Buckinghamshire, also included more than […]

This issue’s contributors

This issue’s contributors Alexander Wakelam “The debtors’ prison was an essential part of the Georgian economy. Its surprising effectiveness helped to ensure the wheels of commerce continued to spin, but it tore families apart and damaged lives across the social spectrum.”  Alexander considers why so many Georgians languished in debtors’ prisons GO THE ARTICLE Rosalind […]