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The journey of the word crusade – from holy to oppressive … and back again

By Benjamin Weber Researcher in Medieval History, Stockholm University

The Battle of Hattin, 1187

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reta Thunberg is on a crusade to save the planet. Elizabeth Warren is on a crusade against Bernie Sanders. Parks in Yorkshire are on a crusade to save the endangered Turtle Dove. Search the word and you will get results from all areas of interest – from sports to politics and everything in between.

What this demonstrates is that the word crusade has many meanings, depending on how it is wielded. While it seems to pop up frequently for all manner of campaigns, strictly religious meanings still prevail.

The word “crusade” has become common in the vocabulary of extremists. Wars in the Middle East are labelled as such by Muslim fundamentalists in order to condemn them. While Christian far-right radicals often use it to describe the driving force behind their killings.

This kind of use is a reflection of modern views of the medieval “crusades” led by Western Christians to conquer Jerusalem from the 11th to the 13th century. Such perceptions have charged a single word with so many, and often contrary, ideological meanings. However, using the term this way is not a new phenomenon.

Historical research demonstrates that since its appearance in the middle ages the word crusade has always had very different meanings and has repeatedly served as a political instrument. Untangling this history of the word can help better understand and counter the extremists who use it.

Similarly taking a negative view of the word, the Enlightenment philosophers considered the expeditions to Jerusalem as a demonstration of Catholicism’s violent and intolerant attitude. Scottish philosopher David Hume, in the first volume of his History of England, wrote of them this: “The Crusades - the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.” The negative connotation of the word was therefore strongly reinforced.

From the end of the 18th century, “crusade” was widely employed to criticise any movement considered as backward looking or needlessly aggressive. Conservative political attitudes, in particular, were frequently disqualified as “crusades”.

Interpretation of the crusades changed again towards the end of the 19th century: viewed as heroic enterprises led by pure and generous knights. The idea and use of the word evolved accordingly, designating any noble cause.

Both world wars were dominated by ideologies of simplistic opposition of good against evil. This new meaning of the word crusade fitted well this conception. As a result, crusades against diseases, war or unemployment, crusades for temperance, children or good manners flourished in western societies in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly in Catholic and Anglo-Saxons countries. But in Germanic and Eastern European countries the negative understanding of “crusade” remained stronger, and the word was not as commonly used.

The term “crusade” appeared in the 1210s, more than a century after the launching of the first expedition to Jerusalem in 1095. Despite our understanding of what “the crusades” are, it wasn’t used to describe these expeditions. Instead, it was used in reference to other wars promoted by the pope, against Muslims in Spain and Cathar “heretics” in southern France.

This use of the word created a common category, the “crusade” – a military campaign waged to defend faith. This meaning now associated these conflicts with the expeditions in the Middle East and opened the way to complete assimilation of wars fought against different enemies, in varied places and often for similar reasons.

Jean Jacques Grandville, Croisade contre la Liberté, La caricature (Crusade against freedom, a cartoon) , from 1834.

American red cross crusade, photography around 1919-1929

Crusade today The final change occurred in the 1960s. Criticism against colonialism and western interventions considered the medieval expeditions in the Middle East as acts of racism and violent conquest. Positive meanings became more frequently condemned or avoided. We are still strongly influenced by these conceptions, but the previous meanings haven’t disappeared.

“Crusade” can nowadays be understood and employed with an almost infinite variety of senses according to a person’s origin, culture, education or religious position. That’s the reason George Bush’s “crusade on terrorism” provoked much more criticism than Harry Truman’s “crusade against communism” in the 1950s.

Considering the moral sanctity associated with defending the “Holy Land” in Christian minds, the word quickly took on a legitimising function. Any contested action could be justified by dubbing it a “crusade”. It, therefore, became a word used to wield power and silence denouncers. In the middle ages, the term described new taxes imposed by the kings of Castile, wars led by the popes against their political opponents or Europe-wide collections of faithful donations (called indulgences).

The indulgences were the main motif of Protestant criticism against papal leadership in the 16th century. The word “crusade” then became associated with papal excesses and, in northern Europe, a synonym for any form of violent campaign prompted by religious motives.

When using the word, meanwhile, extremists rely on a single meaning based on their understanding of the medieval “crusades”. Christian supremacists remain faithful to the early 20th-century visions and consider the crusade as a holy cause. Muslim fundamentalists are influenced by later conceptions and condemn them as an act of imperialism. In both cases, the crusades are read as a basic opposition between Christians and Muslims.

The term can, therefore, be used to promote a simplistic idea of the eternal fight between good and evil. By doing so, extremists are not misusing the word “crusade”.

They’re using it as it has always been used: to support an ideology.

The 1066 diet: Normans passed on their love of pork, study suggests

By Steven Morris

Pork and possibly chicken became more popular in England after arrival of William the Conqueror Pigs on a farm. The 11th-century cook would sometimes roast pork or chicken but most often turned it into a stew.

The Norman conquest led to far-reaching and long-lasting political change across England – and new research suggests it also led to the English eating more pork and chicken.

of the diet and health of ordinary people who lived during this time gives us a detailed picture of their everyday experiences and lifestyles.

Before 1066, beef, lamb, mutton and goat were among the meats most likely to be served in England, but a study of human and animal bones – as well as fat residue found on fragments of cooking pots – found that pork and possibly chicken became much more popular following the arrival of William the Conqueror.

“There is certainly evidence that people experienced periods where food was scarce. But following this, an intensification in farming meant people generally had a more steady food supply and consistent diet.”

Experts believe the Normans passed on their love of pork to local people, and pigs and chickens began to be farmed much more intensively.

The study also suggests there were food shortages for a few years after the Norman invasion, but supplies were soon restored and life returned to normal.

Richard Madgwick, an osteoarchaeologist at Cardiff University’s school of history, archaeology and religion, said 1066 was arguably the most famous and important date in English history.

“It’s seen as a grand transition after which nothing was the same again. For the elite, the nobility, everything did change radically – the administration of the country, legal frameworks, the organisation of the landscape. But at a lower level, people adapted to the new normal rapidly.”

The research team used a range of bio-archaeological techniques to study human and animal bones recovered from sites across Oxford, along with fragments of ceramics used for cooking.

The researchers used a technique called stable isotope analysis on bones to compare the diets of 36 men and women who lived between the 10th and 13th centuries, whose remains were found in various locations around Oxford, including at Oxford Castle.

They found there was not a huge difference between the health of the individuals, who were alive at different points before and after the conquest. Levels of protein and carbohydrate consumption were similar in the group and evidence of bone conditions related to poor diet – such as rickets and scurvy – were rare.

However, detailed analysis of teeth showed evidence of short-term changes in health and diet during the transitional phase after the invasion.

Isotope analysis was also used on 60 animals found at the same sites, to ascertain how they were raised. Studies of pig bones found their diets became more consistent and richer in animal protein after the conquest, suggesting pig farming was intensified under Norman rule. They were probably living in pig sties in towns and being fed scraps instead of being allowed to forage in the countryside.

They found that pork and chicken became a more popular choice Fragments of pottery were examined using a technique called for the cooking pot at the expense of beef, lamb and mutton.

Some things did not change, however: cabbage remained a staple. organic residue analysis. When food is cooked in ceramic pots, fats are absorbed into the vessel. The 11th-century cook would Elizabeth Craig-Atkins, a senior lecturer in human osteology at the sometimes roast pork or chicken but most often simply threw it University of Sheffield, said: “Examining archaeological evidence into a pot and turned it into a stew.

Closed borders and ‘black weddings’: what the 1918 flu teaches us about coronavirus By Laura Spinney

Flu victims in an emergency hospital at Fort Riley, in Kansas, in 1918.

The influenza of 1918 killed up to 100 million people.

What lessons does it offer for our current health crisis?

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lagues – or, to use a more modern term, epidemics of infectious disease – pluck at our most primal fears. We have lived with them for at least 10,000 years, ever since our ancestors took up farming and built the first semi-permanent settlements. And they have always had the upper hand. They know us intimately, preying on our strengths – our sociability, our love of gossip – and turning them into weaknesses. They are always a step ahead, and once they are out, like the genie, we can’t get them back in. All we can do is limit the damage. So here we are again.

Because epidemics are frightening, it is hardly surprising that people reach for the worst possible historic comparison. The 1918 influenza pandemic, which has been distilled in the public imagination to a single black-and-white image of bedridden US soldiers, has been hauled out of mothballs to do duty as a template of what we might expect from Covid-19. But is that global human catastrophe, which killed between 50 million and 100 million people – the vast majority in the developing world – and which was largely forgotten for most of the last century, the right comparison to make?

It is important to note that the Covid-19 outbreak is not yet officially a pandemic – a global epidemic. Some have accused the World Health Organization (WHO) of doing semantic cartwheels to avoid naming it as one, given the rate at which the disease is spreading, but at the time of writing roughly half of the world’s countries remain Covid-19-free.

The virus that causes the disease, Sars-CoV-2, is a new pathogen in humans, meaning we are all immunologically naive to it. It is very contagious, but we don’t yet know how lethal it is. One way of measuring this is by the case-fatality rate (CFR) – the proportion of people who fall sick who go on to die. Last week, the WHO provisionally quoted a CFR of 3.4%, which would be alarming if it were correct. The CFR of the 1918 flu is still being debated, mainly because there was then no reliable diagnostic test for flu, but the number usually quoted is 2.5%. Regarding Covid-19, data is sketchy for the moment, and everyone agrees it will be a while before we know the real CFR, but there’s already good evidence that many cases are going unreported – in part because those affected have very mild symptoms. That would mean the CFR is lower than 3.4% – perhaps as low as that of severe seasonal flu, which is about 0.1%.

So we could ask why we are comparing this outbreak to the 1918 pandemic, which was such an outlier, and not the two other flu pandemics that struck in the 20th century – the 1957 “Asian” flu, and the 1968 “Hong Kong” flu. Both had CFRs much closer to 0.1%, and neither killed more than 3 million people at the most. To bring the

At sign in the Philadelphia navy yard in 1918

picture right up to date, we could include the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, which killed in the region of 600,000 people. These are still big numbers, and they dwarf those attributed to Covid-19 to date. But the 1918 flu was in a different ballpark.

Another major difference between the 1918 flu and Covid-19 is that the flu mainly affected those aged between 20 and 40, while Covid-19 mainly affects those over 60. The British virologist and flu historian John Oxford, of Queen Mary University of London, calls Covid-19 “a pale reflection of 1918 where 200,000 [Britons] died quietly at home and most of them were young”. Indeed, one of the reasons the 1918 flu was so devastating was because it purged communities of their breadwinners – at a time when there wasn’t much of a social welfare safety net to catch those left behind.

Should we be comparing Covid-19 to flu at all? The viruses that cause the two diseases belong to different families. Sars-CoV-2 belongs to the coronavirus family, other members of which caused the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) in China between 2002 and 2004, and of Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), which began in Saudi Arabia in 2012.

Sars and Mers were far more lethal than Covid-19 – boasting CFRs of 10% and 36% respectively – but the viruses that cause all three seem to spread in a similar way. Unlike flu, which spreads rapidly and relatively

evenly through a population, coronaviruses tend to infect in clusters. In theory, that makes coronavirus outbreaks easier to contain, and indeed both Sars and Mers outbreaks were brought under control before they went global. Annelies Wilder-Smith, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, thinks that the unwarranted comparisons with flu may have prevented many western governments from taking the rigorous action that is needed to contain Covid-19 now, while it’s still possible. “The short-term costs of containment look high,” she says, “But they’re much lower than the long-term costs of non-containment.”

Wilder-Smith is not alone in having shifted her opinion in recent weeks towards the idea that this may be the “big one” that infectious disease experts have been fearing. When such experts say “big one”, they mean a pandemic, but it’s not clear how big they mean, because they don’t want to put numbers on it. That’s understandable, if they think that much depends on what we do – or don’t do – next. Mathematical modellers – whose job it is to put numbers on things – have estimated that up to 80% of Britons could be infected, and 500,000 could die (out of a far bigger UK population than in 1918), before this outbreak recedes. But that is very much a worst-case scenario and one that assumes that containment doesn’t work.

The bottom line, then, is that Covid-19 will almost certainly not turn out to be as bad as the 1918 flu pandemic, but it could still be bad – perhaps on a par with the pandemics of 1957 or 1968. Until a vaccine becomes available – which isn’t likely for at least 18 months – containment is our only hope for slowing its spread.

Where containment is concerned, historical comparisons can help, because the techniques don’t change. Quarantine, isolation, masks and handwashing are all time-honoured methods of keeping the sick and the healthy apart, and minimising disease transmission.

One lesson governments took from 1918 is that mandatory public health measures tend to be counterproductive.

Containment is much more effective if people choose to comply. But for that to happen, they need to be properly informed about the threat they face, and to trust the authorities to act in their collective interest. If either – or both – of these things is missing, containment works less than well. In 1918, most governments were caught unawares by the pandemic – because they had no disease surveillance system in place – and public information campaigns were risible.

to the health commissioner’s attempts to restrict attendance at places of entertainment. When Charlie Chaplin’s film Shoulder Arms was released in the autumn of 1918, Harold Edel, the manager of the Strand theatre – a cinema on Times Square – praised his customers for their impressive turnout. He died of flu a few weeks later.

The world of 2020 is vastly different from 1918. Howard Phillips, a historian of the 1918 flu at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, observes “the relative silence of organised religion” during this outbreak, compared with the 1918 pandemic. Laura Jambrina, a teacher and resident of Zamora, notes that today the church authorities have been more vocal in their public health guidance than the secular, provincial ones – advising worshippers to wash their hands and not to sprinkle holy water. Religion has, nevertheless, played a part. The South Korean cluster of Covid-19 seems to have spread via churches, while pilgrims in Iran have posted videos of themselves defiantly licking the Fatima Masumeh shrine in the city of Qom. Many other things haven’t changed. There was a lot of fake news in 1918 and there’s a lot of fake news now – and in 2020, its volume and speed of transmission is unprecedented. Donald Trump’s grandfather died of the 1918 flu, yet Trump has been accused of misleading Americans over the Covid-19 outbreak through his tweets. Meanwhile, hashtags circulating on Italian social media – such as #FlorenceDoesntStop, #CultureAgainstFear – could partly explain the difficulty the Italian authorities are having in containing the outbreak. A prominent Italian politician, Nicola Zingaretti, announced last weekend that he had come down with Covid-19 after organising a party on the theme of #MilanDoesntStop. The Harold Edel of our day will hopefully make a speedy recovery.

There have been horrifying reports of people drinking industrial alcohol or taking cocaine to ward off Covid-19. In 1918, too, people thought alcohol would protect them, and quacks cashed in on people’s desperation by packaging up ineffective and sometimes even toxic concoctions into “elixirs” for which they charged exorbitant prices.

Some of the more vivid images of this epidemic also echo those of a century ago. The Brazilian medic and writer Pedro Nava described in 1918 how, in Rio de Janeiro, footballers played to empty stadiums. The same is happening today, only now people watch the matches on TV. Old habits also die hard; many people are still kissing each other by way of greeting. “I have to bite my tongue every time I meet someone on the street with my baby girl,” says Jambrina. “Most people will immediately touch her cheeks or kiss her.” And we seem to have forgotten that closing borders against infectious disease doesn’t work.

Many countries have done so, despite the WHO’s advice, but they are now discovering that the bug is already on the inside – and they have still got to deal with it.

The world may have changed but containment strategies have not.

One of the reasons the 1918 flu came to be known as the “Spanish” flu was because Spain was neutral in the war and didn’t censor its press. Whereas the US, Britain and France – all of which had the flu before Spain – kept it out of the newspapers at first to avoid damaging morale. When they finally acknowledged it, the newspapers issued conflicting public health messages and repeated unfounded rumours – including one that German U-boats beaching in the US had deliberately sown the flu.

Germ theory – according to which infectious diseases are caused by microscopic organisms – was also relatively new. Inevitably, people found it easy to revert to more mystical, and more fatalistic, explanations of what was happening. In the deeply pious Spanish city of Zamora, for example, the local bishop defied the health authorities by ordering a novena – evening prayers on nine consecutive days – in honour of Saint Rocco, the patron saint of plague and pestilence. This involved churchgoers lining up to kiss the saint’s relics, around the time that the outbreak peaked. Zamora went on to record the highest flurelated death rate of any city in Spain, and one of the highest in Europe.

New York City, on the other hand, experienced one of the lowest death rates. The city’s inhabitants were used to public health interventions by 1918, since local authorities had orchestrated a 20-year campaign against tuberculosis. But some New Yorkers had other ideas: local papers reported on a “black wedding” in Mount Hebron cemetery, where two Jewish strangers were married in an ancient ritual to ward off plague. Meanwhile, in the business community, there was resistance

A US army camp hospital at Aix-les-Bain, France in 1918.

It’s a lesson we seem to have to learn again every time a new pandemic appears, and the kneejerk tendency to pull up the drawbridge shares xenophobic roots with another – that of blaming “the other”. In 1918, before the name “Spanish flu” caught on, Brazilians called it the German flu, while the Senegalese called it the Brazilian flu. The Poles called it the Bolshevik disease and the Danes thought it “came from the south”.

Now they are blaming Chinese people.

If there is one feature of the current epidemic for which we should applaud ourselves – besides the reports that skies are blue again over Chinese cities, since traffic has come to a standstill – it is that we have managed to avoid giving this outbreak a stigmatising name. The WHO guidelines of 2015 on how to name diseases can take a lot of credit for this. So this new plague is not the Chinese flu or the pangolin flu, it’s the rather more mundane Covid-19 – just one more epidemic in a long line of epidemics that have struck fear into our hearts, and that we can still rein in if we would just listen to our brains instead. © The Guardian

Money matters – the art of German hyperinflation There is a card-bound album in the library of the Warburg Institute inscribed with the portentous title Historical Memorial Pages from Germany’s Hardest Time and Deepest Need. Opening the volume, however,

evidently fearing the damage it was doing to the national economy, but by then it was too late, and, when hyperinflation took hold the next year, notes with huge denominations were issued – sometimes in the billions and trillions.

An exhibition currently on display in the British Museum’s coin gallery plunges visitors into the world of Notgeld, surrounding us with its bewilderingly efflorescent iconography. As well as the charming scenes described above, the emergency of which it was both cause and witness also impinged on the Notgeld issued by the Braunschweig public transport authority, 1921. appearance of this money. one is greeted by an unexpectedly Besides floods of valueless paper and cheerful spectacle: colourful rectangles forlorn figures gazing into empty of paper arranged in neat little rows, purses, some examples of Notgeld show their faces depicting pretty landscapes macabre figures, scatological jokes and and villages, and humorous caricatures. acts of violence. Witches, ghosts and These are examples of the Notgeld, or devils stalk these notes, animals vomit emergency money, that was printed by and excrete money, heretics are burnt towns and cities across Germany during at the stake, and – the period of inflation that began with inevitably, but no less the First World War and ended in 1923. shockingly for that – In issuing this ersatz currency, Jews, who were often municipalities and businesses hoped at blamed for the crisis, first to compensate for a chronic are hanged from trees. shortage of small change, which had There are also vanished from circulation thanks to war- advertisements for the spooked hoarders and the businesses that issued government’s withdrawal of coinage for these tokens. One its metallic content. Then, as the appeal particularly of such objects became apparent, overwrought example special collectible notes were issued by shows a donkey – the towns desperate for revenue, often in Dukatenesel from the sets and with their rhetoric ramped up fairytale ‘Little table, lay to catch the eye of potential buyers. yourself!’ – exuding money from both There are retellings of historical and ends. There it is collected by a shabby literary episodes across series of notes, man in a top hat, presumably a profiteer, and a young Notgeld from the Harz Mountains, 1921 woman who lifts her skirt to catch the miraculous draught. In doing so the latter exposes the tops of her stockings, which were a local speciality, while shooting us a coquettish glance. Her Phrygian cap identifies her as Marianne, personification of France; the French were occupying the Ruhr at the time, and greatly resented for what was seen as their extortion of the Germans.

The loose morals of the including Faustian scenes and a life of French woman illustrated on this note, Luther – somewhat incongruous, given who abuses the poor German donkey its medium. In 1922 the government while simultaneously supporting its attempted to put a stop to this practice, stocking manufacturers, sends a mixed

By Tom Wilkinson

message, at once titillating and censorious.

While a few of these designs are of a crude naivety, many were made by professional artists, some of them wellknown. The show’s curator Johannes Hartmann has included several notes from a series designed by illustrator Olaf Gulbransson, a frequent contributor to the popular illustrated magazine Simplicissimus. These elegant little images depict among other things a spectral skeleton appearing in Paris, pasting one of that city’s familiar advertising columns with the fateful words ‘mene, mene, tekel upharsin’ (you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting). This warning came back to bite him: Gulbransson’s choleric view of the Allies led to him being ostracised in his native Norway during the Second World War. Another example included in the show was designed by the future Bauhaus master Herbert Bayer, then a student at the school. This starkly simple note attempts to rationalise an intensely irrational situation by clearing room for

100 Mark Notgeld note from Braunschweig from October 1918.

the orderly accumulation of zeroes on its sparsely decorated face. In doing so it stands out dramatically from its neighbours, with their jumble of genial and horrific iconography. Bayer was reacting to the fact that the inflation had produced a parallel inflation in the world of images, and this was not just limited to the design of money: artists also printed vast quantities of works on paper in this period, hoping to attract buyers eager to transfer their rapidly devaluing cash into tangible assets.

