Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Who were King Henry VIII’s six wives and what happened to them?
April 29th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
During this lockdown when children cannot be at school. I’ve been doing online history lessons for two youngsters aged nine years old – one is granddaughter no 1 and the other the son of a good friend. We started with Victorian Britain and I did four sessions on this period. To keep things fresh, we’ve […]
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Happy St George’s Day – but he was not the character you might have thought
April 23rd, 2020 by Roger Darlington
There is nothing more English than St George, right? And today we celebrate him and all things English. St George might be hailed as a national hero, but he was actually born – in the 3rd century AD – more than 2,000 miles away in Cappadocia (modern day Turkey). He is thought to have died […]
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Political reform in Victorian Britain – and why democracy is always a work in progress
April 9th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I have now delivered three online lessons on Victorian history for two nine year old that I know as their parents endeavour to keep the kids occupied while schools are closed. This week, we covered the challenging issue of political reform. After all, there were key development in the Victorian era and it’s never too […]
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Ever heard of the Pilgrimage of Grace?
April 8th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Neither had I – until I read about it in “The Mirror And The Light”, the 900-page novel by Hilary Mantel which is sustaining me during the period of lockdown as a result of the coronaviris crisis. The so-called Pilgrimage was a northern rebellion against Henry VIII’s government in i536-1537, originally led by Robert Aske […]
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What were the five worst times and places to be alive in human history?
April 6th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Life is tough now. Everywhere in the world is threatened by the coronavirus. I don’t want in any way to understate the challenges we all face, but maybe we now have the time and motivation to recall that, in the course of human history, things have often been worse, much much worse. This video suggests […]
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The importance of rivers to the earliest civilisations
April 3rd, 2020 by Roger Darlington
During the lockdown period of this coronavirus crisis, I’m running online lessons in Victorian history for a couple of nine year olds. This week, we covered developments in transportation and industrialisation. For the transportation section, I suggested that the history of transport could be seen as having five stages: rivers & seas, roads, canals, railways […]
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Victoria and Albert – their names are everywhere
April 1st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
This coronavirus crisis has found me running online lessons in Victorian history for a couple of nine year olds. We’re using Skype to have a one-hour session each week and we’re finding it fun. Naturally we started with Queen Victoria herself who ruled Britain from 1837 to 1901, a record 37 years – until the […]
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Coronavirus (or Covid-19): where and who was patient zero?
March 13th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Whenever there is a global pandemic, it is natural to wonder how it all started. We still don’t know for sure where the Black Death of the mid 14th century originated although, in October 2010, medical geneticists suggested that all three of the great waves of the plague originated in China. Similarly there are different […]
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Coronavirus is not the first global pandemic and, by some accounts, today is the anniversary of the start of one of the very worst
March 11th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
It was called Spanish flu, but it did not start in Spain and we are still not sure where it originated. So-called Spanish flu was an influenza pandemic which ran from around January 1918 – December 1920. It was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic which was the first of the two involving the H1N1 virus, with the second […]
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What do you know about Paraguay and why is today a special one for that country?
March 1st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
One of the many reasons that I love foreign travel is that, having visited a country, I am more likely to pay attention to any news coming out of that nation. I only spent a short time in Paraguay but it was sufficient for me to pick up that today is a special one for […]
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