All About History

Following three days of popular, nonviolent demonstrations in the Philippines, President Ferdinand Marcos fled the country after two decades in power, ending his totalitarian rule. He was succeeded by Corazon Aquino, the first female president, who r

Some of the world’s earliest known use of tea service sets dates back to the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE), with the teapot apparently invented sometime around the Song Dynasty (960-1279). In Europe, they became popular following the arrival of tea

On 30 January 1649, as King Charles I was escorted through the Banqueting House to the scaffold outside, he walked under the magnificent ceiling painting by Peter Paul Rubens that he had commissioned 13 years earlier. A tribute to his father, King Ja

The daughter of a Scottish courtier and later a stepdaughter of James Maxwell, a gentleman of Charles’ bedchamber, Jane Whorwood was a faithful spy and close confidant of the king during the civil war. Unsurprisingly, there are barely any records of

Famous American stockbroker Gerald M Loeb once stated that, “The desire for gold is the most universal and deeply rooted commercial instinct of the human race.” Since the substance was first smelted by the ancient Egyptians around 3,600 BCE, this mos

There has been speculation about who chopped off the king’s head ever since Charles’ execution almost four centuries ago. The executioner and his assistant both wore face masks, fake hair and beards to conceal their identity from those present at the

Artist Edward Bower, whose main patrons were Parliamentarians, was commissioned to create this portrait of King Charles I. It is likely that he made drawings of the king inside Westminster Hall before producing several portraits in his studio. A symp

At a time of great social change in the 19th century, photography was quickly growing as a new art form. With the invention of daguerreotypes, it was increasingly cheap and accessible, and Douglass saw it as democratic medium that could serve the nee

Frederick Bailey was most likely born in February 1818 (although there are no records to prove the exact date) in his grandmother’s slave cabin in Talbot County, Maryland. He was probably mixed race: African, Native American and European, as it’s lik

“Drag for me has always been my superhero costume,” says Drag icon RuPaul in their book GuRu. Today Drag is an integral part of LGBTQ+ culture, providing humorous entertainment in bars, theatres and on television. But the history of Drag reveals it h

Few images of the ancient world evoke the destructive nature of humanity and how easily we can be lured into barbarism than the legendary destruction of the Library of Alexandria. We hear of an enormous collection of books, a mission to collect all t

Having pursued his enemy Pompey into Egypt and become embroiled in the dynastic civil war between Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIII, Caesar found himself trapped by the Egyptian fleet in Alexandria in 48 BCE. He set fire to the fleet, but the fi

We often think about the Middle Ages as a period when people stayed within the confines of their local town or area. Indeed, travel was much more challenging than it would become in the later Early Modern period. But that is not to say there was no t

FRANCE, 20 SEPTEMBER 1792 On 14 July 1789, Parisians fed up with the French monarchy’s obstruction of reforms had stormed the Bastille, the oppressive fortress of the monarch, King Louis XVI. It was the first outbreak of violence in what would become

Between 1750 and 1830, Britain underwent an unprecedented period of change that saw it move from an agricultural society to the modern industrial country we know today. This Industrial Revolution saw the British economy transformed by new materials s

A beautifully shot if sometimes meandering retelling of the Sutton Hoo discovery Certificate: 12 Director: Simon Stone Cast: Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes, Lily James Released: Out now Based on the book of the same name, The Dig is a retelling of the

Fact versus fiction on the silver screen Director: Regina King Starring: Kingsley Ben-Adir, Eli Goree, Aldis Hodge, Leslie Odom Jr Country: USA Released: 2021 01 The film depicts Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay), Sam Cooke, Jim Brown and Malcolm X on

Butter tea, also known as po cha, is considered to be the national drink of Tibet • 950ml water 120ml milk• 2 tbsp cow butter (or yak butter if you have it!)• 1 tbsp of loose leaf black tea or 2 tea bags• 2 tsp of salt • 300g pearl barley grains (or

Considered to be one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever made, the Library of Ashurbanipal is a collection of 30,000 clay tablets written in cuneiform from Mesopotamia. They were found together in northern Iraq in the 1840s in what

French General Charles Francois Dumouriez deploys his Army of the North on 16 September. It assembles in a semicircle with its back to the Argonne Forest to await reinforcements. General Francois Kellermann and the Marquis of Beurnonville arrive on 1

If history is written by the victors, can we trust that the villains were really as wicked as stories remember? I think we challenge this old adage of history with some regularity in All About History, but the case of Charles I and the English Civil

When Great Zimbabwe was unearthed in the late-19th century in what was soon to become Southern Rhodesia (also referred to as South Zambezia), neither the German explorers who discovered it nor many academics believed that Africans in the medieval per