And, just as with Notgeld, this sparked an attention-seeking turn to violent and grotesque imagery – one thinks for instance of the prints produced by George Grosz and Otto Dix at the time.

Then, as now, the sleep of economic reason brings forth strange monsters.

‘Currency in crisis: German emergency money 1914–1924’ is at the British Museum, London, until 29 March 2020. © Apollo Magazine

Armada docudrama shows dark history of Normal People's Sligo

By Rory Carroll

Armada 1588: Shipwreck and Survival tells turbulent tale on bucolic stretch of Irish coast The film tells the tale of Francisco de Cuéllar, who was part of Spain’s ill-fated attempt to invade Elizabethan England. Photograph: RTÉ

Streedagh beach was the setting for young love in the TV drama Normal People, but its latest screen depiction reveals a dark history of plunder and slaughter on the golden sand.

Instead of romance among the dunes, viewers encounter drownings, stabbings and hangings on this bucolic stretch of Ireland’s Atlantic coast. And unlike the adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel, it’s all true.

The docudrama Armada 1588: Shipwreck and Survival tells the story of Francisco de Cuéllar, a Spanish captain who was part of Spain’s illfated attempt to invade Elizabethan England and ended up a fugitive in the west of Ireland.

After surviving naval battles and storms he found himself marooned in a “land of savages” – known in the present day as County Sligo – where he was hunted by English soldiers and repeatedly attacked and robbed by hostile locals, the start of an epic journey home verging on Odyssean.

The film was made by Spanish Armada Ireland, a voluntary group based in Sligo that used €100,000 (£90,100) of community development funding to recruit an international cast and crew and make a swashbuckling half-hour film.

“It’s an incredible story of survival,” said Micheál Ó Domhnaill, a producer. “It had crept into lots of other stories, but it was surprising that no film had ever been done specifically about De Cuéllar.”

The screenplay was based on an account the Spaniard wrote in October 1589 after escaping Ireland and stopping in Amsterdam on his way back to Spain.

A Spanish actor, Fernando Corral, plays the lead, and other Spanish and mainly Irish actors play sailors, soldiers, robbers, good samaritans and chieftains. CGI recreates storms and doomed galleons tossed by waves. Artists’ drawings fill in other sequences.

RTÉ screened the film last month and for €4.99 (or £4.45) it is now available to stream or download, with proceeds going to an armada visitor centre in the village of Grange, a few miles from Streedagh beach.

So far there have been about 2,000 paid downloads. The English version has been viewed in 25 countries and the Spanish version in 29.

Armada 1588 will not rival Normal People for audience size, but it does

cast a different light on the strand where Rooney’s characters, Marianne and Connell, get to know one another.

“It’s strange that we should have two productions that are really different from each other on the same beach,” said Ó Domhnaill.

“Normal People filmed on really sunny days when it was at its absolute best. We filmed in the worst time of year, which replicated conditions in 1588.”

Spain’s King Felipe II dispatched a fleet of 130 ships to transport an army from Flanders to England to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I, restore Catholicism and shore up his power.

Spanish bungling, English and Dutch resistance and bad weather scattered the armada, sending its ships on a circuitous journey around Scotland and Ireland. Only about 80 made it home.

De Cuéllar captained the San Pedro. For breaking formation in the North Sea he was court-martialled on another ship and sentenced to death. That and two other ships foundered off Sligo, drowning hundreds of people. Those who made it ashore were robbed by locals and butchered by English troops.

De Cuéllar, stripped and battered, escaped inland where he spent seven months being alternately brutalised and aided by locals. Two chieftains who sheltered him, Brian O’Rourke and Tadhg Óg McClancy, were later executed.

In his chronicle, De Cuéllar said O’Rourke’s wife was “very beautiful in the extreme, and she showed me much kindness,” a line that has prompted centuries of speculation.

After myriad adventures, including a siege, an offer of marriage and another shipwreck, the fugitive made it back to Spain where he was pardoned and went on to serve the Spanish crown in Naples and the Americas. “He must have been the most resourceful character,” said Ó Domhnaill.

Eddie O’Gorman, the chair of Spanish Armada Ireland, hopes the film will entice visitors to Streedagh beach, which overlooks sunken wrecks.

“It’s an extraordinary treasure. And the fact we have this great hero, there’s nothing to match it.”

Russian Revolution:

Ten propaganda posters from 1917

By Vera Panfilova State Central Museum of Russian Contemporary History

The Russian Revolution was a time of great upheaval but also great creativity.

As events take place to mark the 100th anniversary of the uprising, here are 10 classic images that rallied the masses in 1917.

'Loan of Freedom'

The cost and effort of fighting in World War One took a huge toll on Russia and fuelled the rebellion against the tsar in early 1917.

Boris Kustodiev's famous painting of a soldier with a rifle urged Russians to give money to the war effort. The poster was produced in February 1917 to advertise the "Freedom Loan" and the soldier went on to appear in many other posters until the second Russian rebellion in October.

Revolutionary days

In March 1917, Moscow's Voskresenskaya Square and the city's parliament building became a focal point for revolutionary rallies. This poster depicts the enthusiasm and anticipation people felt for the revolution, which they saw as the beginning of a new era. All this took place against the backdrop of war.

Leading men This comes from the leftist publishing house Parus, founded before the revolution by writer Maxim Gorky. Their posters were often created by famous poets and artists such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexei Radakov.

The top image shows a soldier defending the bourgeoisie with the caption "This is who the soldier used to defend". The second, post-revolutionary, image features banners bearing the slogans, "Land and freedom!", "Democracy and the Republic!" and "Liberty!" The caption reads: "That's who he defends today".

Rising sun This is not really a poster. It is an illustrated leaflet that shows power in Russia was personified.

These men are the leading political figures of the day members of the Provisional Government. Mikhail Rodzianko, Chair of the State Duma (parliament), takes centre stage.

The government's first socialist and future head, Alexander Kerensky, sits in the bottom left corner. At the top, armed men hold slogans reading: "Land and Freedom!" and "Only in battle will you obtain your rights!" For the moment, there are no Bolsheviks.

The changing wind In March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and State Duma deputies formed the Provisional Government. This poster is entitled "Memo of the people's victory". It shows a humbled tsar handing over power to revolutionary forces, symbolised by a soldier and a worker. In the background, you can see the Š BBC

Tauride Palace, where the State Duma met. Above it, a rising sun, symbolising freedom. It was a favourite symbol in posters of this period.

Social pyramid

This is another MayakovskyRadakov collaboration for Parus.

Clearly a caricature, the poster shows the tsar at the top with his ermine robe flowing down on either side to cloak the people.

From top to bottom: "We reign.

We pray for you. We judge you.

We protect you. We feed you.

And you work." The most popular satirical stories until the summer of 1917 were anti-clerical and antimonarchical, aimed specifically at Tsar Nicholas II and his wife.

On the campaign trail

In the autumn of 1917, Russia began its first ever general

election campaign. It was both fierce and uncompromising.

Dozens of organisations took part, but the largest was the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The words on this poster read: "Comrade citizens! Prepare for demonstrations on the day of the opening of the constituent assembly!"

'Anarchy will be defeated by democracy!'

This is a poster from the liberal Cadet Party, which uses a combination of animalistic and mythological images: the giant lizard represents anarchy and the knight on a white horse is democracy.

Breaking the chains

simple, aimed at workers and peasants. "The Socialist Revolutionary Party - Only in battle will you obtain your rights!"

They conducted a very competent campaign. Their victory was achieved with the slogans "Land and freedom!" and "Tear off the chains and the entire world will be free".

Late to the party

The Bolshevik Party (the RSDLP) was slow to the poster game. This 1917 election campaign poster simply says: "Vote for the RSDLP list".

RSDLP stood for Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In Russian the letters were RSDRP. When the civil war broke out in November 1917, the Bolsheviks quickly caught up and this style of poster influenced Soviet propaganda. A group of Soviet artists including Mayakovsky and Radakov created the famous Okna ROSTA (ROSTA Windows) brand. The posters were simple and the messages were short, sharp and clear. The brand became the Soviet hallmark and eventually, a global design classic.

Vera Panfilova, director of Fine Art at the State Central Museum of Russian Contemporary History, was speaking to BBC Russian's Alexandra Semyonova.

The Socialist Revolutionary Party's election poster was Š BBC

Which black Britons should we be commemorating?

Six black Britons who had a momentous impact on the UK’s history The toppling of a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston at a Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol last weekend has sparked a fierce debate over the removal of statues of historical figures linked to slavery and racism.

Whether removing certain statues would be erasing our history, as Boris Johnson has suggested, or a way for Britain to finally reckon with its past, the debate has heightened racial tensions across the country. It also raises intriguing questions of what should be done with the empty spaces potentially left behind.

For some, the eruption of the Black Lives Matter movement and the call to decolonise education provides an important opportunity to shine a spotlight on historical figures Britain should instead be commemorating.

Here are six black Britons who had a momentous impact on the UK’s history. While some already have statues and are recognised in the school curriculum, campaigners say many do not have the profile they deserve.

William Cuffay, 1788-1870 Born on a merchant ship in the West Indies in 1788, Cuffay was the son of a naval cook and former enslaved person from St Kitts. The family eventually settled in Chatham, Kent.

Cuffay played a leading role in the Chartist movement and was considered one of its most militant leaders. In 1842 he was elected to the national executive of the National Charter Association. His significance within the movement was highlighted by a contemporary report in the Times that referred to the chartists as “the black man and his party”.

In August 1848, Cuffay was arrested for conspiring to levy war against the Queen and was sentenced to transportation to Tasmania.

Mary Seacole, 1805-81 Born in Kingston, Jamaica, to a Jamaican woman and a Scottish soldier, Seacole was a nurse who funded her own trip from Britain to the Crimea to take part in the war effort. She risked her life going out on the frontline and frequently came under fire while bringing support to wounded and dying soldiers.

After the war she returned to England and became destitute and unwell. After the press highlighted her plight, a benefit Mary Seacole, a Jamaican-born woman of Scottish and Jamaican descent, A statue commemorating Mary Seacole in the grounds of St Thomas’ hospital in London. funded her own trip to the Crimean war to care for wounded soldiers. festival was organised in Kennington, south London, to raise money for her. The fundraiser is believed to have attracted 1,000 people. In 1857, Seacole published her memoirs, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. A statue of Seacole was erected opposite the Houses of Parliament in the grounds of St Thomas’ hospital in 2016.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, 1875-1912 Born in Holborn, London, on 15 August 1875 and raised in Croydon, Coleridge-Taylor was one of few black classical composers to catch the imagination of the white British musical establishment.

He came to prominence in 1898 at the Gloucester festival with an orchestral Ballade in A Minor, followed by his much acclaimed trilogy Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (1898), which Sir Hubert Parry, the principal of the Royal College of Music, described as “one of the most remarkable events in modern English musical history”.

Coleridge-Taylor died aged 37 after he collapsed at West Croydon station while waiting for a train. His funeral procession through Croydon was lined for three and a half miles by crowds with their heads bared.

Claudia Jones, 1915-64 Born in Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in 1915, she lived much of her life in New York before she was deported from the US for being an active member of the US Communist party. She was given asylum in England in 1955.

Jones threw herself into the anti-racist struggle in the UK, founding the West Indian Gazette and launched the Notting Hill carnival, which was held in 1959 in response to racist attacks and rioting. The carnival was put together to celebrate the culture of the local community because, according to a brochure handed out during the time, “a people’s art is the genesis of their freedom”.

Jones died in 1964 and she is buried next to the Karl Marx memorial at Highgate cemetery.

Olive Morris, 1952-79 Born in Jamaica in 1952, Morris moved to south London as a young child with her siblings to be with her parents.

Morris was just 17 when she became a leading figure in Britain’s anti-racism movement in the 1960s and 70s, organising actions against discrimination in housing and employment, stop and search and attacks by far-right groups such as the National Front. Morris was a member of the youth section of the Black Panther movement in the UK. She became ill while on holiday in Spain and was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer, upon returning home. She died aged 27 on 12 July 1979 at St Thomas’ hospital in London.

Jack Leslie, 1901-88 Born in 1901 in Canning Town, London, Leslie played for Plymouth Argyle from 1921 until he retired in 1934 and was among the small number of professional black footballers in England at the time.

Leslie was expected to become England’s first black player, but was denied the opportunity when selectors became aware of his heritage.

The Jack Leslie Campaign, which has the backing of Leslie’s family, is calling for a statue of the footballer as a celebration of black achievement.

Jack Leslie training with Plymouth Argyle in August 1926

© The Guardian

Mass grave shows how Black Death devastated the countryside

By Esther Addley

Grave in Lincolnshire dates to medieval pandemic of 1348 and reveals rural plague catastrophe

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mass grave containing the remains of dozens of victims of the Black Death offers chilling new evidence of the speed and scale of the devastation the plague brought to rural England, according to archaeologists.

The grave, discovered in a remote corner of rural Lincolnshire, has been dated to the 14th century, almost certainly to the earliest and deadliest medieval outbreak of the disease in 1348-9.

It contained the bodies of at least 48 men, women and children who were laid in a sandy pit within days of each other. DNA tests on the bodies found the plague pathogen, confirming how they died.

About half the population of England was wiped out within 18 months by the 1348-9 pandemic. Perhaps surprisingly, however, direct archaeological evidence for the Black Death is extremely rare, according to Hugh Willmott, senior lecturer in European historical archaeology at the University of Sheffield, who led the excavation.

While a small number of plague mass graves have been excavated in London, he said,

nothing comparable has ever been found in a rural context, making this a discovery of national importance. Analysis of the find, made in 2013, has been published for the first time in Antiquity.

“One of the assumptions in the past has been that perhaps you get mass graves in towns where you have a higher density of people, [whereas] in villages people were being buried as normal in the parish churchyard,” said

desperation as the plague struck, overwhelming the canons who were then forced to bury them together.

“People couldn’t be buried in the parish graveyard – perhaps the priest or the gravedigger has died – [so] you turn to the church, the canons at the abbey down the road. This is a snapshot of a not often seen rural catastrophe.”

While the layout of the bodies

The mass grave near Immingham contains the remains of at least 48 men, women and children.

Willmott.

“But actually what this suggests is that this was a rural community that couldn’t cope, and when the Black Death arrived, the normal system for doing things broke down.”

The grave was discovered by chance during a survey of the now-ruined Augustinian priory of Thornton Abbey, close to Immingham in north Lincolnshire, on the east coast of England. Nearby, archaeologists found the site of a medieval hospital attached to the priory, suggesting the dead or dying had been brought there in

showed they had all been buried within a period of days, said Willmott, they had not been flung without ceremony into a shared pit. Instead, the victims – more than half of whom were children – were shrouded and laid carefully side by side.

“They are trying to treat them as respectfully as possible, because in the middle ages it’s very important to give the dead a proper burial. Even though it is the height of a terrible disaster, they are taking as much care as they can with the dead.” © The Guardian

New blue plaques for women honour spies, artist and suffragettes

By Mark Brown

Sculptor Barbara Hepworth will be celebrated with a blue plaque at her former basement flat in St John’s Wood.

London scheme’s additions are part of effort to correct historical gender imbalance Second world war spies, suffrage organisations and one of the most important British artists of the 20th century are to get blue plaques in a push to correct a historical gender imbalance.

The London scheme has been running since 1866 but only 14% of about 950 blue plaques celebrate women. In 2018 English Heritage called on the public for more nominations, saying the figure was “far too low”.

Her many acts of heroism included skiing out of Nazi-occupied Poland with the first evidence of Operation Barbarossa – the Nazi plans to invade Soviet Russia. The plaque will be placed on the west London hotel where she lived for three years until her death in 1952.

Khan was also renowned for her service with the SOE and has been called Britain’s only female Muslim war heroine. The first female radio operator sent into Nazi-occupied France, she was shot by the Gestapo in 1944 and awarded a posthumous George Cross in 1949.

On Wednesday it announced details of six new blue plaques for 2020: secret agents Christine Granville and Noor Inayat Khan, the artist Barbara Hepworth, the first world war leader and botanist Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, and the headquarters of two suffrage organisations.

Anna Eavis, the curatorial director and secretary of the blue plaques panel, said efforts to address the gender imbalance were starting to yield results.

“It is a long road but we are well on our way to receiving equal number of public nominations for men and women. There are now more women shortlisted than men, and 2020 will see more plaques to women than we have unveiled in 20 years.”

Gwynne-Vaughan will be the first to get her plaque, which will be placed on her home of 50 years in Bedford Avenue in Bloomsbury on Wednesday.

She was much admired for her leadership during the first world war helping to form the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and lay the foundations and set standards for all women’s air services. GwynneVaughan was also an important figure in the fields of botany and mycology and has a number of fungal species named in her honour.

Hepworth, an internationally renowned sculptor, is mostly associated with St Ives in Cornwall and West Yorkshire but she also lived and worked in a basement flat in St John’s Wood with her first husband, John Skeaping.

It was there that she created one of her earliest mother and child sculptures, a motif that was to recur frequently in her work. The plaque will mark both Hepworth and Skeaping.

Granville, a Polish countess born Krystyna Skarbek, was the first and longest-serving female special agent working for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the second world war.

Christine Granville, aka Krystyna Skarbek, was a British special agent in the second world war.

Blue plaques will also be erected on London buildings that were the headquarters of the two main suffrage organisations: the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, formed in 1897 and led by Millicent Fawcett, and the more militant Women’s Social and Political Union, co-founded in Manchester in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst.

Increasing the number of blue plaques for women has been a slow process. The first female recipient was the actor Sarah Siddons in 1876, a plaque that no longer survives.

By the time English Heritage took over the scheme in 1986 there were only 45 celebrating women. Since then, there have been more than 80, or 60%, including plaques for the MP Nancy Astor, the computing innovator Ada Lovelace and the DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin. © The Guardian

Edith Cavell:

1915–1920, Cornish grey granite & white marble by George James Frampton (1860–1928)

commemorating the nurse who became a First World War heroine

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n 1915, the leading British sculptor Sir George James Frampton (1860–1928) received a commission to create a public monument to commemorate the nurse Edith Cavell (1865–1915), an opportunity he took up so willingly that he waived the commission fee altogether.

Although Edith became a celebrity in Britain in the 1910s, her remarkable story is less familiar today.

However, 17th March 2020 marks the centenary of the public unveiling of her Grade I listed stone memorial by Queen Alexandra in 1920, which can still be viewed today – standing a stone's throw away from Trafalgar Square in St Martin's Place. The monument bears her famous words: 'Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.'

Edith's story is equally shocking as it is courageous. On 12th October 1915, after tirelessly caring for hundreds of wounded British, Belgian and German soldiers, and helping Allied soldiers flee the brutalities of war in German-occupied Belgium, she was shot at dawn by German firing squad – despite international outcry for her release.

Her unjust death provoked further contempt towards the Germans across the world, and Edith quickly became a symbol of Allied resistance and a Christian martyr. Without discrimination, she had cared for wounded soldiers, regardless of their nationality.

St Martin's Place, Westminster, Central London

Artist: G. Finchingford

The British used her story as propaganda to recruit more soldiers and galvanise public opinion against Germany.

Recruitment numbers in Britain rose from 5,000 to 10,000 a week after her death.

Born in the Norfolk village of Swardeston in 1865, Edith spent a great deal of her youth looking after her critically ill father, Frederick, the vicar of the local church.

These formative experiences compelled her to train as a nurse at the Royal London Hospital by the time she turned 30. There, she trained under the supervision of the esteemed Matron Eva Luckes.

Not long into her training, she was placed on the front line of a typhoid outbreak in Maidstone – the largest ever reported in the UK. The medical staff responsible for containing the epidemic were so effective that Edith, alongside a

dozen others, was awarded the Maidstone Medal. The survival rates were so high, that out of a total of 1,847 people who contracted the deadly disease, only 132 died.

Spread through contaminated water due to poor sanitation, typhoid was an incredibly common illness during the Victorian era in Britain – even Prince Albert died from the illness in 1861.

In 1907, Edith went to Brussels to nurse a sick child, having already spent five years working in Belgium as a governess between 1890 and 1895. While there she

photograph showing Cavell (seated centre) among a group of her multinational student nurses whom she trained in Brussels, Imperial War Museums

ended up running a secular training school for nurses, an unprecedented position as previously nuns were usually the only women allowed to work in infirmaries.

In 1910, Edith began editing Europe's first nursing journals, called L’Infirmière ('nurse'). She was also in demand as an educator and lecturer.

At the outbreak of the First World War, after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in June 1914, Edith was visiting her mother in Norwich – not long after the death of her father.

However, she felt her duty was to return to Brussels, where her clinic was declared 'neutral' and turned into a Red Cross facility. Edith was in Belgium when the German army invaded on 4th August. Although British and French civilians were ordered to return home, Edith remained to care for the wounded.

Artist unknown

Artist: Raymond Lynde (1854–1928)

time, Frampton was President of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and regarded as one of the most important sculptors in Britain. He had been a key figure in the late-nineteenth-century New Sculpture movement and his other famous works included the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, and the lions at the British Museum.

The modernist 10-feet high monument further cemented Edith Cavell's legacy in granite and white marble. Despite this, it was poorly received by many of Frampton's contemporaries who criticised the poor engineering of the statue. The words 'fortitude', 'sacrifice' and 'humanity' are engraved onto the plinth beneath the lifelike statue of Cavell, who stands in her nurse's uniform in calm defiance.

