HISTORY SCOTLAND AND THE HISTORY OF SCOTLAND A Retrospective

From the perspective of the early 2020s, the winter of 2001 feels like a different age. Tony Blair was in Number 10; Jack McConnell was entering Bute House at the head of a Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition; the first Harry Potter film was released in cinemas; and, of course, the world was reeling from the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the developing ‘War on Terror’. With all of this going on, people might have been forgiven for overlooking the emergence into the world of a new magazine dedicated to the history, heritage and archaeology of Scotland. For it was in the waning months of 2001 that History Scotland published its first issue.

History Scotland magazine

The only issue (subsequent volumes, each covering a calendar year, have all had six issues), this inaugural magazine, assembled under the editorship of Professor Richard Oram, offered the diverse range of articles that would become the title’s hallmark: a study of Richard Waitt’s portraiture; a discussion of prehistoric settlement on the west coast; analysis of Mary, Queen of Scots and the ‘casket sonnets’; archaeological reports regarding both a Cromwellian shipwreck and the battlefield of Rullion Green; an exploration of the Aberdeen typhoid outbreak of 1964; and the tale of a stalker in Georgian Edinburgh. The first issue of also contained the news items and book reviews that would likewise become integral to the magazine.