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      Experience: I’m a full-time Henry VIII impersonator

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 10:00

    Some schoolkids are clearly nervous. One asked if I’d ever killed a child

    I’ve always been interested in the past. At school, I threw myself into history lessons. I turned one of my mum’s bedsheets into a toga so I could pretend to be a Roman, and spent holidays learning hieroglyphics long after lessons on ancient Egypt had finished.

    When I was eight, we did the Tudors at school, and my aunt took me to the Tower of London, not far from where I grew up in Thurrock, Essex. I was spellbound. Back home, I’d pore over my mum’s Encyclopaedia Britannica, try to copy Hans Holbein portraits, and watch documentaries about Henry VIII over and over. There was just something magical about the Tudors.

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      A historic revolt, a forgotten hero, an empty plinth: is there a right way to remember slavery?

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 3 days ago - 05:00 · 1 minute

    As the author of a book about a pivotal uprising in 18th-century Jamaica, Vincent Brown was enlisted in a campaign to make its leader a national hero. But when he arrived in Jamaica, he started to wonder what he had got himself into

    • Read more in this series: Cotton Capital

    ‘Let’s get something straight,” the politician told me, “we are now owning you.” Though this was meant as a warm welcome, hearing it from an eminent state official made me wonder what I had got myself into. Olivia Grange, Jamaica’s influential minister of culture, gender, entertainment and sport, looked me in the eyes: “You are Jamaican now, you are part of us.”

    I met Grange last April, on a hot day in Port Maria in St Mary parish on the northern coast of Jamaica. Both of us had come to the town to commemorate the second annual Chief Takyi Day . Grange had established the holiday in 2022, instigating the government’s proclamation that henceforth 8 April would honour Takyi, or Tacky, as he was generally called in English, the best-known leader of the largest uprising of enslaved Africans in the 18th-century British empire. I was invited to the event because I had written the first book about Tacky’s revolt.

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      Take a trip through gaming history with this charming GDC display

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 7 days ago - 20:08 · 1 minute

    SAN FRANCISCO—Trade shows like the Game Developers Conference and the (dearly departed) E3 are a great chance to see what's coming down the pike for the game industry. But they can also be a great place to celebrate gaming's history, as we've shown you with any number of on-site photo galleries in years past.

    The history display tucked away in a corner of this year's Game Developers Conference—the first one arranged by the Video Game History Foundation—was a little different. Rather than simply laying out a parcel of random collectibles, as past history-focused booths have, VGHF took a more curated approach, with mini-exhibits focused on specific topics like women in gaming, oddities of gaming music, and an entire case devoted to a little-known entry in a famous edutainment series .

    Then there was the central case, devoted to the idea that all sorts of ephemera—from design docs to photos to pre-release prototypes to newsletters to promotional items—were all an integral part of video game history. The organization is practically begging developers, journalists, and fan hoarders of all stripes not to throw out even items that seem like they have no value. After all, today's trash might be tomorrow's important historic relic.

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      James Sharpe obituary

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 15 March - 18:34

    Lecturer and social historian whose books on witchcraft transformed the study of the subject

    In the mid-1990s the historian James Sharpe, who has died aged 77, wrote Instruments of Darkness, a book on witch-hunting in England that reopened a field of research that had been in the doldrums for a generation after the Welsh historian Keith Thomas ’s brilliant Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). Published in 1996, Jim’s book helped to make the study of British witchcraft what it is today: one of the most lively areas of historical writing.

    Earlier historians had argued that whereas witch-hunting on the European continent was fantastical, dominated by beliefs about the devil, English witch-hunting was comparatively rational and down-to-earth, centred on beliefs about the practical harm that witches caused to people and animals. Jim showed that this was nonsense, and that English witch-hunting was also powered by fear of the devil and followed much the same pattern as many other European countries.