In 1922, the National Council of Women of Great Britain and Ireland proposed to have the nurse's reported words 'patriotism is not enough' added to the memorial.

The Germans posted signs throughout the city threatening harsh penalties for anyone caught protecting or hiding enemy combatants. However, Edith fearlessly helped fugitives and prisoners of war to flee undetected. She did this over a period of nine months, saving the lives of approximately 200 Allied soldiers.

In August 1915, the Germans Edith's remarkable story extended beyond arrested her and she Britain. Sculpted monuments dedicated to her confessed to everything. can also be found in Paris' Jardin des She was found guilty Tuileries by Gabriel Pech, and in Brussels of treason,

by Paul Du Bois. In 1916, a mountain in specifically for Canada was named after her. providing 'reinforcements' Still today, the charitable Cavell to German enemies.

Nurses' Trust which was founded in her However, memory in 1917 supports the welfare of historians today nurses, midwives and healthcare have argued that assistants in the UK. Sculptor: she may, indeed, Lydia Figes, Content Editor at Art UK George James Frampton (1860–1928) have been recruited Further reading as a British spy.

The Victorian Web, 'Edith Cavell', Sir George Frampton, RA

At her two-day trial, she was charged with treason and sentenced to death by a German judge on 11th October 1915.

Although legal under international law, it sparked great outrage in Allied and neutral countries.

Historian Anne-Marie Hughes has argued that 'Cavell's gender and non-combatant status made her an exceptionally good candidate for use in propaganda because it was more plausible to portray her as a victim and appeal to men's chivalrous urges.'

Cavell told English chaplain Stirling Gahan that she was not afraid and had no regrets about her actions or sentence. Gahan noted that she was incredibly calm despite her fate, and he recorded her saying: 'I have no fear nor shrinking; I have seen death so often that it is not strange or fearful to me... Patriotism is not enough. It is not enough to love one's own people, one must love all men and hate none.'

(1860–1928), 2009 Anne-Marie Claire Hughes, 'War, Gender and National Mourning: The Significance of the Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavell in Britain', European Review of History, Volume 12, Issue 3, 2005 The unveiling of George Frampton's statue of Edith Cavell 1920,

Edith's state funeral took place at Westminster Abbey on 15th May 1919, and was attended by thousands. The words of Edward VII's widow, Queen Alexandra, were read to the congregation: 'In memory of our brave, heroic, never-to-be-forgotten Miss Cavell.

Life's race well run, life's work well done. Life's crown well won, now comes rest. From Alexandra.'

Artist William Hatherell (1855– 1928) was commissioned to paint the event.

One year later, photographer Reginald Silk captured the unveiling of Frampton's statue in 1920. At this

Edith Cavell, wearing Red Cross uniform, as her spirit rises in the form of an angel c.1915, colour process print after painting by Alexander Rossell (1859–1922)

The unveiling of George Frampton's statue of Edith Cavell 1920,

The Funeral Service of Edith Cavell at Westminster Abbey, 15 May 1919 William Hatherell (1855–1928)

The toppling of Edward Colston's statue is not an attack on history. It is history The slave trader’s figure loomed over Bristol for 125 years Now a multiracial protest has achieved what past campaigns couldn’t

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or people who don’t know Bristol, the real shock when they heard that the statue of a 17th-century slave trader had been torn from its plinth and thrown into the harbour was that 21st-century Bristol still had a statue of a slave trader on public display. For many watching the events unfold on social media, that was the real WTF moment.

Edward Colston, the man in question, was a board member and ultimately the deputy governor of the Royal African Company. In those roles he helped to oversee the transportation into slavery of an estimated 84,000 Africans. Of them, it is believed, around 19,000 died in the stagnant bellies of the company’s slave ships during the infamous Middle Passage from the coast of Africa to the plantations of the new world. The bodies of the dead were cast into the water where they were devoured by the sharks that, over the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, learned to seek out slave ships and follow the bloody paths of slave routes across the ocean. This is the man who, for 125 years, has been honoured by Bristol. Put literally on a pedestal in the very heart of the city. But tonight Edward Colston sleeps with the fishes.

The historical symmetry of this moment is poetic. A bronze effigy of an infamous and prolific slave trader dragged through the streets of a city built on the wealth of that trade, and then dumped, like the victims of the Middle Passage, into the water. Colston lies at the bottom of a harbour in which the ships of the triangular slave trade once moored, by the dockside on to which their cargoes were unloaded.

Slave ship captains were often permitted to bring one or two enslaved people back to Britain and sell them privately for their own profit. The practice offered successful captains an additional bonus and the Africans enslaved in this manner were called “privilege negroes”.

Many were young boys who were sold as exotic servants: fashion accessories. They appear as commodities for sale in advertisements in 18th-century Bristol newspapers, publications that also carried notices offering rewards for the recapture of enslaved people who had absconded from the grand homes of the city’s elite. Metres from where Colston’s statue now rests runs Pero’s Bridge, named after Pero Jones, one of those enslaved people who lived and died in Bristol. A man who may well have taken his first steps on British soil on the docks from which Colston’s statue was hurled.

The crowd who saw to it that Colston fell were of all races, but some were the descendants of the enslaved black and brown Bristolians whose ancestors were chained to the decks of Colston’s ships. Ripped from his pedestal, Colston seemed smaller: diminished in both size and potency. Lying flat, with his studied pensive pose, he looked suddenly preposterous. It was when the statue was in this position that one of the protesters made a grim but powerful gesture. By placing his knee over the bronze throat of Edward Colston, he reminded us of the unlikely catalyst for these remarkable events.

The fact that a man who died 299 years ago is today on the front pages of most of Britain’s newspapers suggests that Bristol has not been brilliant at coming to terms with its history. Despite the valiant and persistent efforts of

By David Olusoga

campaigners, all attempts to have the statue peacefully removed were thwarted by Colston’s legion of defenders.

In 2019, attempts to fix a plaque to the pedestal collapsed after Bristol’s Society of Merchant Venturers, the high priests of the Colston cult, insisted on watering down the text, adding qualifications that, it was felt, had the effect of minimising his crimes. Yet what repulsed many about the statue was not that it valorised Colston but that it was silent about his victims, those whose lives were destroyed to build the fortune he lavished upon the city.

The long defence of the figure and Colston’s reputation was overt and shameless, but not unique. In other British cities other men who grew rich through the trafficking of human beings or who defended the “respectable trade” are venerated in bronze and marble. In Edinburgh’s St Andrew Square, on a pedestal 150 feet high, stands Viscount Melville, Henry Dundas, another of history’s guilty men. His great contribution to civilisation was to water down and delay attempts to pass an act abolishing the slave trade. Historians struggle to estimate how many thousands died or were transported into slavery because of his actions. Already social media is ablaze with calls for Dundas to be thrown into the Forth.

Today is the first full day since 1895 on which the effigy of a mass murderer does not cast its shadow over Bristol’s city centre. Those who lament the dawning of this day, and who are appalled by what happened on Sunday, need to ask themselves some difficult questions. Do they honestly believe that Bristol was a better place yesterday because the figure of a slave trader stood at its centre?

Are they genuinely unable – even now – to understand why those descended from Colston’s victims have always regarded his statue as an outrage and for decades pleaded for its removal?

If they do not confront such questions they risk becoming lost in the same labyrinth of moral bewilderment in which some of Colston’s defenders became entrapped in 2017.

That year Colston Hall, Bristol’s prime concert venue, and one of the many institutions named after the slave trader, announced that it was to change its name. In response, a number of otherwise reasonable decent people announced that they would be boycotting the hall. Think about that for a moment. Rational, educated, 21st-century people earnestly concluded that they were taking a moral stance by refusing to listen to music performed within the walls of a concert hall unless that venue was named after a man who bought, sold and killed human beings.

Now is not the time for those who for so long defended the indefensible to contort themselves into some new, supposedly moral stance, or play the victim. Their strategy of heel-dragging and obfuscation was predicated on one fundamental assumption: that what happened on Sunday would never happen. They were confident that black people and brown people who call Bristol their home would forever tolerate living under the shadow of a man who traded in human flesh, that the power to decide whether Colston stood or fell lay in their hands. They were wrong on every level. Whatever is said over the next few days, this was not an attack on history. This is history. It is one of those rare historic moments whose arrival means things can never go back to how they were.

Protesters with the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, 7 June 2020.

© The Guardian

2,500 rare texts from Islamic world to go online for free

By Dalya Alberge

A 10th-century miniature Qur’an, which is part of the collection.

National Library of Israel is digitising collection of manuscripts and books dating back to ninth century More than 2,500 rare manuscripts and books from the Islamic world covering a period of more than a thousand years are to be made freely available online.

Even with a magnifying glass, you wouldn’t be able to get there.”

Among the extraordinary treasures are a miniature 10th-century Qur’an, just 37 by 68 mm. “It’s tiny,” Ukeles said. “It was not for study, but rather for religious protection as an amulet.”

The National Library of Israel (NLI) in Jerusalem is digitising its world-class collection of items in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, dating from the ninth to the 20th centuries, including spectacularly beautiful Qur’ans and literary works decorated with gold leaf and lapis lazuli.

The Qur’an was carried into battle by an Ottoman soldier in the siege of Vienna, 1529, but did not bring good fortune and was taken by the Austrian army when the Ottomans retreated, before being returned to the Ottomans in the 19th century.

The NLI’s treasures include an exquisite Iranian copy of Gift to the Noble (Tuhfat al-Ahrar), created barely three years after the completion of a 1484 collection of verse on religious and moral themes by the great Persian mystical poet Nur al-Din Jami.

Each page is illuminated in gold leaf, with illustrations that include a polo game and a garden scene featuring beautiful medieval calligraphy.

Most of the manuscripts were bequeathed by Abraham Shalom Yahuda, a Jerusalem-born Arab-Jewish scholar and one of the most important Islamic manuscript collectors of the early 20th century, who died in 1951.

Advertisement Dr Raquel Ukeles, curator of the NLI’s Islam and Middle East collection, said: “It’s exquisite.

Each border is decorated in gold leaf [and] very delicate paintings. Every page is different.

You’ll have pictures of gazelles, flowers or plants.”

An NLI spokesman said the project would not have happened without a “generous grant” from the British-based Arcadia fund. Founded

by Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, Arcadia supports charities and scholarly institutions to preserve cultural heritage, protect the environment, and promote open access.

The opening and closing pages feature “mouth-wateringly beautiful” double-sided miniatures that were added later, apparently in the 17th or 18th centuries, but in the 15thcentury style.

Ukeles said: “For us, it’s very much about opening up access across borders. Of course, we’re in a highly contentious region, where we don’t have easy access or easy communication with our neighbours. But through the Islam collection, it’s always been a goal of ours to create a space, whether it’s physically in a building or digitally where people can come together, study their own and other cultures and expand their horizons, irrespective of what’s going on at the political level.”

Such manuscripts are too delicate to be put on permanent display, Ukeles added. “What’s wonderful about digitisation is that you can get in very close. Only through digitisation have we noticed unique and distinctive details.

Manuscript dating from 1484 of Nur al-Din Jami’s Tuhfat al-Ahrar.

© The Guardian

Female photographers who escaped Nazi persecution - in pictures

By Sarah Gilbert

Coinciding with Women’s History Month, a new exhibition celebrates female photographers, mainly Jewish, who fled Nazi-dominated Europe and brought a fresh eye to life in the UK. Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain After 1933 is on show at Four Corners gallery in east London until 2 May

Jean Seberg, a US actor shot in the 1960s

by Lotte Meitner-Graf, who moved from Austria to the UK in 1937 and became a noted portrait photographer.

A girl from the Canning Town Women’s Settlement in 1940, looking at some of the work produced by local children expressing their view of the second world war. Shot by Gerti Deutsch, who was brought up in Austria and worked mainly for Picture Post.

An image by Dorothy Bohm of a woman in Chapel Street Market, Islington, London in the 1960s. Bohm was sent from Lithuania to school in England in 1939.

A photograph of bathers by Erika Koch, who was forced to leave her school in Berlin because she was Jewish, and sought refuge in the UK at the end of 1936.

Miners’ wives chatting in a 1948 image for Picture Post by Elisabeth Chat.

Photograph by Lisel Haas of two children wearing satchels.

Born to Jewish parents, Haas fled Nazi Germany after Kristallnacht in 1938, abandoning her studio.

An undated photograph of poverty in the UK by Edith Tudor-Hart, who escaped from Austria in 1933 after being persectuted for her communist sympathies and Jewish background.

Š The Guardian

Florence Nightingale's lamp features in 200th anniversary show

By Mark Brown

Two hundred years after her birth, exhibition sheds light on nursing pioneer

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family album featuring unseen drawings of Florence Nightingale is to go on public display for the first time at a show hoping to shine new light on a figure whose name is world famous.

Nightingale, the lady with the lamp, the founding figure of modern nursing, was someone who “is known but not known”, said David Green, director of London’s Florence Nightingale Museum.

“Most people in the world have heard of Florence Nightingale, but they don’t really know her full story,” he said.

The 200th anniversary of her birth has prompted the museum to shine light on different aspects of her life in an exhibition of 200 objects.

They include a family album which was started by Nightingale’s aunt, Ann Elizabeth Nicholson, and passed down through family generations before becoming buried in papers.

It was unearthed last year and loaned to the museum. It includes drawings and watercolour sketches, including a small number of Nightingale.

Also on display for the first time is a gold watch, given to Nightingale by her father, which she wore throughout her service in the Crimean war. She gave it away because she was largely bed-ridden in later years. “I do not use a watch now, for I am not movable,” she said. That shines light on the less well-known side of Nightingale’s life: her physical and mental health struggles. She contracted what is now understood to be brucellosis, which causes fatigue and muscle pain. It turned her into a recluse in her Mayfair home. “That is bound to have had an effect on her mental health,” said Green.

“There is also a very real chance she had post-traumatic stress disorder. She was working in filthy, rat-infested conditions, sanitation was appalling and there were soldiers on the ground, often needing amputations.

Florence Nightingale’s family album, filled with paintings and drawings.

“Possibly more challenging was dealing with the fame which went with her success,” said Green. Because of Crimea she became a hero, the second most famous person in the British empire, and she hated it. “She did not want the adulation and she struggled with it.”

The exhibition will reveal misunderstandings and inaccuracies, such as the lamp carried by Nightingale in the depiction of her on the old £10 note, which was in circulation until 1994. It shows her with a genie-style lamp which had a candle in it rather than the folded Turkish lantern, or “fanoos”, she carried.

The actual lamp will be on display, as will a new Florence Barbie doll that carries the correct lamp.

Other exhibits include the door knocker from her house in Mayfair, visited by luminaries of the Victorian era, including Prime Minister William Gladstone and Charles Dickens.

Green said: “If they were lucky she would see them because there were plenty of times she sent people away, either because she wasn’t in the mood or she wanted to get on with her work.

“She was important enough she could do that. People would still come back. When she spoke, people listened.”

One of the most curious objects is Nightingale’s pet owl Athena, which she acquired on a visit to the Acropolis in Greece. Seeing that the owl was being tormented by a group of boys, she scooped it up and took it with her on her travels.

It became her constant companion and would sit on her shoulder, but it soon died.

Nightingale had it stuffed and it was later displayed in the home of her sister Parthenope who wrote a book The Life and Death of Athena an Owlet from the Parthenon.

• Nightingale in 200 Objects, People & Places: Leader, Icon and Pioneer, is at the Florence Nightingale Museum in the grounds of St Thomas’ hospital, London from 8 March.

The Turkish ‘fanoos’ lamp carried by Florence Nightingale during the Crimean war will go on display.

© The Guardian

FLORENCE BAKER: The polyglot slave girl turned intrepid explorer The Transylvanianborn orphan was sold to an English traveller, with whom she discovered the wonders of Africa, married and fought to abolish slavery

Passport details Lady Florence Baker, née Flora Barbara Maria von Szász, or Sass. Born 6 August 1841 in Nagyenyed, then in the Kingdom of Hungary, now Aiud in present-day Romania.

Claim to fame The details of Florence Baker’s early life are sketchy – for dramatic reasons. As an orphan she was sold into the Ottoman slave trade, and in 1859 found herself on the auction block in Vidin, in present-day Bulgaria.

Blonde, blue-eyed and polylingual, she caught the eye of English traveller Samuel Baker, who bought her.

Baker, a middle-aged widower, took her with him as he headed to Africa to search for the source of the Nile.

Along the way, Florence learned Arabic, brokered peace when their team of locals mutinied, and nearly died of sunstroke. They didn’t find the source of the Nile, but she and Samuel were the first Europeans to see Murchison Falls and Lake Albert in Uganda. When Samuel went back to England in 1865 to be knighted, she went with him as his wife. Explorer David Livingstone wrote snarkily: “Baker married his mistress at Cairo and by all accounts she deserved it after going through all she did for him.” It’s said that a scandalised Queen Victoria refused to receive them at court.

Between 1870 and 1873, the Bakers made another expedition to east Africa to try to suppress the slave trade – presumably a cause Florence felt strongly about.

Supporting documentation Florence kept diaries of her travels in English, but has been overshadowed by her husband and still lacks a definitive biography. In the writings of others – Samuel especially – she emerges as a person of enormous resourcefulness and sangfroid, whether serving afternoon tea to guests in the jungle or preparing a last-ditch defence against the king of Bunyoro’s army.

Distinguishing marks It may just be the long exposure times of 19th-century photography, but pictures of Florence portray an icy calm and imperturbability.

Last sighted Widowed in 1893, Florence lived until 1916 at Sandford Orleigh, the Bakers’ estate in Devon, and was doubtless gratified when the Daily News called her “a refined English lady”.

Intrepidness rating Florence, like Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, was blessed with resilience that seems to require supernatural explanation: 10.

By Marcel Theroux

Lady Florence Baker, pictured in London in about 1870.

© The Guardian

Thomas Becket's vestment to return to the scene of his murder this summer

By Harriet Sherwood

Vatican allows loan of tunicle for display in Canterbury Cathedral to mark 850th death anniversary A vestment believed to be worn by England’s famous “turbulent priest”, Thomas Becket, when four knights hacked him to death in Canterbury Cathedral is to return to the UK this summer.

into exile after being accused of treachery. A few years later, in 1170, he returned but angered Henry by excommunicating the archbishop of York who had sided with the king against Rome. Henry allegedly exclaimed: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

On 29 December, four knights entered the cathedral and hacked Becket to death in front of the high altar, creating an instant martyr.

He was canonised two years later and his shrine became a magnet for pilgrims across Europe, inspiring Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

When Becket was reburied in 1220, relics from his body – fragments of bone, scraps of cloth – were taken and dispersed across Europe.

Thomas Becket’s tunicle will be on display at Canterbury Cathedral from 4 July to 3 August 2020.

The garment, known as a tunicle, contained within a 17th-century glass reliquary, is likely to become a focal point for thousands of pilgrims who are expected to visit Canterbury for the 850th anniversary of Becket’s murder.

The Vatican has given permission for the tunicle to be loaned from its home, the Papal Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.

Three centuries later, during the Reformation, Henry VIII – determined to kill off the cult of St Thomas – ordered his shrine to be destroyed and his remains obliterated. The veneration of saints’ relics was condemned by the Protestant king as an idolatrous Catholic practice.

Max Kramer, the precentor of Canterbury Cathedral, said the tunicle was a reminder of

Four years ago, a fragment of Becket’s elbow made a fleeting appearance at Canterbury Cathedral, on loan from Hungary as part of a tour of Westminster Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, Rochester Cathedral and other churches.

Becket was appointed archbishop of Canterbury in 1162 by his friend King Henry II, who wanted an ally in the crown’s tussles with the church. Almost overnight, however, Becket turned extremely pious, donning a sackcloth shirt, consuming only bread and water, spurning riches and staunchly defending the faith.

He and the king clashed over the supremacy of church and state, and Becket was forced

Thomas Becket was hacked to death by four knights in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 after the archbishop clashed with King Henry II

“the cost of bearing faithful witness to Christ” and of Becket’s “extraordinary legacy”.

The tunicle will be on display at Canterbury Cathedral from 4 July to 3 August 2020 as part of a programme of services, events and exhibitions in the UK to commemorate Becket’s life and death. © The Guardian

Top 10 eyewitness accounts of 20th-century history

By Charles Emmerson

These stories of a tumultuous era bring to life its intimate passions and accidents as well as its overwhelming scale.

One of the great fortunes of a writer chronicling Europe’s tumultuous, revolutionary 20th century is the flood of memoirs, diaries and letters that accompanied it.

It is as if the massiveness of events – the Russian Revolution, two world wars, the Holocaust, great and terrible experiments in human suffering and freedom – created a duty to bear Passion and politics … witness. Reading these accounts often Lenin addressing a crowd in Red Square in October 1917. feels the best way not just to get the facts, but closer to the human impulses at play, the vicissitudes of chance, the reason and unreason of it all.

The best witnesses combine the epochal and the personal, metaphysical and mundane. They speak with immediacy and natural resonance, with life’s downbeats and absurdities, the cold and chaos as well as the grand sense-making narratives. They can even make us laugh. In my new book Crucible, I wanted to tell the story of the years 1917 to 1924 – more similar to our own times than I would like – in a similar voice, in the present tense, more like a film or novel than traditional history.

