World Histories Sampler

NEW FROM THE MAKERS OF BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE

WorldHistories FRESH PERSPECTIVES ON OUR GLOBAL PAST

Has the tide of history turned against the west?

Donald Trump and the origins of populism

William Dalrymple on the Koh-i-Noor scandal “ALIENS ATTACK!” Japan’s American nightmare DEVILS AND DICTATORS The Beatles tour that shocked the world “ISTANBUL IS A CITY OF PROTEST” Bettany Hughes talks to Peter Frankopan “Man took a swipe at all living things” Witness to the Chernobyl disaster

INDIA’S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM

From WW2 to partition ISSUE 1 DEC 2016/JAN 2017 £6.99

Millions of Indian soldiers served during the Second World War, with almost 90,000 losing their lives. Yet as Yasmin Khan explains, the huge efforts of Indians toiling on the home front, and the extreme hardships they suffered, had an even more empire-shaking impact 2

ALAMY

Famine and freedom: how war ignited India

New possibilities Young women work in a busy textile mill in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1943. The war created opportunities as well as challenges for industrialists and women in Indian cities

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The Beatles and world politics

1966 and the three crises of the Beatles The famous pop band’s world tour should have been straightforward – but a mix of bad luck and naivety saw them offend audiences in three nations. Clifford Williamson looks at what the group’s misadventures reveal about the political and cultural complexities of an era of change

Happi arrival in Japan The Beatles leave the plane wearing traditional happi coats given to them by the airline.

Unfortunately their visit fell foul of cultural sensitivities, and political interests almost prevented their performances from going ahead

Building bridges in the US John Lennon’s remark that “we’re more popular than Jesus” enraged Christians in the US. The band, seen here at a press conference in Memphis, were forced to apologise and even considered cutting the tour short

Hasty exit from Manila

GETTY IMAGES/TOPFOTO

Paul McCartney at the airport, where the Beatles were intimidated on departure from the Philippines. The band left under a cloud after their failure to turn up for a party was seen as a snub to President Marcos and his wife, Imelda

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The year in pictures: 1905

As 1905 dawned,

the world was on the cusp of a new age. The machinery of the industrial revolution – made with iron and driven by coal and steam – was being transformed by a cluster of recent inventions: radio, the motor car, the aeroplane. At the same time, the Newtonian world of physics was about to be overturned by a young scientific genius, Albert Einstein, whose first thoughts about relativity would be published that year.

The overseas empires of European powers, which reached their greatest extent in the early 20th century, would be challenged by the rise of popular anti-colonialism and undermined by competition for the few remaining areas of the world, such as Morocco, not yet absorbed into the European sphere.

Rapid social change brought on by industrialisation and urbanisation prompted the growth of mass politics and social protest. This was the year of the first Russian revolution, paving the way for the rise of radical politics in Russia that eventually resulted in Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution a dozen years later.

The early years of the 20th century also witnessed a revolution in western culture, featuring the emergence of new forms of art, music and literature.

Vienna was the epicentre of this dizzy transformation, with Gustav Klimt among a handful of pioneers of the ‘new art’. Traditionalists deplored the change, but the style that became known as art nouveau matched the wider sense of fin de siècle provoked by fundamental political, social and scientific changes.

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Gems from the grime Workers toil at a ruby mine in Tachileik, far east Burma (today known as Myanmar). The British province was, and still is, the location of the world’s most abundant supply of rubies, mined by workers who, as in most areas of the empire early in the century, laboured in atrocious conditions for scant reward.

Golden girls of the ‘new art’ Austrian painter Gustav Klimt’s The Three Ages of Woman, completed in 1905, is one of the most famous examples of the ‘new art’ – art nouveau or Jugendstil – that took Vienna by storm in the early 20th century.

The Austrian capital was at the heart of a revolution in modern culture, in art, music, medicine and literature.

Einstein’s amazing year

AKG IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES

This photograph of theoretical physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was taken in 1905, around the time he shook the world of physics with the publication of his Special Theory of Relativity about the relationship between space and time. The theory made him a household name – though few people understood it.

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Culture

Books, exhibitions, films and more

THE CONVERSATION Bettany Hughes & Peter Frankopan

“Istanbul is a character in and of itself – almost bigger than its rulers” Historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes talks to fellow author Peter Frankopan about her new book Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities

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PORTRAITS BY FRAN MONKS WITH THANKS TO THE BRITISH ACADEMY

Bettany Hughes and Peter Frankopan discuss the history of Istanbul. “The open-mindedness of these civilisations, in all their iterations, explains why they lasted so long,” says Hughes

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