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      TV tonight: real-life Jacobean intrigue for fans of Mary & George

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 12 March - 06:20


    Bloody docu-drama Royal Kill List tells the vengeful tale of Charles II. Plus: the ever-loveable Mel Giedroyc hears more cringeworthy celebrity stories. Here’s what to watch tonight

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      TV tonight: Martin Compston and pal head to Scandinavia for a Norwegian Fling

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 23 February - 06:20


    The Line of Duty actor and Phil MacHugh go skiing and meet the country’s youngest MP. Plus: The Great Escape: The True Story. Here’s what to watch this evening

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      The Guardian view on celebrating working-class memory: a way of looking to the future | Editorial

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 21 February - 19:31

    Historic England’s Everyday Heritage programme can help foster a sense of local pride and empowerment

    For admirers of a venerable progressive tradition in academia, it is proving an uplifting start to the year. The idea of “ history from below ”, foregrounding the experience of groups grievously neglected by traditional studies, was most famously pioneered by the Marxist historian EP Thompson. In his The Making of the English Working Class , Thompson rescued industrial textile workers from what he described as the “enormous condescension of posterity”. In this, the month of his centenary, other neglected voices have come to the fore.

    In a fascinating new book entitled Remembering Peasants, the historian Patrick Joyce has performed a recuperative service on behalf of an often disdained culture – one that now has all but vanished in Europe. Prof Joyce has set out to rectify the record for the lost peasant generations who, historically, “do not generally speak, they are spoken to”. And in a very different way, a list of 56 new working-class heritage projects released on Wednesday by Historic England will facilitate the telling of some remarkable and little-known stories.

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      Darwin Online has virtually reassembled the naturalist’s personal library

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 20 February - 17:08 · 1 minute

    Oil painting by Victor Eustaphieff of Darwin in his study at Down House with one of his bookcases that made up his extensive personal library reflected in the mirror.

    Enlarge / Oil painting by Victor Eustaphieff of Charles Darwin in his study at Down House. One of the many bookcases that made up his extensive personal library is reflected in the mirror. (credit: State Darwin Museum, Moscow)

    Famed naturalist Charles Darwin amassed an impressive personal library over the course of his life, much of which was preserved and cataloged upon his death in 1882. But many other items were lost, including more ephemeral items like unbound volumes, pamphlets, journals, clippings, and so forth, often only vaguely referenced in Darwin's own records.

    For the last 18 years, the Darwin Online project has painstakingly scoured all manner of archival records to reassemble a complete catalog of Darwin's personal library virtually. The project released its complete 300-page online catalog—consisting of 7,400 titles across 13,000 volumes, with links to electronic copies of the works—to mark Darwin's 215th birthday on February 12.

    “This unprecedentedly detailed view of Darwin’s complete library allows one to appreciate more than ever that he was not an isolated figure working alone but an expert of his time building on the sophisticated science and studies and other knowledge of thousands of people," project leader John van Wyhe of the National University of Singapore said . "Indeed, the size and range of works in the library makes manifest the extraordinary extent of Darwin’s research into the work of others.”

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      Solar storms, ice cores and nuns’ teeth: inside the new science of history

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 20 February - 05:00 · 1 minute

    Advances in fields such as spectrometry and gene sequencing are unleashing torrents of new data about the ancient world – and could offer answers to questions we never even knew to ask

    Scythians did terrible things. Two-thousand five-hundred years ago, these warrior nomads, who lived in the grasslands of what is now southern Ukraine, enjoyed a truly ferocious reputation. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the Scythians drank the blood of their fallen enemies, took their heads back to their king and made trinkets out of their scalps. Sometimes, they draped whole human skins over their horses and used smaller pieces of human leather to make the quivers that held the deadly arrows for which they were famous.

    Readers have long doubted the truth of this story, as they did many of Herodotus’s more outlandish tales, gathered from all corners of the ancient world. (Not for nothing was the “father of history” also known as the “father of lies” in antiquity.) Recently, though, evidence has come to light that vindicates his account. In 2023, a team of scientists at the University of Copenhagen, led by Luise Ørsted Brandt , tested the composition of leather goods, including several quivers, recovered from Scythian tombs in Ukraine. By using a form of mass spectrometry, which let them read the “molecular barcode” of biological samples, the team found that while most of the Scythian leather came from sheep, goats, cows and horses, two of the quivers contained pieces of human skin. “Herodotus’s texts are sometimes questioned for their historical content, and some of the things he writes seem to be a little mythological, but in this case we could prove that he was right,” Brandt told me recently.

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