There are as many different types of witness as reader: those at the centre and at the margin, Rosa Luxemburg penning letters from a prison cell and Einstein taking down impressions of Palestine, those writing accounts with an eye to posterity (all politicians) and those without the time to think. How we read matters as much as who we read. There are those paid to make sense of the world – journalists such as Hemingway or novelists such as Nabokov or Zweig – and those whose testimony moves us through the simple miracle of survival. The trouble is to choose. Here are 10 compelling examples: 1 The Russian Revolution by Nikolai Sukhanov It’s not hard to understand why John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World is the popular eyewitness account of the Bolshevik revolution: Reed and Louise Bryant’s immortalisation in Reds, Lenin’s endorsement, the fact Reed beat others to the scoop. But there are problems. In his scrapbooks in the Harvard archive you find a page where Reed tentatively writes his name in Cyrillic script. Here is a man learning revolution as he goes along, breathless with excitement. (He called Ten Days “a slice of intensified history”). Sukhanov, an insider who wound up dead at the hands of Stalin’s henchmen in 1940, is more balanced. He makes sense of the whole complex rigmarole of 1917, February as well as October, the politics as well as the passion and the personalities.

4. The Diaries of Wasif Jawhariyyeh I was introduced to Jawhariyyeh while researching 1913: The World Before the Great War and was immediately captivated. An Arab Christian in late Ottoman Jerusalem who spoke English, French and Turkish and was taught the Qur’an by a local Islamic scholar, he was his city’s Harry Kesssler: a poet and musician open to all, living in a world with ever-diminishing space for such eclectics.

5. Dateline: Toronto, 1920-1924 by Ernest Hemingway Hemingway’s articles from the 1920s read like a novelist’s prep work, his eye scanning the horizon for that single observation which conveys an infinite backstory. Their veracity is secondary. They zing. He describes a 1922 press conference where new Italian premier Mussolini affects not to notice the crush around him, so engrossed is he in some heavy work of literature. Hemingway notes the actual book he pretends to read: a French-English dictionary, held upside down. This may not be true. But it should be.

6. The Devil in France by Lion Feuchtwanger A German-Jewish anti-Nazi author, Feuchtwanger was nonetheless interned by the French in Les Milles in 1939. While Vichy made peace with Hitler, Feuchtwanger lived in fear of being given up. (This was the time of Casablanca). Defeat, imprisonment, the need to make choices: this is urgently written political and human drama. Feuchtwanger was lucky. He and his wife made it to the US. 7. If This Is a Man by Primo Levi It was decades before Levi’s account of life and death in Auschwitz, written in 1946 while working in a Turin paint factory, took on the significance it holds today. A testament told with simplicity and directness: the details of camp life and the visceral sensations accompanying it, the accumulation of horrors, the tenuousness of hope and then, one day: “The Germans were no longer there. The watchtowers were empty.”

8. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn From the 1920s on, westerners such as Emma Goldman and Victor Serge told their tales of Soviet disappointment, experiences from behind the veil of lies already hardening into what would become the iron curtain (a term first used by the British suffragette and socialist Ethel Snowden in 1920). Solzhenitsyn’s work is in a different, higher register: both meditation on and meticulous account of the camps so integral to the mechanisms of fear and power in Stalin’s USSR: the way skin cracks from the cold, the women faced with the awful dilemmas of survival, the Lithuanians who helped him make a rosary from stale bread. A grand indictment equal to its subject.

Joan Bright Astley.

2. Bureau of Military History, Ireland While books have traditionally been the format of published witness testimony, oral histories and archival digitisation have changed the landscape. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum site offers survivors’ video interviews. Audio projects document Indian partition and the Windrush experience. For Crucible, I found myself engrossed in digital records of grainy, typed-up statements from participants in Ireland’s bloody and intimate independence struggle, all at www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie.

3. The Diaries of Harry Kessler Kessler has it all. Born into wealth, eternally inquisitive, an insider whose sexuality gave him an outsider’s perspective, Kessler got everywhere and met everyone from Bismarck to Josephine Baker. A diplomat as well as a dandy, he understood politics as well as art and cared for both (earning the moniker the Red Count).

And he wrote brilliantly. One example: describing Berlin after the failed 1919 Communist coup as continuing on “like an Diplomat and dandy … Harry Kessler. elephant stabbed by a penknife”.

9. The Inner Circle: A View of War at the Top

by Joan Bright Astley Joan Bright – trained in shorthand and typing, confident, easy to trust, keenly perceptive of others – was at the diplomatic centre of the second world war. A trusted intermediary between the top brass and Churchill, she was there in Quebec, Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam.

High-level war management is never just about the (mostly male) principals: generals, diplomats and politicians with fired-up egos.

There are all the things that go into making sure information gets where it should, that some small mishap does not upset the whole and personal tensions do not overwhelm the common cause. Bright’s account of her “marvellous war” gives character and verve to that reality.

10. The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich Alexievich is the meta-witness to the Soviet experience, eyewitness to the eyewitnesses. She turns memories into folk epics and gives human scale to the awful hugeness of the “Great Patriotic War”. Here are the stories of women often drowned by what the war had become in the 1980s USSR, the stale trumpet-blare of Communist legitimacy. Then she did the same for Chernobyl, the starting point of the Soviet Union’s unravelling, as important to the century’s end as its foundation was to its start. Literature is “news that stays news”, wrote Ezra Pound. This is what Alexievich has done for her eyewitnesses: imbuing their testimony with the power of literature, thus ensuring it remains relevant for all time.

• Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World 1917-24 by Charles Emmerson is published by Bodley Head.

Dispatches from hell: the extraordinary story of the hero who infiltrated Auschwitz

By Claire Armitstead

Jack Fairweather, a former foreign correspondent who once wrote a story while being chased by a kidnap squad in Iraq.

This week Jack Fairweather won the Costa Prize for his book The Volunteer. It is the biography of Polish resistance leader and intelligence agent Witold Pilecki, who had himself deliberately interned in the death camp ne spring day in 1948, two children were sitting at their school desks in Poland when the tannoy crackled into life to announce that their father had just been executed as an enemy of the state. Andrzej and Zofia Pilecki knew nothing about the mission that had taken their father away from them for most of their childhood. It was only when they were in their 60s, as the iron curtain fell, that the details of Witold Pilecki’s extraordinary second world war mission began to emerge.

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Then, in 2012, a British war correspondent who was looking for a new subject after covering wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, stumbled across the story. He discovered that Pilecki, a former cavalry officer, had become a leading member of the Polish resistance – and deliberately got himself interned in Auschwitz so that he could send intelligence to London. He survived that ordeal only to fall into the hands of the Soviet regime, who took possession of Poland in the postwar carve-up of Europe.

Jack Fairweather was in his late 30s and the father of two young children when he began work on the book. When The Volunteer was crowned Costa book of the year this week, Fairweather paid an emotional tribute to Andrzej and Zofia, who were among hundreds of survivors who helped him piece together their father’s story.

In undertaking the task, Fairweather knew he would have to honour Pilecki’s own insistence that “any falsehood would profane the memory of my fallen colleagues”. Every single word of the book is either from Pilecki’s own writing, from Witold Pilecki at a show trial in Poland in 1948

interviews Fairweather conducted, or from firsthand accounts by people who lived alongside Pilecki, drawn from the many thousands of testimonies held in the Auschwitz museum.

Sitting in his publisher’s office the day after his win, Fairweather sums up the five years he spent on the book: “Years of always chasing your quarry and looking for a glimpse – for one of those very special moments when you suddenly

see the full man. It can be a story detail or a snippet you find in the archive.”

One such nugget popped up when he took Pilecki’s octogenarian nephew back to the Warsaw flat the nephew’s family had lived in when he was a toddler. The nephew was just three the night his uncle was taken away. He remembered that his teddy bear had just fallen out of his cot. Pilecki, writes Fairweather, “quickly picks up the bear and hands it to the boy and the mother lets the Germans in. ‘See you soon,’ he whispers to the child. Then, against every instinct he must have had, he steps into captivity.”

The story must have become a family anecdote, Fairweather says. “For me, it really spoke of one of his great characteristics: at times of greatest stress, when you’d expect him to be thinking of himself, he was always able to reach out and engage with other people.” Part of the puzzle, adds the 41-year-old author, lay in working out what drove “this apparently ordinary man, with no great record of service, to expand his empathy, his moral capacity, to piece together the Nazis’ greatest crimes when others looked away”.

Pilecki managed to get 10 reports smuggled out of the death camp during his two and a half years there, but they fell on deaf ears and were forgotten. Their significance only began to emerge in the early 90s, when Polish archives – sealed by the Soviets – were opened to Polish historians. But one important piece of the jigsaw was missing: the testimony Pilecki was known to have written during a spell in Italy after he escaped from Auschwitz by using a duplicate key made by a metalworker friend in the camp.

Witold and Maria Pilecki in 1944.

“The goosebumps moment,” says Fairweather, “was when my researcher phoned me from the Polish Underground Study Trust in London saying it had been found.” The document – entrusted to a colleague when Pilecki made the fatal decision to return to his homeland under the Soviets – had been handed over to the Polish government in exile in the 60s, but had been kept secret for fear of reprisals against people it named. “There it was in his loopy blue handwriting,” says Fairweather, “still in a little beige folder.”

One of the most poignant discoveries for Fairweather was that the second world war didn’t end in May 1945 for Poland and a lot of Europe.

“For us, it was victory parades and celebrations.

But for them, it marked the transition to the brutality of Stalin, when more than 80,000 people who had resisted the Nazis were arrested and tortured. Hundreds were shot and thousands more deported to the gulag.”

Growing up in Wales, the eldest of four children born to teacher parents, Fairweather was steeped in a war history that made little mention of the Polish resistance. “We always think of the French,” he says, “but Polish intelligence was much bigger and more sophisticated.”

Pilecki survived in the camp by using his underground contacts to wangle the relatively easy jobs of carpenter and hospital block handyman, though they did not shield him from witnessing Auschwitz’s horrors. “One day while scratching in the frozen earth for roots,” writes Fairweather, “he had the grim thought that they’d

be better off if the British simply bombed the camp and brought an end to the suffering.”

Pilecki developed this thought in one of his reports, reasoning that nobody would die in vain if Auschwitz was obliterated, because it would expose what was going on, while ending the “monstrous suffering”.

Fairweather arrived at the book via an Oxford degree followed by a career as a war correspondent, which began when his tutor suggested him for a job at a Kolkata newspaper.

While working there as a copy editor on the letters page, he took himself off to report on the 2002 terrorist attack on the US cultural centrein the city, selling it to the Daily Telegraph in the UK “for three months of my salary at the paper”. He was given a break as a stringer in Kuwait where, “by a bizarre coincidence”, a former schoolfriend of his mother’s turned out to be a member of the Kuwaiti royal family and head of the civil service.

His first big scoop was an interview in which, contrary to official briefings, the Kuwaiti foreign minister said the country would be happy to be the launchpad for an attack on Iraq aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein.

Stints in Afghanistan and Iraq followed, resulting in two books. He talks of “the heroism of ordinary people” – in particular, the Iraqi driver who, with Fairweather typing out the story of an attempted suicide bombing in the back seat, managed to outrun a Shia squad who had been sent to kidnap him. “We were bouncing all over the place for 45 minutes. I was saying, ‘Please drive more carefully.

I’m trying to write a piece.” Only when they’d arrived back in Baghdad and he had filed his story did his driver tell him exactly what had been going on.

It’s a great tale but, he says, it is nothing compared with what Pilecki lived through. “To be able to get this man’s story was the greatest honour of my career. My books about Iraq and Afghanistan were attempts to understand what I’d experienced. But in this case, I was trying to follow in the footsteps of this man – and be confronted by history as it confronted him.” He adds: “When we think of western war heroes, they give us solace and a story about our experience.

But Poland wasn’t ever able to commemorate its heroes because for decades they were ‘enemies of the people’.”

Fairweather – who now lives between London and Vermont with his American wife, the journalist Christina Asquith – is well aware that The Volunteer owes part of its power to the fact that Auschwitz is now passing out of living human memory. “I wanted to speak to as many people who had witnessed Pilecki in action – and many of the people I interviewed are now dead.”

He pauses. “We’re living in a time of turmoil, with resurgent nationalism and rising antisemitism.

That’s why Pilecki’s story is so important. I find it really inspiring. He immersed himself in the darkest moment of human history and somehow found the courage to rise above it.”

© The Guardian

By Claire Armitstead

Dispatches from hell: the extraordinary story of the hero who infiltrated Auschwitz This week Jack Fairweather won the Costa Prize for his book The Volunteer. It is the biography of Polish resistance leader and intelligence agent Witold Pilecki, who had himself deliberately interned in the death camp ne spring day in 1948, two children were sitting at their school desks in Poland when the tannoy crackled into life to announce that their father had just been executed as an enemy of the state. Andrzej and Zofia Pilecki knew nothing about the mission that had taken their father away from them for most of their childhood. It was only when they were in their 60s, as the iron curtain fell, that the details of Witold Pilecki’s extraordinary second world war mission began to emerge.

Then, in 2012, a British war correspondent

O

who was looking for a new subject after covering wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, stumbled across the story. He discovered that Pilecki, a former cavalry officer, had become a leading member of the Polish resistance – and deliberately got himself interned in Auschwitz so that he could send intelligence to London. He survived that ordeal only to fall into the hands of the Soviet regime, who took possession of Poland in the postwar carve-up of Europe.

Jack Fairweather was in his late 30s and the father of two young children when he began work on the book. When The Volunteer was crowned Costa book of the year this week, Fairweather paid an emotional tribute to Andrzej and Zofia, who were among hundreds of survivors who helped him piece Diplomat and dandy … Harry Kessler.

together their father’s story.

In undertaking the task, Fairweather knew he would have to honour Pilecki’s own insistence that “any falsehood would profane the memory of my fallen colleagues”.

Every single word of the book is either from Pilecki’s own writing, from interviews Fairweather conducted, or from first-hand accounts by people who lived alongside Pilecki, drawn from the many thousands of testimonies held in the Auschwitz museum.

Sitting in his publisher’s office the day after his win, Fairweather sums up the five years he spent on the book: “Years of always chasing your quarry and looking for a glimpse – for one of those very special moments when you suddenly see the full man. It can be a story detail or a snippet you find in the archive.” © The Guardian

Hallucinating history: when Stalin and Eisenstein reinvented a revolution

By Peter Bradshaw Ten years after the storming of the Winter Palace, Sergei Eisenstein’s surreal and savage epic October reimagined Russia’s 1917 revolt – and parodied Stalin, who had commissioned it.

We revisit its explosive unruliness.

‘Reimagining history for posterity’ … a vision of Lenin in October

by Sergei Eisenstein.

C

oleridge said that seeing the fiery Edmund Kean act was “like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning”.

Watching Sergei Eisenstein’s classic silent film October is like watching the Russian revolution the same way. It’s surreally lit up by stark images that sear your retina; gone the next second, to be replaced by others just as mysterious and disorientating. October is not a historical document, more a remembered dream. I sometimes wish we could see it without music, with just a deafening thunderbolt on each of its 3,200 cuts. A violent electrical storm of strangeness.

The film was commissioned in Stalin’s Soviet Russia for the 10th anniversary of the 1917 October revolution, as a suitably fervent propagandist celebration. Eisenstein was the obvious candidate to direct, having won an international reputation for his brilliant Battleship Potemkin. Like Orson Welles, he had first made his mark in experimental theatre (And, like Welles, he later got bogged down in a big Latin American location shoot that resulted in a lost film – for Welles: It’s All True, for Eisenstein: ¡Que viva México!).

October has fierce, declamatory intertitles with exclamation points, unforgettably intense closeups on faces, staggering crowd scenes with swarming masses, savage and ambiguous satiric digressions and epic set pieces for which Eisenstein was pretty much given licence to do what he liked in Sergei Eisenstein Leningrad (as it then was). He was recreating or reimagining historical events so soon afterwards, and with so many of the original participants, that the film is almost a docu-hallucination of what happened.

The action follows the historical record, in its way. The February revolution sees the pulling down of the statue of Alexander III; there is tension and frustration between the workers, peasants and soldiers. April sees the

incendiary arrival of Lenin from exile, demanding an end to the Provisional government. The July Days are shown, with their riots, the Bolsheviks’ unwillingness to attack and the spectacular urban disorder. General Kornilov launches a Tsarist counter-revolutionary assault, which is foiled after a reverse-time vision of the Tsar statue being de-toppled; the Provisional government’s leader Kerensky is shown strutting pompously around, affecting his Napoleonic mannerisms; and finally there is the storming of the Winter Palace itself.

The film pioneered a number of things, quite apart from the montage – the audacious juxtaposition of images – for which Eisenstein became famous. Stalin himself interfered at an early stage, viewing an early rough assembly of material and demanding that scenes with Trotsky and even Lenin were removed. And so he became cinema’s first overbearing producer, in a nauseous parallel with his censorship, tyranny and mass murder. Eisenstein was never terrorised by Stalin in the way other artists were, and was arguably as complicit as any apparatchik, but he was certainly later compelled to abandon his experimentalism for Stalin’s favoured “socialist realism”. He was further forced to make humiliating public apologies when Stalin declared he had got it wrong and he underwent constant fear.

October is of course very different from classic Hollywood filmmaking, as in, say, David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (based on the Boris Pasternak novel), in which a conventional love story anchors the political events.

Eisenstein doesn’t offer any characters for us to relate to.

Lenin and Kerensky hardly count. My personal theory, moreover, is that the Eisenstein was puffed-up, boastful forced to make figure of Kerensky is humiliating public apologies for what Stalin not only to be said he got wrong… a still from October. compared to Napoleon – apart from the lack of a moustache, he could be Marshal Stalin himself in his uniform and his stiff bearing.

The storming of the Winter Palace is a concept Eisenstein almost invented. It became the eternal trope for the revenge of the dispossessed: a simple, dual image. Power and wealth inside the luxurious palace; downtrodden poor outside. In reality, it was a chaotic and weirdly anticlimactic affair involving far fewer people. Eisenstein reimagined it for posterity as a sweeping battle scene, like the storming of the Bastille. He also added irresistible images, such as the Bolshevik jeering incredulously at the padded lavatory seat in the Empress’s bedroom.

Perhaps more astonishing is an earlier sequence, in which the government orders the raising of a drawbridge to prevent the Bolshevik masses from entering the city; in the melee, a dead

white horse, attached to a carriage, is caught at the point where the bridge separates. It dangles high above the river: poignant, awe-inspiring and in some mysterious way sacrificial. It has a stranger-than-fiction reality. What a horribly undignified end for this noble beast. What on earth can it symbolise? In its pure unreadability it has a poetic power in excess of Eisenstein’s much-discussed montage pairing of the conceited Kerensky with shots of an imaginary mechanical peacock.

Above all else, October is about violence. The whole movie is shot through with an atmosphere of delirium. For all that it is a loyal and ideological tribute to the revolution, it also looks like a bacchanal of violent insurrection, or a panoramic portrait shattered into thousands of shard-like images. This is partly due to the unfinished first world war: Russia was in conflict within and without, and its own civil war – that great unmentioned subject that comes between the events of this film and the circumstances of its release – hovers over it. October is an intuition of what Pushkin called the merciless senselessness of the Pugachevshchina, the 18thcentury peasant revolt from which the ruling classes learned secretly to fear and hate the lower orders. Lenin himself said the “proletarian state” is a “system of organised violence”.

Eisenstein’s film could be said in its own way to have systematised it.

Yet there is always something more unquantifiable going on. When the all-female 1st Petrograd Women’s Battalion of Death is summoned to defend the Winter Palace, Eisenstein creates a very curious byway in which a soldier is shown in a sort of reverie triggered by a Rodin statue. That is partly to mock women’s alleged incapacity for martial service,

but it is also just to knock things for a visual loop. The same is true, I think, for the grand ladies with their parasols attacking the worker during the July Days. Of course that is to satirise the bourgeoisie, yet Eisenstein appears in that instant on the women’s side, obscurely excited by the exotic flare-up of aggression.

October is a film which attaches itself to Russian history’s dark combustion, almost as if political reality was metaphorically subordinate to Eisenstein’s own radical formal upheaval as an artist. The events gave him the perfect pretext for explosive unruliness on a grand scale. His guiding spirit was not Lenin, but Bakunin. The film is pure anarchy.

Sergei Eisenstein’s October will be screened with a live orchestral score at the Barbican, London, on 26 October.

© The Guardian

The gateway to hell?

By Mark Brown

Hundreds of anti-witch marks found in Midlands cave Hundreds of symbols at gorge could be Britain’s biggest collection of protective signs Some of the apotropaic marks believed to protect against witches at Creswell Crags in the east Midlands

There is no public access to the cave but the trust is considering a multi-media presentation for visitors.

Up close the walls are a remarkable frenzy of marks.

Everywhere you point a torch there are overlapping Vs, a reference to Mary, virgin of virgins. There are also PMs, as in Pace Maria, and crossed Is, referring to Jesus on a cross, and odd-shaped As. Alison Fearn, a Leicester university expert on protective marks, recalled first shuffling on her backside in to the cave and realising what she was looking at. “I think I said a very naughty word.”

The letters and symbols were Christian but should not be looked at in that context, she said. From the 16th century to the early 19th century, when people made witches marks, there may have been a lack of association with religion, such as today when people might cross fingers or say “oh god”. She said: “It just becomes a protective symbol. It was a mark you always made to protect yourself.”

A Tenerife hotel being placed in quarantine this week.

Members of the Subterranea Britannica group check out the witches’ marks at Creswell Crags

What the marks were keeping out, or in, can only be speculated on. “It could be fairies, witches, whatever you were fearful of, it was going to be down there.”

The cave markings fit in with local history since the postmediaeval village of Creswell used to be much closer to the caves. The dukes of Portland had relocated the village 20 minutes walk away during a spot of 19th century landscaping for themselves.

If there is a gateway to hell, a portal from the underworld used by demons and witches to wreak their evil havoc on humanity, then it could be in a small east Midlands cave handy for both the M1 and A60.

Heritage experts have revealed what is thought to be the biggest concentration of apotropaic marks, or symbols to ward off evil or misfortune, ever found in the UK. The markings, at Creswell Crags, a limestone gorge on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border, include hundreds of letters, symbols and patterns carved, at a time when belief in witchcraft was widespread. The scale and variety of the marks made on the limestone walls and ceiling of a cave which has at its centre a deep, dark, hole, is unprecedented.

Believed to protect against witches and curses, the marks were discovered by chance at the site, which is also home to the only ice age art ever discovered in the UK. Paul Baker, the director of Creswell Heritage Trust, said the marks had been in plain sight. They had known they were there. “But we told people it was Victorian graffiti,” he said. “We had no idea. Can you imagine how stupid we felt?”

The trust was alerted to the marks last year by Hayley Clark and Ed Waters. The two keen-eyed cavers thought there were perhaps two or three markings; it soon became clear there were dozens and then on further investigation up to a thousand. And counting. “They are everywhere,” said Baker. “How scared were they?”

John Charlesworth, the caves’ heritage interpreter, said natural landscapes were once regarded as scary places.

“These are places where supernatural forces in an untamed non-human environment could be at work. Local people are in the jaws of this monstrous landscape.”

Ritualistic protection marks are most commonly found in houses and churches, in doors and windows, to ward off evil spirits. They have been found in caves but never on this scale.

Creswell Crags hit the headlines in 2003 when ice age cave art, including figures of birds, deer, bison and horses, were discovered.

Macbeth’s witches from the Illustrated Library Shakespeare published in 1890

The announcement of the latest find was made by Creswell Crags and Historic England. Baker acknowledged that the witches’ marks might bring a new type of visitor.

Ronald Hutton, a professor and leading authority on folklore, said the find was hugely important and exciting.

“It looks like the largest assemblage of protective marks ever found in British caves, and possibly anywhere in Britain.” © The Guardian

From the Black Death to coronavirus: a brief history of quarantines

By Stephen Moss

dealing with people suspected of having leprosy, with instructions to “shut up” those thought to be at risk and get a priest to check on them every seven days to see if the disease has taken hold. The Greek physician Hippocrates, who first defined epidemics, also stressed the need to isolate sufferers.

A Tenerife hotel being placed in quarantine this week.

It has been used to contain epidemics for thousands of years – and is a crucial response to the current health crisis, too. But when did quarantining people begin?

China has resorted to mass quarantining in response to the coronavirus epidemic, while towns in Italy with high infection rates have been cordoned off and holidaymakers in Tenerife are confined to their rooms. The rest of us can only watch and try not to panic. But this is far from the first time that freedom of movement has been curtailed because of fears of a pandemic.

Urbanisation and the regulation of public health in the late 18th and 19th centuries slowly led to systematic quarantining. During the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, it was left to other towns in the US to quarantine the city by banning its residents and goods from entering. But repeated outbreaks of yellow fever, cholera and smallpox in the 19th century eventually led to the federal government taking responsibility for quarantine.

The influenza epidemic of 1918-20 (the socalled “Spanish flu”) was so widespread that in some places it was not the sick who were quarantined, but the healthy – a policy now called “protective sequestration”. In 1918, Gunnison in Colorado barricaded all roads into the town and told people arriving by train they would be arrested and The modern notion of quarantine dates quarantined. The policy worked: no one in back to the 15th century, when Venice was the town died of Spanish flu. grappling with one of the recurrent Quarantine raises human rights issues, with outbreaks of the Black Death, which had individual freedom having to be balanced devastated Asia and Europe in the 14th against public health. The UN stresses the century and continued to reappear for the need for proportionality and evidencenext 500 years. The idea of isolating potential carriers, usually sailors arriving on based action in accordance with the Siracusa principles established in 1984, but ships from Asia, where the plague originated, was common in the 14th century, in the last resort the World Health Organization says “interference with but it wasn’t until 1448 that the Venetian freedom of movement when instituting authorities decreed the period of isolation quarantine or isolation for a communicable to check for symptoms should be 40 disease may be necessary for the public (quaranta in Italian) days. good, and could be considered legitimate Isolating carriers of disease, however, under international human rights law”. predates the Black Death by thousands of years. The book of Leviticus in the Old Testament has an entire chapter devoted to Now with coronavirus, is it 1918 all over again? That is the terrifying question. © The Guardian

Beyond Mantel: the historical novels everyone must read

By John Mullan

Tipping The Velvet, Sarah Waters’s novel, is set in England in the 1890s. The BBC series starred Keeley Hawes (left) and Rachel Stirling.

From Francis Spufford to Sarah Waters, contemporary writers have brought new complexity and playfulness to historical fiction Readers of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies can be in no doubt about where The Mirror & the Light, the concluding volume of Hilary Mantel’s historical trilogy (reviewed on page 12), will take them. On 28 July 1540, Thomas Cromwell will be beheaded at Tower Hill. But while we know where Cromwell is going, he does not. Mantel has brilliantly exploited the predestination of historical fiction. It comes alive in the gap between the reader’s knowledge and her protagonist’s uncertainty. Her special achievement is to restore provisionality – luck, accident, surprise – to history. In Mantel’s extraordinary present-tense narration, history is unfolding before us. Cromwell, the novelist’s surrogate, is a piercing analyst of human beings, but can never be sure of what they will do next.

This is where historical fiction began. When Walter Scott in effect invented the genre with Waverley in 1814, his eponymous hero was a young idealist drawn into the 1745 Jacobite rebellion against George II. (The reader knew that the rebellion was to fail.) In the 19th century, in Scott’s wake, the historical novel had high status.

Works that are now little read – Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond Esq, George Eliot’s Romola, Hardy’s The Trumpet Major – were once thought their authors’ highest achievements.

By the next century, historical fiction had sunk.

Modernism made history look like escapism and novelists avoided it. As the mid-20th century approached, historical fiction was commercially successful but distinctly populist. The big names were authors such as Georgette Heyer and Jean

Russell Crowe in Peter Weir’s 2003, film of Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian

Plaidy (the nom de plume of the prolific Eleanor Hibbert). They loved their History. Heyer, in particular, was exacting in her research, her Regency novels sometimes clotted with period detail. The most successful and prolific historical novelist of today, Philippa Gregory, equally prides herself on accuracy. You can say the same for Bernard Cornwell, with his Sharpe series, or Patrick O’Brian, with his Napoleonic nautical novels.

Yet sometimes a historical setting means not an accumulation of period detail, but the very opposite. Some novelists go to the past to lose the distractions of the modern world. The model

here is William Golding, in both his 1964 novel The Spire and To the Ends of the Earth, his trilogy of novels from the 1980s set on a ship taking British migrants to Australia in the early 19th century. Golding used the imagined past to distil essential human appetites and conflicts. In The Spire, the building of an English cathedral spire in the middle ages is the Christian mission of Jocelin, the dean, but he and those who work for him are possessed by dark

spirits of lust or fear.

A more recent book such as Jim Crace’s dark antipastoral Harvest, set in a remote English village at a time of forced enclosures of land (the date is uncertain), belongs to the same category of historical fiction. The past is where social order hardly protects people from some Hobbesian state of nature. A comparable example is Samantha Harvey’s 2018 novel The Western Wind, which takes us to an isolated Somerset village in the 15th century. Narrated by an intelligent, weary parish priest, it asks us to imagine what religious belief might be like in an age of faith.

(This is an interest of much recent historical fiction.) The action takes place over four days, in reverse chronological order, as if time is pulling us backwards.

There is a mystery plot – the wealthiest and cleverest man in the village has disappeared, perhaps drowned – but to find the solution we return to what the narrator has always known. The history that it reveals is one of communal violence. Oddly, the setting and the protagonist have something in common with Robert Harris’s 2019 neo-historical novel The Second Sleep. Although this begins by declaring that its events take place in 1468, we soon find that we are in a Dark Age of the distant future, where history has been remade after some catastrophe. It is also a novel that turns on the murderous violence with which one small group can turn on another.

A novel set centuries ago has a freedom denied to fiction that goes back only decades, to times for which we still have records or even memories.

Some contemporary novelists clearly find historical distance a liberation. Andrew Miller’s Now We Shall Be Entirely Free (2018) is set in 1809 and narrates the return from the Peninsular war of a traumatised army officer, who flees the horrors of war but is pursued by a vengeful villain.

Essential to the novel’s pleasure is the estranging period detail – we explore a Regency gunshop, visit a textile mill, or flinch from the work of a surgeon of the time. (Miller has always been fascinated by the incomplete medical and scientific knowledge of earlier ages ). Yet the sentences are only lightly touched by archaism.

For Miller, as for some other contemporary novelists, history has become an escape into the wonderful. The challenge is language: how do you make your characters’ sentences belong to another age? Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake took the archaising principle to an unmatchable extreme. His novel, set in 11th-century Lincolnshire, is narrated in an invented neo-Old English, full of words and syntactic patterns taken

from Anglo-Saxon, comprehensible to the modern reader. Among recent historical novels, James Meek’s To Calais, in Ordinary Time is rare in making its vocabulary and occasionally syntax sound old. The novel is set in 1348. The “ordinary time” of its title names a period in the religious calendar between major festivals, but also refers ironically to the extraordinary time of the Black Death, impending as the novel begins. It centres on three characters of different social groups and fashions different languages for each of them: a dialect culled from Chaucer, a diction learned from French romance and an elaborately Latinate English. There is a delight about this, but also a price to pay. We notice the characters less than the author’s amusement as he fabricates his antique idiolects from magpie visits to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Playfulness and pastiche have crept in to historical fiction in recent years. A cunning example is Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill, set in New York in the 1740s, and itself an imitation of an 18th-century novel. Spufford offers his book as “a colonial counterpart to Joseph Andrews or David Simple”, bestselling novels of the 1740s by brother and sister Henry and Sarah Fielding, respectively. Both employ guileless heroes, set loose in a guileful world. Golden Hill’s hero, who has arrived from London in this dangerous town, appears to be an innocent, yet turns out to be anything but.

Rufus Sewell and Juliet Aubrey in Middlemarch

Spufford entertains us with 18th-century setpieces: a card game, a rioting mob, confinement in prison, a duel, a play (you will find all these in the novels of the Fieldings). Golden Hill is full of parodic flourishes and incongruously replanted lines from famous English novels, from Tristram Shandy to Middlemarch. It also has the kind of postmodern twist not unfamiliar in recent fiction, where we discover near the novel’s end an unexpected truth about the narrative that we have been reading. The mock 18th-century book provides its own account of how it got made.

Such generic playfulness has been permitted to historical fiction since John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. You find it in the neoVictorian fiction of Sarah Waters – Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith – or in Charles Palliser.

Writing about the distant past means rewriting the novels of the period that you are revisiting.

Mantel has hardly been alone in bringing new literary complexity to historical fiction. Yet she has done something singular. She gives us not just circumstantial accuracy (the clothes, the food, the manners) but fastidious narrative exactitude.

Almost every named character is someone that we know existed, exactly in that time and place.

Every episode fits the historical record. Academic historians may not like her take on Sir Thomas More – a cold fanatic in Wolf Hall – but they dispute with her as with a fellow expert. She has freed the historical novel from any condescension, but she has also set a stern precedent. It seems an impossible act to follow. © The Guardian

Coronavirus: How did Ireland handle epidemics throughout history?

Diarmaid Ferriter

House Fort on an isolated sea wall at the mouth of the River Liffey – a 50-bed wood-and-iron unit constructed in just 21 days at a cost of £939. This state intervention, via the local authority, proved to be the vital initiative. There were also 1,400 “contacts” housed in a refuge in St Nicholas Street for two weeks at a time. As Dublin cabmen were loath to take passengers there, the city council bought a 12-person omnibus to ferry people to and from the refuge. A campaign to get people to present themselves for vaccination was also initiated, with vaccination centres set up in various parts of the city.

Victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic are quarantined in a converted warehouse.

Vaccination against smallpox was compulsory in Ireland and the local authority was responsible for enforcing the regulations. essons from Irish history underline the vital There was also a search for concealed cases of smallpox importance of leadership, decisiveness, clarity of along with incineration of patients’ clothing and bedding and communication and effective co-ordination when disinfection of their dwellings. Voluntary effort – or indeed dealing with public health crises, along with co-operation central government – could not have handled all this, and from the public. the powers the local authority exercised were crucial. As Wallace concludes, “the mediating role of the city...

We should not think of our health history as just a journey equipped with modern powers and state funds, was from darkness to enlightenment or primitiveness to essential.” modernity. The historian Oliver MacDonagh has pointed out, for example, that by the mid-19th century, Ireland The great influenza pandemic of 1918-19 was of course on a had “one of the most advanced health services in Europe” terrifyingly vaster scale and the greatest threat since the which was “to a large degree state-supported, uniform cholera epidemic of the famine era. In three waves it killed and centralised”. well over 20,000 and infected an estimated 800,000 in Ireland. The leading historian of this calamity, Ida Milne, has Nonetheless, there were always regional disparities and observed it “placed an enormous strain on the underfunded, accessibility issues, and care at home was imperative for overstretched and awkwardly structured health system”. many, while the Edwardian era generated new administrative issues relating to public health and – Complication correspondingly – a more extensive role for local But another complication was that the Local Government authorities.

Board (LGB) – often regarded as the public face of government in Ireland due to its reach and multiple As a result, potential public health disasters were avoided responsibilities – “was widely perceived as being either or lessened. As pointed out by historian Ciarán Wallace, a unwilling or unable to devise a plan of action to deal with the serious outbreak of smallpox in 1902-3 “threatened epidemic”. There was thus an absence of a “centralised crisis Dublin’s overcrowded population and its proverbially management strategy emerging from the LGB”, while a inefficient Dublin City Council”. According to Wallace, range of voluntary healthcare providers “devised localised “how this looming catastrophe was averted illustrates the strategies to feed and nurse the ill”. growing importance of local councils in safeguarding There were many complaints about poor communications public health.” The city had become its own sanitary from the authorities, though given the scale and rapidity of authority and, in rising to the challenge, its council the spread, this was a common accusation internationally. became vital in confronting the outbreak.

The LGB’s doctors worked tirelessly but inevitably struggled to cope.

In February 1902 a visitor from Glasgow became ill while staying at a lodging house in the tenement district of Milne also records that commerce was hugely disrupted and Townsend Street; he was removed to a fever hospital and “entire towns were silenced as the flu passed through... court the occupants of the lodging house were moved to an sittings and public meetings were postponed, libraries and isolation unit. Three “contact” cases occurred but the other public buildings were closed and sports fixtures and patients recovered in isolation. concerts cancelled.” In many cases whole families were Smallpox entered the city again in March 1903 and, within incapacitated and there was little point in them going to five months, 255 cases across a densely populated north hospital as the capacity was not there. Once again Charles inner city emerged, and 33 people died. The outbreak Cameron, who was now aged 80, delivered public advice in lasted until July but what was most notable was the a clear and practical way, emphasising the need for decisiveness shown, especially by the impressive Charles disinfection, ventilation and minimal contact until recovery.

Cameron, Dublin’s medical superintendent of health, through identifying the chain of original infection and As The Irish Times put it at the time, “Disinfection and then moving quickly to isolate and disinfect. purification are the watchwords just now.”

Smallpox hospital And now too.

Crucially, new isolation beds were needed, and so a © THE IRISH TIMES smallpox hospital was rapidly constructed at the Pigeon

L

Auschwitz and the new anti-Semitism bullets” might be remembered too, since, as a baleful document of what humans are capable of doing to other humans, these mass murders may be even more dumbfounding than the gassings and incinerations of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and the rest. For the victims of the Einsatzgruppen were executed close up, by hand, as it were, aided by local “auxiliaries” who had been neighbours of those they were about to kill and bury in pits.

The Jewish Westhoffen cemetary near Strasbourg in eastern France, where last month 107 graves were found vandalised with swastikas and anti-Semetic inscriptions.

Seventy-five years after the camp’s liberation, remembrance is more important than ever “P.J.” The letters were painted in ghostly white, a foot high on the wall, faded but legible beneath the veil of grime. I was seven years old when I noticed them, waiting with my father for the arrival of uncles and aunts at Southend railway station. What did the gnomic inscription mean?

“Nothing; never mind,” he answered, but I remember the uneasiness written on his usually frank face. Later that day, when I asked again, he told me. The initials stood, he said, for “Perish Judah”. “Bad people, stupid people put them there; that’s why they’re rubbed out.”

I was struck (and scared) by the archaic ring of it, as if drawn from an Old Testament passage recording the proclamation of a Mesopotamian tyrant resolved to raze Jerusalem to the ground. My parents thought the graffito a relic of the Mosley years in the 1930s, when they and all their East End friends and neighbours had stood firm against the fascist march on Cable Street. But since the sighting was in 1952, I now realise there was another possibility.

The Einsatzgruppen themselves numbered a mere 3,000. One of their officers in Lithuania estimated the ratio of Germans to locals in the firing squads to be one to eight. Work out for yourselves what that means.

Women and children were executed in colossal numbers. Himmler made it plain that “I could not justify exterminating men and allow children to grow up to be their avengers.” The Nazi prime objective, after all, was to annihilate the Jewish future embodied in children and women of childbearing age.

All of this became exhaustively known during the Einsatzgruppen trials, as would the full enormity of the death camps of the “Final Solution”.

But as we have discovered to our cost, neither irrefutable historical evidence nor proximity in time and place to the events immunised the world against the dehumanising prejudices consummated in the Holocaust. The degradations of anti-Semitism did not begin with the Nazis and would not end with them.

Nor did it predispose powers who had slammed the door of refuge in the face of the Jews in their time of most desperate need to feel especially tender-hearted towards survivors. Ernest Bevin, foreign secretary in the Labour government, formed a joint Anglo-American Commission on Palestine in 1945 as a way of preparing some shared responsibility. But when it recommended allowing 100,000 survivors to enter the country, Bevin and prime minister Clement Attlee ignored the proposal. No state was stepping forward with welcoming visas for those languishing in displaced-persons camps in Europe.

Survivors attempting to return to their countries of origin and reclaim

Five years before, over a hot bank holiday weekend in August 1947, there had been a frightening outbreak of anti-Semitic rioting – especially violent in Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. The trigger had been the hanging in Palestine of two British army sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, by the Jewish paramilitary group Irgun Zvai Leumi, three of whose members had been executed by the British authorities. The Irgun had committed terrorist acts including the bombing of the King David Hotel. The Jewish press in Britain and community leaders expressed horror and repugnance at the execution of the sergeants. But their condemnation was drowned out in the press uproar.

The popular mood in that summer of bitter postwar austerity was in any case ugly. The usual mutterings about Jewish profiteering surfaced. But the targets in 1947 were modest Jewish high-street shopkeepers whose premises were smashed up, windows daubed or shattered. Cheetham Hill in Manchester was carpeted with broken glass; the devastation severe enough to remind many of the Blitz. Just two years after the war had ended there was no shortage of those eager to hold all Jews responsible for the action of militant fanatics in Palestine. An antiSemitic orator (and ex sergeant-major) called John Regan, speaking to a crowd of 700 in Eccles, bellowed: “Hitler was right. Exterminate every Jew – every man, woman and child.” “Hang all Jews” screamed another sign; there were similar anti-Semitic actions in Bolton, Holyhead, Hendon and, as it turned out, Southend.

Einsatzgruppen trial At almost the same time, in the late summer of 1947, indictments were being filed by the American military authorities in Nuremberg against commanders of the Einsatzgruppen whose trial would open in September and continue through the spring. The commission that those “special task forces” received from Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich was to accompany the German invasion launched against the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 through the Baltic states and Ukraine, and exterminate the Jews of that region along with Roma, the mentally handicapped and anyone judged to have been part of the communist regime.

They succeeded in that mission all too well. The killers kept meticulous records. Ronald Headland’s Messages of Murder (1992), which used them as a source, documents more than a million deaths of Jewish men, women and children between the summer of 1941 and the late spring of 1943, the vast majority taking place within the first six to nine months.

With the exception of those killed in German-encouraged pogroms, especially in Lithuania, and some communities burned alive inside their synagogues, the million were all murdered by shooting.

Before the gas camps were conceived, then, entire populations in a huge swath of territory from the Baltic to Crimea were wiped out for the

A picture taken in January 1945 depicts Auschwitz concentration camp gate and railways after its liberation by Soviet troops.

homes and property were met with predictable hostility, sometimes violent, by those who had taken them in the presumed permanent absence of their prior owners. In Poland uneasiness about the inconvenient reappearance of Jews predictably led to the return of ancient anti-Semitic demons. In Kielce in 1946, the disappearance of a Christian child triggered yet another edition of the blood libel (invented in medieval England) by which Jews were said to require the blood of Christians for their Passover matzot. The resulting pogrom ended in the death of 40 Jews. The Polish government became eager to encourage Jewish emigration and the offer was swiftly accepted by the vast majority of the surviving 200,000 (out of a prewar population of three million).

Refuge established Nonetheless, the world I grew up in during the 1950s seemed, finally, to have put the nightmare of exterminating anti-Semitism behind it. Israel had been established as the refuge no other countries had given. It did not escape my generation’s attention that had El Alamein gone the other way, there would have been another Holocaust. The failure of Arab armies to crush the infant state at birth in 1948 seemed miraculous.

If we were ignorant of the magnitude of the Palestinian trauma, the 800,000 of the Nakba who fled or were forced from their homes, we were also largely ignorant of the tragically symmetrical trauma of the Jews of Arab countries, brutalised, persecuted and expelled from their ancestral homes in Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Iraq – the catastrophic uprooting of 800,000 Arabic-speaking Mizrachi Jews.

In postwar Britain, on the other hand, Jews seemed comfortably at home. They were a conspicuous presence in science and arts, the media and the academy. If Attlee and Bevin had been hostile to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, a core of Labour including Aneurin Bevan, Herbert Morrison, Hugh Gaitskell and the young Harold Wilson were all champions. With the Mapai/Labour party and the Histadrut unions dominating Israeli politics there was an assumed affinity with British Labour. There was no need for the Labour Friends of Israel to feel defensive.

In the US anti-Semitism seemed confined to a lunatic fringe, even when in 1958 the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple in Atlanta was bombed by white supremacists accusing the Jews not just of aiding and abetting the civil rights movement (guilty as charged) but creating the campaign expressly to destroy white Christian America. An almost identical argument would be made 60 years later, online, by Robert Bowers when he insisted George Soros and Jewish money were behind caravans of Latino migrants that the president had described as an invasion. Believing himself to be a good patriot soldier, Bowers reached for his guns and headed towards the Tree of Life synagogue.

Former SS officers on trial for mass murder in Munich, 20th January 1970.

The men were members of ‘Einsatzgruppen’, or mobile death squads tasked with the killing of Jews and communists behind the front line in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe during World War II.

crime of being Jewish or Roma. Between June and November 1941, 177,000 Lithuanian Jews – or 80 per cent of the Jewish population – were murdered. In the city and neighbouring countryside around Kovno (Kaunas), the home of my mother’s family the Steinbergs, Lithuanian auxiliary police encouraged by the Germans killed 1,500 in a pogrom within days of the German arrival, and a further 2,800 in subsequent acts of violence – all this before organised executions. At Babi Yar near Kyiv, 33,771 were murdered in two days in late September 1941. Not all were liquidated in remote ravines and woods; many of the shootings took place in daylight and in the middle of towns. At Kamenetz-Podolsk, 23,600 were killed in three days; at Rovno, 15,000 in two days.

Romanian killing squads slaughtered between 75,000 and 80,000 Odessa Jews.

Holocaust of the bullets Nothing could be more fruitless than the tabulation of some sort of scale of comparative atrocity, but when the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is commemorated next week, the “Holocaust of the

Historians aren’t prophets; I didn’t see this coming from either extreme, right or left. The election – and re-election – of Barack Obama seemed to suggest that white nationalists could foam with rage but to little political effect. I hadn’t anticipated how populist rage against minorities (and there had been a strain of anti-Semitism in the American populism of the early 20th century) would go dangerously mainstream.

As for the anti-Semitism of the left, during the 1950s and early 1960s, when Israel was social democracy’s darling, it seemed unlikely that Labour governments in that country would be decisively replaced by right-wing nationalists. In 1977 Menahem Begin won the first majority for Likud. Then came the lethal symmetry of competing messianisms: intifada and jihad on the one side; biblically invoked settlements on the other. With dismaying speed, criticism of the actions of successive Israeli governments mutated into denials of Israel’s right to exist at all.

Diplomat and dandy … Harry Zionism, which is no moreKessler. than the acceptance of that right, became the common anathema of the racist right and the hard left; anti-Zionism degenerated into conspiratorial, dehumanising anti-Semitism. And now we have reached the point where a head of government – Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad – can speak to students at universities in the US and England despite having called Jews “hook-

By Simon Sharma

nosed”, said they “rule the world by proxy”, questioned the numbers killed in the Holocaust and stated that he was “glad” to be called an anti-Semite.

But then, after 1952 I had never seen another anti-Semitic daub deface a British wall; until, that is, the past few years, when swastika and bloodred star of David graffiti on high-street windows have appeared with sinister regularity. Something about our times – the hatred of the immigrant and the foreign – has given permission for an epidemic of cemetery desecration; painting a swastika on a tombstone, is, after all, just an extension of the kind of dehumanising mania that emboldens racists to scream abuse at Americans speaking Spanish in a supermarket or at British Muslim women on a London bus.

Poison pit So here we are now, deep in the poison pit where Jews are blamed and physically assaulted both for being insufficiently integrated and for being excessively integrated (the better to conspire to dominion over the media, finance, politics and so on). This lose/lose predicament in which, historically, Jews were subject both to expulsion or physical separation from non-Jewish populations (hence the ghetto) and (as in the French revolution) ordered to assimilate so completely that they relinquish their own cultural and religious identity, was the heart of Theodor Herzl’s case for Zionism in Der Judenstaat.

It was the impossibility of meeting these two demands simultaneously that led to the persecution and judicial murder of “New Christian” converts in Spain and Portugal (at least a thousand killed over two days of Easter in Lisbon in 1506) and which Herzl accurately predicted would some day lead to an immense annihilation of both pious and impious Jews (like himself). Hence the existential need for a place of their own where both norms of being Jewish could live side by side (if not uncontentiously) without being thrown on the tender mercies of others who time after time, when it came to the rub, confined their concern for the fate of Jews to the expression of well-meaning sympathies.

This impossible predicament of the diaspora has already begun to take lives – in the US, in France – though no state government has yet come to power with anti-Semitism as its manifesto. As friends of mine pointed out when the spectre of new anti-Semitism raised its head a decade or more ago, Hitler is indeed dead. But there are other ways to kill off the safety of being Jewish in a non-Jewish world and those amounting to a passive deprivation of basic civil rights are legion today.

Jews are told by well-meaning authorities that they cannot walk down a street wearing a kippah skull cap, much less the garb of an ultraorthodox Haredi, if they wish to be safe. Attending a synagogue service routinely means passing through armed security guards. Nor may they defend Zionism without incurring a storm of murderous online trolling. Israel, we are told, is the new reich and those of us committed to its existence (not all of its policies) are the new Nazis. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance included this grotesque equation in its definition of anti-Semitism. It was when Labour originally declined to accept that part of the definition that another round of recrimination began.

So the gathering of the good and the great in Jerusalem on January 27th to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz is right and proper, and a sign – also given by the likes of Emmanuel Macron and, most movingly, Angela Merkel in a visit to the death camp – to treat this ongoing dehumanisation with the utmost urgency.

While what Jews have suffered over centuries may be incommensurably more monstrous in both enormity and regularity than any other people facing genocidal destruction and institutionalised racial dehumanisation, there is nothing whatsoever to be gained by any kind of competition for ultimate victimhood. It ought not to be impossible to acknowledge the suffering and mistreatment of Palestinians while also acknowledging the terrible uniqueness of the industrial programme to wipe Jews from the face of the earth.

A group of women and children arriving at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland, circa 1943.

Connectedness The greater point, though, is connectedness. The reason why the likes of Émile Zola sprang to the defence of Dreyfus and into combat with the anti-Semite Edouard Drumont – whose acolytes and devotees, at one especially odious moment in 1899, proposed a wide variety of “solutions” to deal with the Jews of France, including turning them into dog food, subjects for medical school vivisection and target practice for artillery – was that Zola saw the integrity of republican democracy itself as contingent on treating the Jews as full, patriotically loyal citizens.

So too, now, any campaign against anti-Semitism is necessarily a campaign for the basic decencies of liberal democracy; a consistency of principle which makes Jews not just the kin of other people who have suffered genocide – Armenians, Bosniaks and Tutsis, for instance – but of those currently suffering the theft of civil rights on account of their race or religion: the Uighurs, Rohingya, the defenceless children of Latino fugitives from terror and dispossession in their homes; and, indeed, Palestinians living under the daily hardships and injustices of occupation.

What, then, is the purpose of acts of remembrance of the kind that will take place at Auschwitz and Jerusalem; who are they for? To begin with, in the age of disinformation when Holocaust denial has become commonplace and more are taken in by the demonising forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion through online access to the libel; at a time when the power of evidence has to contend with the intoxication of malignant belief; at a moment when those who went through the tormenting fires themselves are leaving us, it is essential that the cautionary history be imprinted in the minds of the future.

But this should be not done just to vindicate the survivors and the millions whose bodies were turned to smoke, or whose bones still lie in the mass pits of eastern Europe. It should also be done, especially in this wretched time of tribal shrieking, for the sake of our common humanity.

If the story represents the very worst that humans can do, and must not do again, the act of telling is also a reassertion through horrified decency of the mutual care and kindness of which humanity must yet be capable.

© The Irish Times

Alexandra David-Néel, the first European woman to see Lhasa

The scholar and opera singer who sneaked into Tibet in the 1920s was also an anarchist, ran a casino and adopted a Buddhist monk

By Marcel Theroux

Place and date of birth Paris, 24 October 1868 Claim to fame Undoubtedly most famous for being the first European woman to visit Lhasa in Tibet, Alexandra David-Néel was also a runaway, an anarchist, an opera singer, a Buddhist scholar, a pioneering traveller and a prolific author. Her extraordinary life lasted more than a century. One of her earliest memories was the bloody aftermath of the Paris Commune in 1871; she died just a few weeks after Jimi Hendrix played Woodstock, living long enough Alexandra David-Néel in later life at home in the south of France.

she married a wealthy Frenchman, Philippe Néel de Saint-Sauveur, whom she promptly abandoned to spend 14 years travelling around India, Tibet, China, Nepal, Korea, Mongolia and Japan. In Tibet, she met a 14-year-old monk called Aphur Yongden, whom she adopted in 1929. He was her companion for 40 years.

Supporting documentation David-Néel wrote anarchist pamphlets, travelogues and scholarly studies of Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism and her own translations of Tibetan scripture.

Her most famous work, My Journey to Lhasa, recounts her visit to the Tibetan capital in 1924 – at a time when it was closed to outsiders. In order to sneak in, she had to disguise herself as a Tibetan, lengthening her hair with a yak’s tail and dying it black.

Distinguishing marks The photographs taken across many decades show a person with as many avatars as a Hindu deity: society belle, wanderer, orientalist, monk, sage and, in her last years, lovable Yoda figure.

to see her unconventional personal philosophy – “No commandments! Live your life! Live your instinct!” – enter the cultural bloodstream of the west in the 1960s.

Almost as a side note, she helped run a casino in Tunis, sang at the Hanoi opera house and studied Buddhist texts at the British Museum. In middle age,

Last sighted Outliving both her husband and Aphur Yongden, her adopted son, she spent her last years cared for by her secretary, who, on her death, scattered DavidNéel’s ashes in the Ganges at Varanasi.

Intrepidness rating David-Néel seemed to compress the contents of many existences into a life of almost unimaginable unpredictability and richness. She was still exploring China and Tibet in her 70s and, aged 100, renewed her passport “just in case”: 9. © The Guardian

Remains of earliest purpose-built playhouse found in east London

By Mark Brown

Location of the Red Lion, which predated the Globe, has been subject of debate for years A 17th-century tavern mug with a badge of King Charles II found at the dig site in Whitechapel. Photograph: UCL

Work on what are believed to be the remains of the Red Lion playhouse in Whitechapel, east London. Photograph: UCL

Archaeologists believe they have found remains of one of the most elusive of all known Elizabethan structures – the earliest purpose-built playhouse in Britain and a prototype for a theatre that staged plays by a young William Shakespeare.

The Red Lion is thought to have been built around 1567 and probably played host to travelling groups of players. Its precise location has been the subject of conjecture and debate for a number of years, but archaeologists are as certain as they can be that they have found its remains at a site in the East End of London where a self-storage facility once stood.

“It is not what I was expecting when I turned up to do an excavation in Whitechapel, I have to be honest,” said Stephen White, the lead archaeologist on a team from UCL Archaeology South-East. “This is one of the most extraordinary sites I’ve worked on.”

The Red Lion playhouse was created by John Brayne, who nine years later went on to construct the Theatre in Shoreditch with James Burbage, the father of the Elizabethan actor Richard Burbage. The Theatre was the first permanent home for acting troupes and staged plays

by Shakespeare in 1590. After a dispute it was dismantled and its timbers used in the construction of the more famous Globe on Bankside.

Before the Globe and the Theatre, there was the Red Lion, which was in effect a prototype, said White.

All that is known of the Red Lion comes from two lawsuits describing timber scaffolds or galleries around the stage.

The stage measured 40ft (12.2 metres) north to south by 30ft (9.1 metres) east to west, at a height of 5ft (1.5 metres).

White recalled the mounting excitement when they realised they were discovering evidence of just such a structure.

“We started finding timbers and then uncovered this whole structure. It was very exciting.”

The playhouse structure was part of a complex that included the Red Lion Inn. Among other discoveries are probable beer cellars as well as beakers, drinking glasses and tankards.

The team also found bone groups of dogs whose teeth had been filed down. That and other evidence suggests the playhouse was reused as a baiting pit in the 17th century.

Little is known about what plays were performed at the Red Lion, apart from a fragment of evidence about one called Samson, a lost play by an unknown writer.

The archaeological dig was ordered by Tower Hamlets council before the site is developed for flats at 85 Stepney Way. Emily Gee, Historic England’s regional director for London and the south-east, said the find followed the exciting recent discoveries of the Theatre and the Curtain playhouses in Shoreditch and the Boar’s Head in Aldgate, all of which “have immensely improved our understanding of the beginnings of English theatre”.

She added: “We will continue to work closely with the developer to interpret these archaeological remains and display them so the public will be able to understand them within the finished development and appreciate the rich history of this site.” © The Guardian

The Peterloo massacre: what was it and what did it mean?

By Helen Pidd

When a militia attacked Manchester protesters in 1819 it was a turning point for Britain

What was the Peterloo massacre?

On 16 August 1819, up to 60,000 working class people from the towns and villages of what is now Greater Manchester marched to St Peter’s Field in central Manchester to demand political representation at a time when only wealthy landowners could vote. Their peaceful protest turned bloody when Manchester magistrates ordered a private militia paid for by rich locals to storm the crowd with sabres. An estimated 18 people died and more than 650 were injured in the chaos.

Why don’t we know exactly how many people died?

Most historians agree that 14 people were definitely killed in the massacre – 15 if you include the unborn child of Elizabeth Gaunt, killed in the womb after Gaunt was beaten by constables in custody. A further three named people are believed to have either been stabbed or trampled to death, but their fate remains unconfirmed.

Where exactly did it happen?

St Peter’s Field is no longer a field, but a built-up area of central Manchester, around St Peter’s Square. A red plaque on Peter Street marks the spot, on the side of what is now the Radisson Blu hotel.

What did the protesters want?

They wanted political reform. At that point, only the richest landowners could vote and large swathes of the country were not adequately represented in Westminster. Manchester and Salford, which then had a population of 150,000, had no dedicated MP, yet Oxford and Cambridge Universities had their own representation in parliament dating back to 1603. So did Old Sarum, a field in Salisbury, which had no resident electorate.

At the time of Peterloo, the extension of the vote to all men, let alone women, was actively opposed by many who thought it should be restricted to those of influence and means.

Why did they want to vote?

The years leading up to Peterloo had been tough for working-class people and they wanted a voice in parliament to put their needs and wants on the political agenda, inspired by the French Revolution.

Machines had begun to take away jobs in the lucrative cotton industry and periodic trade slumps closed factories at short notice, putting workers out on the street. The Napoleonic wars, which ended in 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo, had taken a heavy toll on the nation’s finances, and 350,000 ex-servicemen returned home needing jobs and food. Yet those in power seemed more interested in lining their own pockets than helping the poor.

Why is it called Peterloo?

The name was first coined five days after the massacre by James Wroe, editor of the Manchester Observer, the city’s first radical newspaper (no relation to the Observer of today). “‘Peterloo’ was a bitter pun, comparing the cowardly attacks by the yeomanry and soldiers on unarmed civilians to the brutality suffered at Waterloo,” according to historian Robert Poole.

Why is Peterloo important?

The massacre paved the way for parliamentary democracy and particularly the Great Reform Act of 1832, which got rid of “rotten” boroughs such as Old Sarum and created new parliamentary seats, particularly in the industrial towns of the north of England. It also led to the establishment two years later of the Manchester Guardian by John Edward Taylor, a 28-year-old English journalist who was present at the massacre and saw how the “establishment” media sought to discredit the protesters.

Why haven’t I heard of it?

Because it was rarely taught in schools. Some might say that was because history has traditionally concentrated on the battles and victories of royalty and the elite, rather than the working classes. It was only last year that Mike Leigh’s Peterloo film brought the story to the masses.

• This article was amended on 18 August 2019. An earlier version omitted the word “adequately”

© The Guardian

from the sentence “… only the richest landowners could vote and large swathes of the country were not adequately represented in Westminster”; and the word “dedicated” from the sentence “Manchester and Salford, which then had a population of 150,000, had no dedicated MP”.

THE SAMURAI WHO CHARMED THE COURTS OF EUROPE

By Marcel Theroux

Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga dazzled the king of Spain, set up diplomatic links with 17th-century Europe and even met the pope Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga, painted by Claude Deruet during his visit to Rome in 1615

Passport details Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga. Born 1571 of Japanese imperial descent; baptised into the Catholic church as Francisco Felipe Faxicura in Spain, 1615.

Claim to fame In 1613, seven years before the Mayflower headed to the New World, Hasekura set sail from the small Japanese port of Tsukinoura, crossed the Pacific, travelled overland through Mexico, then sailed all the way to Europe. He was accompanied by about 20 fellow countrymen – in all likelihood, the first Japanese to cross the Atlantic. They visited Seville, were received by the King of Spain, popped briefly to France, and travelled to Rome for an audience with the pope in 1615. The purpose of Hasekura’s embassy seems to have been to establish cultural and trading links with Europe.

Supporting documentation When he left Japan, Hasekura began a journal about his experiences. Unfortunately, this was lost or destroyed on his return. There are, however, records of his visit in European archives. It was the discovery of these in the 19th century that reignited Japanese interest in their forgotten emissary. Some of the historical evidence is collected in an appendix to Shusaku Endo’s excellent 1982 novel about Hasekura’s journey, The Samurai.

Distinguishing marks Hasekura was painted during his visit to Rome by the artist Claude Deruet. It shows him wearing a beautiful silk outfit embroidered with animals and grasses, but the eye is drawn to a pair of swords at his waist, symbols of his status as a samurai.

Last sighted Hasekura’s trip was astonishingly badly timed.

When he returned to Japan in 1620, having been baptised into the Catholic church, the country had begun to persecute Christians and was about to retreat into sakoku, the centuries-long policy of isolation that weirdly foreshadowed Brexit. With Japanese Euroscepticism triumphant, Hasekura was persona non grata. He vanishes from history. One hint of his fate is the fact that in 1640 his son was forced to disembowel himself because of alleged sympathies towards the illegal Christian religion.

Intrepidness rating It’s not so much that Hasekura was intrepid – though he clearly was – but that his journey helps correct the Eurocentric bias of many assumptions about explorers. Whatever his aims, the mind boggles at the thought of armed samurai wandering around the Europe of El Greco and Cervantes: 7. © The Guardian

Eyam recalls lessons from 1665 battle with plague By Peter Beaumont

An outdoor church service at Eyam in 1666, from a display in the local museum.

Coronavirus crisis has powerful echoes in the Derbyshire village that once self-isolated to save others In the fields between the Derbyshire villages of Eyam and Stoney Middleton sits a gritstone boulder known as the “boundary stone”.

During the bubonic plague outbreak of 1665-6, the inhabitants of Eyam quarantined themselves, in a famous act of self-sacrifice, to prevent the spread of the plague. Villagers would come to place money in six holes drilled into the top of the boundary stone to pay for food and medicine left by their anxious neighbours.

By the end of the outbreak, more than a quarter of the village’s population of almost 1,000 were dead. The plague, however, was contained.

For residents of Eyam today, in the midst of the escalating coronavirus pandemic, which has already touched a nearby village, the lessons of that selfimposed isolation have powerful echoes.

Standing by the boundary stone, Ian Smith, who volunteers at the local museum, describes how the village had adopted a process that has become familiar around the world in the last few weeks – “social distancing”.

Even as Smith is ruminating on this fact, English football, perhaps belatedly, is in the process of being suspended.

On Friday, the day after prime minister Boris Johnson’s press conference, the stories of two pandemics, one historical and one current, were colliding in Eyam. The green tourist information placards outside homes with names like “Plague Cottage” have been joined in recent weeks by a prominent new poster in the village centre giving information on coronavirus and its symptoms.

At one point a middle-aged couple walk past, discussing an acquaintance facing self-isolation. And villagers wonder what will happen when their popular museum reopens next weekend after the winter closure; whether the thousands of schoolchildren who annually visit will appear this year.

What is clear to many, however, is that Eyam’s story remains a powerful example not only of how diseases are transmitted – then as now via trade routes and centres – but also of how successful social immobilisation can contain outbreaks. For the Derbyshire villagers in the mid1660s, the trade that brought the plague was cloth, and

“In some respects,” says Smith, “the villagers were well ahead of their time. They didn’t know what the affliction was, but they reasoned that close contact with other people was how the illness was passing from one to another.” (In fact, infected fleas had been brought into the village in a bundle of cloth.) “They recognised the necessary business of keeping apart from other people.”

He applies the lesson to the current crisis. “We should be very aware that mass movement of people from one community to another is not a good thing. Like football matches, where you take fans from one area to mix with others quite closely. It’s mad.”

Plague Cottage in Eyam.

the source of it was London, where thousands were already dying.

Confronted by mounting deaths, the village’s newly arrived priest, William Mompesson, was able – in an uneasy alliance with his ejected Puritan predecessor Thomas Stanley – to convince villagers that the right thing to do was quarantine the village, and face a high probability of death, rather than spread the plague.

And in 17th-century Eyam, “social distancing” in the midst of a plague outbreak meant not only isolation – as Francine Clifford, the local historian, points out – but also open-air funeral services that reduced physical proximity, and families burying their own dead in fields and gardens rather than the village graveyard.

As Clifford explains, Eyam’s quarantine was finally imposed after a month-long lull in plague deaths that had first begun in the autumn of 1665.

“It was June [1666] and the deaths started to go up again,” she explains. “It was then William Mompesson realised that it was going to get a heck of a lot worse before it got better. He knew if he didn’t stop people leaving the village in panic, it would spread to the villages and the towns. If it got to Sheffield or Manchester, it would be back to the London proportions.”

The experience of those villagers has become pertinent again as families, communities, towns and even countries engage with the concept of quarantine. The word is derived from the Italian quaranta giorni, in reference to the practice during the 14th century of requiring plagueinfected ships from Venice to sit at anchor for 40 days before landing.

Ironically, perhaps, it was a quarantine in China – once again for plague, in Harbin in 1910 – that would inform most modern approaches, not least in China, where, like Eyam, it became embedded in myth.

The 1910 Harbin outbreak, in a centre of the fur trade, saw 95% of infected patients die. The quarantine was managed by a celebrated doctor named Wu Lien-teh, dispatched to Harbin from what is now Malaysia.

In Harbin he implemented not just a strict lockdown, including the suspension of transport links with Russia and Japan, but introduced measures still used today, including dedicated quarantine centres and Wu Lien-teh fought a Chinese outbreak in 1910. hygienic burials, with his approach recorded meticulously in his notes.

Eugenia Tognotti, a historian of quarantine who wrote an essay on the subject for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, believes we still have much to learn from quarantines of the past.

Currently under lockdown herself in Italy, the European country worst hit by coronavirus, she emphasises that successful quarantines like Eyam’s require “social acceptance” and other conditions that vary according to geography and political context, pointing out that they are rarely uncontroversial. “Let’s not forget that quarantine measures raise many ethical issues,” she says, referring to the Sars outbreak in 2002, an even more deadly if less widespread coronavirus than the one

causing the current pandemic.She adds: “In China, compared to other affected countries, there was stronger control of the social strata at risk”; village-level governments were empowered to isolate travellers from Sars-infected areas, and enforce quarantines on people suspected of having contact with Sars patients.

“That raised many questions regarding the impact of isolation and quarantine measures, and possible discrimination against certain social categories and minorities. The present emergency and the rigid measures adopted pending the Covid-19 epidemic will give us more lessons.”

And Tognotti poses the question that has been troubling many political leaders and commentators. “Can the kind of quarantines applied in China – with the rigid measures – work in the western democratic countries?”

She answers her own question with a big “if” – one that is becoming increasingly apparent. “Only if countries were not caught unprepared and if they recognised the enormous importance of planning.”

She adds: “We can learn from the past. In time of plague and cholera, well-trained and experienced public health officials were quick to recognise the crisis and launch an emergency public health response to contain outbreaks.

A well-organised educational campaign to inform and calm a panicking and frightened public, and combat misinformation and fake news, is extremely important. It’s the effort that Italy is making right now with some success.”

And it was exactly that which Mompesson – who lost his wife in the outbreak – and Stanley achieved: communicating the difficult necessity of social immobilisation to a village of poor miners.

On a hill above the village, overlooking the boundary stone, are the socalled “Riley graves”, named after the local farm where Elizabeth Hancock buried her husband and six children in a field. It’s a poignant reminder of Mompesson’s success as a public health leader.

Tourists Karen and Paul Senior are visiting the village from Newcastle.

“Everyone is going into a panic because of the coronavirus and we’re actually in a plague village where everyone voluntarily self-isolated,” says Karen.

“The timing’s been a bit bizarre,” says Paul. “We planned this visit before the coronavirus. Maybe we’re being taught an existential lesson.”

Asked what thoughts the visit has inspired, he replies: “It’s a question of humanity.

“There’s the juxtaposition of looking after your own family,” he adds, referring to the fact that Mompesson sent his children away. “Wanting to save your own skin and the bigger picture. If they left Eyam, they could have spread the disease. You want to do the best for the community, but there’s a strong desire to survive.” © The Guardian

ENEMIES EVERYWHERE:

Photos show absurdity of life under the Stasi

By Philip Oltermann

By Sarah Gilbert

Stasi photograph of a football that was accidentally kicked over the Berlin Wall in 1978.

East German secret police saw evidence of western sabotage in the most mundane events

A

football kicked over a wall, a lightbulb thrown out of a window, a suspiciously unkempt lawn: for East Germany’s secret police, even the most mundane event was recorded as potential proof of the capitalist enemy trying to sabotage life in the socialist republic.

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, researchers at the Stasi Records Agency have for the first time systematically analysed the vast photographic archive the surveillance state amassed as a result of its untrammelled paranoia.

The result is a new coffee table book, Der Blick der Staatssicherheit (The Gaze of State Security), with previously unseen photographs that cast a melancholy eye on the absurdity of life behind the Iron Curtain.

They tell the story of three children who caused an incident when they kicked a football over the Berlin Wall on to Soviet soil in May 1978. The children, two girls and a boy from West Berlin, eventually managed to get their ball back, but not before the Stasi had thoroughly

documented the ball’s position – “around 25 metres from the border markings” – and photographed the ceremonial return of the offending object.

A lightbulb tossed out of a high-rise apartment caused a similar flurry of activity in the town of Suhl on 7 October 1987, after it hit the roof of a vehicle in a motorcade for state apparatchiks. The Stasi suspected “negative enemy forces” were to blame.

Over the 40-year existence of communist East Germany, the Ministry of State Security built one of the most tightly controlled surveillance regimes in history.

The Stasi created a vast web of full-time

Three friends from West Berlin.

enemy’ behind every minor event or mishap, so they began to take pictures of even seemingly harmless everyday objects,” Sprnger said.

Stasi photograph of a lightbulb thrown out of a window.

agents and part-time spies, with some historians calculating that there was one informant for every 6.5 citizens.

The historian Philipp Springer, who spent two and a half years combing through the archive’s more than 2m photographs, said the Stasi’s attention to seemingly mundane detail intensified as technology became more sophisticated and easier to disguise.

“In the 1950s, photography was still a relatively rare technology. But by the 80s cameras were more widely available and the Stasi discovered them as what they called a ‘weapon’. The number of photographs taken grew exponentially.”

Cameras were hidden inside arm casts, shopping bags, books and bras, with the ministry offering incentives for employees who could come up with ingenious A Stasi agent demonstrates a camera disguised as an arm cast in East Berlin in 1982

Sometimes, the appetite for photographic documentation could backfire. In May 1980, Stasi spies accidentally took photographs of a senior member of their own team leaving and entering a house that had been put under surveillance in Neubrandenburg.

It emerged the man had used the same building to maintain an extramarital affair The Stasi official is accidentally photographed as he leaves the flat where he was having an affair.

with a colleague in the secret police.

“When you dive into the archive in a nonsystematic way, you find all sorts of stories that surprise you,” said Springer. One cache of pictures documented the story of a 19-year-old Soviet soldier who spent four and a half years hiding in a hole in the ground in rural Brandenburg after deserting from his East German barracks.

“If Hollywood had made a film about that, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

Another series of photographs shows a young couple from Dresden with a sixmonth-old child, who had tried to escape to the west in the boot of a car. The baby suffocated during the journey, most likely because of leaked exhaust fumes, the couple were arrested before making it across the border. Unmoved, the Stasi continued to spy on the couple after the tragedy, even getting a photographer to covertly take pictures at their child’s funeral.

solutions.

“East Germany’s secret police had a tendency to see the fingerprints of ‘the

“Many of these pictures are now comical in an involuntary way,” said Springer. “But when you come across a picture like this, it really drives home the incredible inhumanity of this surveillance state.” © The Guardian

Smashed windows, broken rules: the dark suffragette sites of London

By Jo Griffin

Suffragettes marching in London in 1912

London is deeply marked by the struggle for women’s suffrage – from Holloway prison where Sylvia Pankhurst was force-fed to the east London tearooms where activists plotted hen police sped to the scene of two explosions that blew out the windows of homes near HMP Holloway just before Christmas in 1913, they found a damaged wall and bomb-making equipment in the garden of 12 Dalmeny Avenue. But they never managed to pin the blasts on their chief suspects – suffragettes staying at the safe house backing on to the prison, from where the women shouted at prisoners and serenaded Emmeline Pankhurst with a cornet. More than a century later, such stories explain why London’s suffrage past is still so compelling.

The struggle for women’s suffrage in early 20th-century Britain is embedded nowhere as deeply as in London, which in 1906 became the epicentre of both the constitutional campaign and militant movement, after Pankhurst moved the Women’s Political and Social Union (WSPU) to the capital. Perhaps no single location A woman peers through a shattered window in Holloway prison after the explosion in December 1913.

resonates for women’s rights campaigners today as much as Holloway, the first female-only prison, where militant suffragettes were incarcerated, went on hunger strike and were savagely forcefed.

“Holloway is absolutely central to the suffragettes’ story,” says Caitlin Davies, whose book on Holloway, Bad Girls: A History of Rebels and Renegades, will be published on 8 March. “I grew up in the area and had always known about the suffragette inmates but mainly in terms of their victimisation. Now I also know that they put up a lot of resistance to the prison regime, refusing the rule of silence, for example. They were well connected and they spread the word about conditions inside.”

Davies, who led workshops at Holloway shortly before it closed, says the last women inmates were very aware of the importance of the suffragettes’ story.

Around 300 suffragettes were jailed at Holloway for arson, window-smashing and other acts of sabotage, and the north London prison became a key battleground in the war with the authorities. Harrowing personal testimonies reveal how women were forcibly fed, held down while a rubber tube was pushed down the nose or throat in a life-threatening procedure that some underwent more than 200 times. A further cruelty was the Temporary Discharge for Prisoners Act, known as the “Cat and Mouse Act”, which allowed hunger strikers to be released into the community until they were well enough to be re-arrested. In a nod to the legislation, last December Islington council opened the Cat and Mouse Library next to the now-closed prison.

Now the Ministry of Justice has put the 10-acre site up for sale, and its future is contentious. Islington council says it won’t back redevelopment plans that don’t include at least 50% “genuinely affordable” homes, while local campaigners fear developers will dilute the council’s plan for a women’s building on the site.

into a community hub, and Bow police station, where many women were taken after arrest for window smashing and other sabotage.

Also in Bow, 46 Norman Grove was once the site of a toy factory and creche set up by Pankhurst, among other sites.

Jackson suggests starting at Roman Road market, where the suffragettes had a stall to spread their message, and heading to 400 Old Ford Road, where a green space now marks the former site of the Women’s Hall, the most innovative women’s project of the era, where women distributed milk and food at a low-cost canteen and held radical meetings.

Suffragettes campaigning during a by-election, circa 1910

Following their footsteps Interest in London’s suffrage sites has been revived by the centenary on 6 February of the Representation of the People Act, which first gave the vote to women over 30 who met some kind of property qualification. Specialist tours offer the chance to walk in the footsteps of the suffragettes, who marched from their headquarters in Lincoln’s Inn House on Kingsway to the Houses of Parliament and held rallies in Hyde Park.

A defining image of the era is the funeral procession from Piccadilly to King’s Cross of Emily Wilding Davison, who died after running in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby in June 1913. Many government offices, including the War Office and 10 Downing Street, as well as the National Gallery, St Paul’s and the Bank of England, were the targets of window smashing and bombs by suffragettes who gathered in West End tearooms and restaurants, like the Criterion on Piccadilly, to organise.

But the anniversary is also a chance to pay proper attention to

“It is very poignant that in the place of the Women’s Hall there is now just this green space,” says Jackson. “There is a literal gap between the buildings. The hall was the site of these extraordinary radical meetings, and the space is a symbol of the challenges that working-class movements faced in organising, in places that were not prestigious.”

From March to December, the “Women’s Hall”, a Heritage Lottery project at east London venues, will celebrate the EFLS, with two major exhibitions, a volunteering programme and other events.

These include a Girls Do Science family day, to celebrate women’s contribution to science and engineering; a Working for Equality cinema, with free screenings of films focusing on women who challenged discrimination at work; and an exhibition to mark 100 years of women’s activism.

Other gaps in London’s suffrage history are finally being filled.

Beverley Cook, curator of a centenary display at the Museum of London, says her research has shed light on the lives of the women who came from outside the capital to campaign, sought lodgings through an underground network, and went undercover to evade the Cat and Mouse Act. Cook highlights how even landmarks such as Trafalgar Square deserve a second look. “For me, the images of Emmeline Pankhurst speaking in the square, surrounded by men, are still among the Emmeline Pankhurst addresses a meeting in London’s Trafalgar Square in October 1908.

A police officer tries to remove a suffragette from the railings outside Buckingham Palace during a demonstration in London

places that have been overlooked in the suffragette story, says historian Sarah Jackson, co-founder of the East End Women’s Museum. Interest has been growing in East End suffragette history, and in 2014 researchers produced a map of key sites. It was in Bow that Sylvia Pankhurst led the East London Federation of Suffragettes, whose campaign was anchored in the daily reality of working women’s lives and fought for decent housing and fair pay – as opposed to the middle-class campaign on the single issue of the vote.

“The suffragettes of the East End went beyond the vote and carried on the fight for equality and women’s rights for years after 1918.

They also opposed the war,” says Jackson, author of Voices from History: East London Suffragettes. “Some middle-class leaders like Sylvia Pankhurst had to listen and learn from them and their experiences, and their legacy is still embedded in the community decades later.”

Sylvia had split from the WSPU after clashing with her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel over the need to mobilise working women, and it is her values that resonate for modern-day campaigners, sayes Jackson. “The suffragettes were inspiring and it is impossible to overstate their importance, but they were of their time and some of their views and positions were problematic.

Young women activists of the East End today find more in common with the East End suffragettes, who were more flexible and tackled a much broader range of issues.”

A suffragette tour of east London would take in the former site of the Mother’s Arms at 438 Old Ford Road, a pub that was converted

most powerful because this required more courage than, say, taking part in mass rallies.”

Historic England, the body that looks after England’s historic environment, is inviting people to send in their suffrage stories for new “toffee hammer listings”, named after the tools the suffragettes used to break windows, which will be added to its list of well-known sites, such as the Pankhurst Centre in Manchester. Historic England is also working with the artist Lucy Orta and former Holloway inmates to produce a banner for Processions, a public art event in which thousands of women and girls will walk through London, Belfast, Cardiff and Edinburgh on 10 June.

With its sale due to be announced in spring, the Holloway site is likely to remain a focus for campaigners who demand that its redevelopment includes public housing, green space and a women’s building to reflect and honour its painful history.

Sisters Uncut, who stormed the red carpet at the London premiere of the film Suffragette, in a protest against its “celebratory” tone at a time when domestic violence services and refuges are being closed, plan more action to “reclaim the suffragette movement”.

Last year they occupied the Holloway site.

“Part of the reason for reclaiming that space is redressing the legacy of trauma experienced by the women who were locked up there for years,” says Nina, a 24-year-old activist who did not give her full name. “If the suffragettes were still with us today, I think they’d also like to see a women’s building on that site.” © The Guardian

British Museum acquires 3,000year-old Shropshire sun pendant Gold bulla is described as one of the most important bronze age finds of the last century

By Mark Brown

The pendant was made by someone who was clearly skilled in their craft around 1,000-800BC. Photograph: British Museum

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he British Museum has acquired a shimmering 3,000-year-old gold sun pendant heralded as one of the most important bronze age finds of the last century.

The astonishingly wellpreserved pendant, or bulla, was discovered by a metal detector enthusiast in Shropshire in 2018.

Neil Wilkin, the museum’s bronze age curator, recalled dropping everything when he first saw it. “I was absolutely flabbergasted, I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he said. “To me it is the most important object from this period, the first age of metal, that has come up in about 100 years.”

The pendant has been purchased for £250,000 using money from the Art Fund and the American Friends of the British Museum.

Wilkin said it could easily pass as a glorious example of art deco jewellery from the 1930s. In reality it was made by someone who was clearly skilled in their craft around 1,000-800BC. “The skill and care with which it has been put together is remarkable,” he said. “It is just exquisite.”

It comes from a period that is often misunderstood, Florence Nightingale’s family album, filled with paintings and drawings. associated with people living in huts or caves. Wilkin said that was understandable. “This is a subject, a period, that hasn’t been taught in school curriculums until very recently … I didn’t learn about it at school.”

The pendant is decorated with semi-circles and geometric motifs, and on one side is a stylised solar design, reflecting the importance of the sun and its path across the sky to bronze age farmers.

That depiction of the sun is seen in famous objects as the Trundholm sun chariot in Copenhagen and a small number of gold pendants found in Ireland, “but we haven’t really seen it on British objects until now,” said Wilkins.

The pendant was found in a landscape that would have been boggy and wet during the bronze age.

Curatorsth ink it would have been intentionally cast into the water as an offering, much as people today throw coins into fountains.

It was found by a metal detectorist who wants to remain anonymous. All the correct procedures were adhered to in that it was reported to the local finds liaison officer who notified the coroner and brought it to the British Museum under the treasure process.

A coroner found it to be treasure and the independent treasure valuation committee recommended to the culture secretary a valuation of £250,000.

It will probably be known as the Shropshire sun pendant and will go on display from November at Shrewsbury museum and art gallery, near the find site. In 2021 it will come to the British Museum in London and will be displayed near other bronze age treasures such as the Mold gold cape.

The pendant, 3.6cm by 4.7cm, is the second one ever found in Britain. The first was discovered during canal digging in Manchester in 1722 and was assumed by many experts to be Roman, because of its quality. It was last recorded in 1806 before disappearing from sight.

Could it still be out there? “It is possible,” said Wilkin. “To find it would be astonishing but in some ways it wouldn’t surprise me.

The weight of it means you wouldn’t necessarily think of melting it down for bullion. I do have a sneaking suspicion it is out there somewhere, just misunderstood or mislabelled.”

The pendant is decorated with semi-circles and geometric motifs, and on one side is a stylised solar design.

Photograph: British Museum

© The Guardian

Board-game piece from period of first Viking raid found on Lindisfarne

By Esther Addley

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mall glass ‘crown’ thought to be rare archaeological link to first Norse raiders It is not large – the shape and size of a chocolate sweet – and might easily have been discarded as a pebble by a less careful hand.

But a tiny piece of worked glass unearthed during an excavation on Lindisfarne has been revealed to be a rare archaeological treasure linking the Northumbrian island with the Vikings, from the very beginning of one of the most turbulent periods in English history.

Archaeologists believe the object, made from swirling blue and white glass with a small “crown” of white glass droplets, is a gaming piece from the Viking board game hnefatafl (“king’s table”), or a local version of the game.

Whether dropped on the island by a Norse raider or owned by a highstatus local imitating their customs, the gaming piece offers a rare tangible link between Lindisfarne’s AngloSaxon monastery and the culture that eventually overwhelmed it.

Lindisfarne is arguably best known for its spectacular illuminated gospels, which were created in the early eighth century in the island’s first monastery. But to historians, “Holy Island” also has immense significance as the site, in AD793, of the first major Viking raid in Britain or Ireland, launching almost three centuries of destruction and occupation that dramatically shaped English history.

The exact location of the early wooden monastery is not known

– ruins visible on the island today are from a later priory – but recent excavations on the island by archaeologists and volunteers from DigVentures have located a cemetery and at least one building.

The gaming piece, discovered last summer, came from a trench that has been dated to the eighth to ninth centuries, according to the project’s lead archaeologist, David Petts, putting it squarely in the most

bustling place peopled with monks, pilgrims, tradespeople, and even visiting kings. “The sheer quality of this piece suggests this isn’t any old gaming set. Someone on the island is living an elite lifestyle.”

It is particularly valuable as an artefact, he says, because “we are starting to get an insight into the actual lives of the people who were in the monastery, rather than just their cemeteries and their afterlives”.

The piece of worked glass unearthed during an excavation on Lindisfarne

notorious period of the island’s history, around the time of the raid. Even if the game was being played by wealthy monks or pilgrims before the Vikings attacked, he says, it shows the influence that Norse culture already had across the north Atlantic.

“We often tend to think of early medieval Christianity, especially on islands, as terribly austere: that they were all living a brutal, hard life,” says Petts, a senior lecturer in the archaeology of northern England at Durham University.

In fact, he says, Lindisfarne at the time would have been a

The gaming piece is unusual not only as an artefact but because of the manner of its discovery. DigVentures excavations are crowdfunded and staffed substantially by volunteers, and the find was made by the mother of one of the team members, who was visiting the site for a day to celebrate her birthday.

“Several of the most significant finds from Lindisfarne have been made by members of the public,” says DigVentures’ managing director, Lisa Westcott Wilkins. “The big argument is that you can’t do real archaeology with members of the public: you can, as long as it is properly supervised.”

When the piece was discovered, she says, “my heart was pounding, the little hairs on my arms were standing up. As a scientist, you have to train yourself out of having an emotional response to things like this. It’s a piece of evidence, bottom line.

“But honestly, it’s just so beautiful and so evocative of that time period, I couldn’t help myself.” © The Guardian

By Matthew Kneale Nero contemplates the burning of Rome while singing about the destruction of Troy, in 64 AD, in an illustration by Tancredi Scarpell

here’s nothing like a crisis of survival to show people’s true natures. Though I’ve written a good deal about tumultuous times, both fiction (English Passengers) and non-fiction (Rome: a History in Seven Sackings), I can’t say I’m too interested in the tumult itself. I’m more interested in the decisions people make during such crises – how they ride the wave.

My new novel, Pilgrims, is set in the late 1280s, shortly after one episode of shameful English national wickedness – the annexation of the Principality of Gwynedd, north Wales – and just before another (no spoilers). The story follows a group of British pilgrims walking to Rome, each seeking their own different kind of redemption, and shows how they navigate the – to our eyes – bizarre values of their age.

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Pilgrims was partly inspired by this work by a great scholar, who died sadly young and never lived to see it published. Mansfield reveals France at this time (and England wasn’t too different) as a land of hyper morality. Married couples feared for their souls if they’d had sex on the wrong day of the week. Clerics faced down troublesome non-churchmen by forcing them to publicly confess their sins before their whole community, to pray all night in church in their underclothes – and sometimes to go on pilgrimages.

Medieval English village life was largely a blank until Hanawalt had the great idea of reconstructing lives through coroners’ inquests. The result is a rich portrait of a whole world. Hanawalt’s villagers are more sophisticated than one might expect. They had a strong sense of community and also legality. Mostly they come across as level-headed but a little drunken (not everything’s changed in seven centuries). Yet death lurked everywhere. Rivers and village wells were perilous and harvest fields were the worst spots for murder.

Peasant life … where physical and moral perils abound.

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As the British army retreated to Dunkirk, newly appointed prime minister Winston Churchill debated with his war cabinet – most of all with his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, and foreign minister Lord Halifax – as to what to do: fight on or make peace with Hitler? Lukacs’s riveting account pulls the rug on a great misconception (shamefully repeated in the film Darkest Hour) and details how, at this crucial moment, Chamberlain used his considerable authority to support Churchill against Halifax to prevent a peace deal with the Nazis.

Winston Churchill and his wife inspect bomb-damage in London during the Blitz, 1940.

Fletcher’s fine non-fiction account looks at England’s ambassador in Rome, Gregorio Casali: a shrewd, loyal servant with an impossible task. He had to assist Henry in his project to divorce Catherine of Aragon, at the very moment in 1527 when an army belonging to Charles V, Catherine’s nephew, was sacking Rome. Fletcher provides wonderful details: who knew that one English proposal was that the pope give his blessing to Henry being married to Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn at the same time? Her book is a useful reminder that the future of nations can change forever with little more than the flip of a coin.

Cellini, who lived during the same tumultuous days recounted by Fletcher, produced this outrageously self-aggrandising work. By his own account, Cellini is always the bravest of fighters and wins battles single-handedly; he’s the most admired of artists (to be fair he was a highly talented sculptor) and he avenges himself on every enemy. In this wonderful if highly unreliable portrait of his age, Cellini’s dishonesty is so robust that it’s hard not to like the man.

This Roman historian, who lived during the reigns of some of the emperors he describes, recounts a different kind of peril: paranoid and murderous rulers. It served Suetonius to describe his subjects as blackly as possible and no doubt at times he exaggerates, yet he has a wonderful eye for scandalous detail. The book was a major source for Robert Graves’s fine Claudius novels, yet Graves couldn’t use the most entertaining life of them all, who ruled after Claudius’s death: the singing emperor Nero. Imagine a piss-poor contestant for Britain’s Got Talent wielding supreme power. Suetonius recounts how Nero imported whole audiences from Alexandria because they applauded more enthusiastically, and locked them into stadiums when he sang, so even women in labour could not leave.

This is scholarly historical writing at its best. The book’s subject is vast – the slow and convoluted collapse of a whole world – yet it is recounted and analysed with great clarity, and has a wonderful ability to move from the grand picture to the very precise detail. It’s also very exciting.

Stille takes us into another dangerous time in Italy: the 1930s and 40s. The individuals whose lives he narrates are finely varied. Some were jailed for their staunch antifascism, others were stalwart supporters of the regime and could not believe – until it was too late – that they would not be safe. The book has a rich humanity, and there’s a beautiful moment when an imprisoned antifascist is advised by her jailers as to which of her antifascist suitors she should marry. She followed their suggestion and never looked back.

Battle lines … Vasily Grossman covers the Red Army’s advance in Schwerin, Germany, 1945.

Ireland’s war of independence … captured by Manchester Guardian photographer Walter Doughty

Farrell’s novel looks at a group of Anglo-Irish Protestants, who are holed up in a vast, deteriorating hotel as the Irish struggle for independence erupts around them. The book, which is richly funny, has an unreal quality, yet it retains a quiet truth. While some characters respond to the crisis with fury and evil, the protagonist, shell-shocked Major Brendan Archer, is a conflicted bystander, uneasily loyal to an indefensible cause.

Surely the ultimate read on tumultuous times: Grossman’s characters find themselves in Soviet gulags, Nazi death camps, the notorious Lubyanka KGB jail in Moscow and in every corner of the Battle of Stalingrad, which Grossman witnessed first-hand as a Soviet war reporter. The novel, which savages the Soviet system, was itself subjected to the turbulence of history. After Grossman presented it for publication, it was stopped by the KGB, who said it could not be published for another two centuries. It reached the west after nuclear physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov smuggled out a second copy the authorities did not know existed. As Grossman acknowledged, the novel could have done with a polish – and he would have given it one if he hadn’t been arrested – yet it is an astonishing achievement. © The Guardian

West Country witchcraft and the hanged women of urban Exeter

By Maev Kennedy

Why were so many women accused and then put to death in 16th and 17th century Devon?

who survived and continued to live among her presumably deeply suspicious neighbours.

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Long before the law changed, Stoyle says, lawyers and magistrates had become deeply sceptical of such cases, which were regularly thrown out of court, but popular belief in spells, charms and witchcraft endured long afterwards. He found evidence of spells and charms against harm being sought from “wise women” in the West Country right up to the outbreak of the first world war and beyond, and has even heard of relatives of colleagues seeking charms in the past decade against conditions such as ringworm.

xeter is believed to hold the ignoble record of having hanged the last women convicted of witchcraft in England. Now research by a West Country academic suggests it may also have been the first place to convict and execute such unfortunates, for crimes such as being seen with a large toad.

In 2014 hundreds of modern witches converged on the city, demanding a retrospective pardon for three elderly women hanged in 1682, Temperance Lloyd, Susannah Edwards and Mary Trembles, who were followed in 1685 by Alice Molland, whose execution was believed to be the last of its kind although the law was not changed until 1735.

“Such beliefs are very enduring. We think of the railways as being engines of progress and communication,” he said.

“But when a little Victorian railway cottage near where we live was demolished, they found a pair of shoes cemented in by the window frame, to stop witches flying in.”

New research by Mark Stoyle, professor of early modern history at the University of Southampton, who lives in Exeter, suggests that the city may also have been the first The images of black cats, ubiquitous at Halloween are lateto execute witches more than a century earlier. Maud Park comers in the popular and Alice Mead were perception of witches, convicted soon after the according to another law was changed in 1563 West Country academic: to make “conjurations, the earliest accounts of enchantment and witches’ cats are white witchcrafts” a capital or tabby, and other offence, and though familiars included dogs, Stoyle has been unable lambs, toads and ferrets. to find a record of their execution, he fears that The earliest newspaper was almost certainly account traced by their fate.

Marion Gibson, professor In 1585 Thomasine of magic in literature at Shorte was hanged, the University of Exeter, convicted of bewitching was in a 16th-century and killing the entire journal recording a family of an Exeter spotted white cat, ‘Conjurations, enchantment and witchcrafts’ were made a capital offence in England in 1563 weaver. Men met the memorably called Satan, same fate: in 1610 owned by an Essex woman called Elizabeth Francis.

Richard Wilkyns was hanged for injuring or killing livestock and people through witchcraft.

She was accused in 1566 of sending the cat to punish a lover who wouldn’t marry her, and to cause ill to Stoyle, whose research is published this week in a book, neighbours. Francis avoided hanging, but in 1582 Ursula Witchcraft in Exeter 1558-1660, said: “When you go Kemp, who had two cats, one grey, one black, called Tiffin through the records of the assizes, it is really striking how and Jack, was hanged despite being regarded as a good far such cases stretch back, and it’s not easy to explain witch who helped her neighbours with the pains of why there should have been so many in Exeter. These childbirth and rheumatism. cases do not match the traditional image of rural witches living in isolated cottages – these are urban witches, often Black cats only become standard witches’ accessories in elderly women mostly living a hand-to-mouth existence on Victorian fiction, Gibson says. Earlier accounts include a rat the poor fringes of the city – but in some ways this was the named Phillip, a ginger and white dog named Minny, and a ideal setting for the spread of disease, fires, the ferret owned by Joan Prentice called Bid, who was said to unexplained death of children and animals, exactly the sort have arrived out of the blue announcing “I am Satan. Fear of crimes the witches were believed to commit.” me not.”

Familiars, animals believed to be manifestations of evil spirits, were common features, Stoyle said. “Toads, for The early reports also often portrayed “witches” as young some reason, are particularly common. One unfortunate and noble, rather than poor old women. In 1441 Eleanor old woman was spotted by a neighbour sitting by the fire Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, was accused of with a toad in her lap, and that was enough to condemn necromancy and raising the dead, and of paying her.” astrologers to foresee the death of the king. She was only made to do penance through the streets dressed in a white Mary Stone, an Exeter widow, was accused of having as a robe: her fellow witch, Margery Jourdemayne, was burned familiar a rat that spied on her neighbours. She was at the stake. Gibson said she believed Cobham’s story may accused of killing chickens, infesting a household with lice have inspired the scheming noblewoman Cersei Lannister and killing a man by bewitching him into falling from a field in Game of Thrones. © The Guardian stile. Stoyle believes Stone was a rare acquittal, a woman

'Sensational' Egypt find offers clues in hunt for Cleopatra’s tomb

The two mummies found inside a sealed tomb at Taposiris Magna, that would originally have been completely covered with gold leaf

Exclusive: discovery of two ancient mummies filmed for Channel 5 documentary She was the fabled queen of ancient Egypt, immortalised over thousands of years as a beautiful seductress. But, despite her fame, Cleopatra’s tomb is one of the great unsolved mysteries.

Some believe she was buried in Alexandria, where she was born and ruled from her royal palace, a city decimated by the tsunami of 365AD. Others suggest her final resting place could be about 30 miles away, in the ancient temple of Taposiris Magna, built by her Ptolemaic ancestors on the Nile Delta.

Now two mummies of high-status individuals who lived at the time of

The opening of the first-ever intact tomb found at Taposiris Magna was witnessed by cameras for a new Channel 5 documentary, The Hunt for Cleopatra’s Tomb, to be screened on Thursday.

It is presented by Dr Glenn Godenho, a senior lecturer in Egyptology at Liverpool University, who described the discovery as phenomenal. “Although now covered in dust from 2,000 years underground, at the time these mummies would have been spectacular. To be covered in gold leaf shows they ... would have been … important members of society,” he said.

The mummies have been X-rayed, establishing that they are male and female. One suggestion is they were priests who played a key role in maintaining the pharaohs’ power. One bears an image of a scarab, symbolising rebirth, painted in gold leaf.

Cleopatra was the last of a ruthless dynasty that ruled the Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt for almost three centuries. Yet not a single Ptolemaic pharaoh’s tomb has been found.

The discovery of an intact tomb at Taposiris Magna has fuelled hope that Cleopatra’s tomb will be found there

Cleopatra have been uncovered at Taposiris Magna, a discovery that it is being described as “sensational” because it shows the importance of a necropolis that is being linked to her by the latest finds.

Although the burial chamber had been undisturbed for 2,000 years, the mummies are in a poor state of preservation because water had seeped through. But crucial evidence reveals they were originally completely covered with gold leaf, a luxury afforded only to those from the top tiers of society. Perhaps these two individuals had interacted with Cleopatra herself, archaeologists suggest.

Excavations at Taposiris Magna are headed by Dr Kathleen Martínez, who, after working there for over 14 years, is more convinced than ever Cleopatra’s tomb will be found there.

Only a tiny percentage of the vast site has been explored.

In the show, cameras film her as the burial chamber with two mummies is opened up for the first time. After an initial limestone slab is removed with a chisel and hammer, she peers through a small hole, exclaiming: “Oh my god, there are two mummies … See this wonder.”

Her previous discoveries include a headless statue of a pharaoh, believed to be King Ptolemy IV, Cleopatra’s ancestor, and a foundation plate with an inscription showing that the temple was dedicated to the goddess Isis. Cleopatra saw herself as the “human incarnation of Isis”, Martínez said. © The Guardian

At the site of the temple altar, where priests would have made offerings to the gods, 200 coins bearing Cleopatra’s name and her face have been discovered.

This “incredible find” not only links Cleopatra directly to Taposiris Magna, but also reveals a striking image of the queen, Godenho says in the documentary. While its prominent nose and double chin may not suggest the classical beauty immortalised by Hollywood and Elizabeth Taylor, it is how she would have wanted to be seen as the coins would have been pressed using her direct instructions.

Dr Kathleen Martínez and Dr Glenn Godenho at the Taposiris Magna temple

Roman rule in Britain begins. The Numerus Maurorum Aurelianorum, an African auxiliary unit, takes its position on Hadrian’s Wall (c100-c400) as part of the Roman army and helps guard the outermost reaches of the empire.

Kingdom of Ghana. A large sub-Saharan state established. Archaeological

evidence suggests that Ghana had achieved a high level of civilisation (advanced metalworking, an indigenous trading network) before Arab travellers arrived around AD750. Its capital, Koumbi Saleh, had a population of 30,000. A 12th-century Muslim, alIdrisi, told a Norman King Roger II in Sicily that the Ghanaian nobility gave sumptuous banquets with thousands of guests.

Hadrian becomes an abbot in Canterbury.

century, the kingdom was 15 days’ journey wide.

General Tariq ibn-Ziyad conquers the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal).

The rock of Gibraltar is named after this Moorish general (the Arabic Jabal Tariq means Mount Tariq). He led an eightyear campaign to conquer modern Spain and Portugal in AD 711.

Religion of Islam starts to slowly spread across sub-Saharan Africa.

African-born scholar Hadrian of Canterbury, having rejected a papal request to become Archbishop of Canterbury, travels to Britain with Theodore, who took up the post instead.

Around this time Kanem-Bornu is established by Dougu, the first king of the Zaghawa dynasty. It occupied much of present day Chad. According to an Arab geographer writing in the 10th

Massive stone structures in Zimbabwe show that a civilisation flourished

around this time. Although these ruins are very impressive, with a great wall measuring 246m long, this ancient city is just one of many in the region. More than 600 stone ruins have been identifed in modern-day Zimbabwe and nearly 7,500 have been found in northern South Africa.

years of war with Spain that follow, a growing number of Africans arrive in England. Historical records suggest that Queen Elizabeth I was involved in a plan to remove Africans from her realm.

Recent evidence suggests a more nuanced picture, but whatever the truth it shows there was a black presence in Britain.

A play featuring a fully rounded black leading character, Othello, is performed for the first time. In some ways Shakespeare’s portrayal of a black character was far superior to the often dehumanising representations of black people that were to follow in much European literature.

This earliest image of a black Briton was discovered in an abbreviated version of the Domesday Book used to collect taxes.

The highly centralised Kingdom of Kongo is established during this period and is surrounded by the formidable kingdoms of Teke, Tio, Dembo and Ndongo. One of its kings, Mani Kongo Diogo I, tried unsuccessfully to stop the Atlantic slave trade.

A poem by William Dunbar called Of Ane Blak-Moir suggests that there were black people in Britain during this period.

More than 20 enslaved Africans are kidnapped and taken to the English colony of Virginia, opening a new chapter of slavery in north America.

Abomey, capital of the kingdom of Dahomey, is founded around this time in modern-day Benin, west Africa. This was to become a powerful state with a strong connection to the Atlantic slave trade. It survived until 1904.

The annexing of the island of St Kitts signals the beginning of British domination of much of the Caribbean.

Many islands in the Caribbean changed hands during this period as European colonisers from France, England, Spain and elsewhere fought to control the islands.

The Royal African Company granted a charter giving it the exclusive right to carry slaves to the Americas.

John Hawkins is the first Englishman to lead a slave trading voyage from the west coast of Africa. Later Britain would become one of the biggest players in the Atlantic slave trade which led to the enforced transportation of 13 million Africans (according to recent estimates).

There are now a number of exhibitions across the UK that detail the close connection between the growth of cities such as London, Bristol, and Liverpool and the Atlantic slave trade.

During the period that a constitutional monarchy is established in Britain, Aphra Behn publishes her novel Oroonoko about an African of royal blood. Apart from being one of the first known female writers in the English language, Aphra Behn is credited with producing one of the first attacks on the Atlantic slave trade.

After a long-running war, the Maroons (runaway enslaved Africans who formed their own communities) force Edward Trelawny, the British governor of Jamaica, to sign a peace agreement.

Part of the agreement stipulates that the Maroons will return other runaway enslaved Africans who try to join them.

After the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Moroccan ambassador, Mushac Reyz, visits the court of Elizabeth I seeking a military alliance against Spain. In the

The Zulu army conquers great areas of southern Africa under the leadership of Shaka Zulu. During 10 years of warfare, Shaka Zulu quadruples the size of his army and the number of his subjects, absorbing them into the Zulu nation.

Phillis Wheatley, an African American, comes to London where her poetry had gained a following. She has a book of poems published.

Sugar and slavery become synonymous.

From North America to South America to the Caribbean to Australia, this commodity is grown using slavery or other forms of coerced labour. Sugar becomes England’s dominant import from the mid-18th century to the 19th century. This, in turn, fuels the Atlantic slave trade which helps to build the international trade system with its complex web of insurance and credit.

Captain Collingwood throws 132 sick Africans off the slave ship Zong in order to collect insurance money for them. This incident helps galvanise support for the movement against the Atlantic slave trade.

This organisation introduces the political poster, the consumer boycott, the petition, the flyer, the political book tour, and investigative reporting designed to stir people to political action. This movement was to immortalise characters such Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and of course, William Wilberforce. It was a three-pronged movement: its parliamentary face; its agitational face on the streets of Britain; but, above all, the resistance of the enslaved Africans themselves.

The Haitian Revolution. After a 12-year struggle in which thousands of formerly enslaved Africans overcame the British, Spanish, and Napoleonic French armies, the first independent black republic in the Americas was established. Motivated by ideas of the French revolution and led

by Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Alexandre Pétion, this revolution destroyed slavery in the most profitable French colony. William Wordsworth later dedicated a poem to L’Ouverture, including the lines: “There's not a breathing of the common wind / That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; / Thy friends are exultations, agonies, / And love, and Man’s unconquerable mind.”

The British slave trade is abolished in parliament on March 25 by the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. However, many slave traders discover ways to circumvent the new law. And slavery itself remains legal.

Having observed attempts by the British abolition movement to repatriate formerly enslaved Africans to Sierra Leone, the American Colonisation Society pays for 80 African Americans to be repatriated back to Africa. They set sail on the Elizabeth to west Africa, and though their attempt to establish a colony almost fails, they are later followed by others and go on to establish Liberia.

The slave rebellion in Jamaica movement initially starts off as passive resistance becomes an open rebellion against slavery. This uprising is credited with speeding up the full abolition a few years later.

Though the law now bans slavery, formerly enslaved Africans have to serve an “apprenticeship” of up to six years on low or no pay, until this system is scrapped in 1838. The slaveowners receive £20m in compensation, equivalent to 40% of the Treasury’s annual income at the time. The freed receive nothing.

Indians are moved to the British Caribbean as indentured labourers (who work for five years on plantations in exchange for wages and passage fares).

Indentured labourers experience terrible conditions as they have few rights.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas is published to great acclaim.

Dumas’s father was a Haitian-born general in Napoleon’s army. Dumas also authors The Three Musketeers.

As the British empire is approaching its zenith, the Great Exhibition is held in Hyde Park in London. Over six million visitors view goods from Africa, India and the West Indies. It was here that jewels taken from an Indian protectorate are

“donated” to Queen Victoria. They become part of the crown jewels.

Publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. It is an instant bestseller and polarises opinion on the issue of slavery in the United States and Britain.

Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation. Many free African Americans and runaway slaves join the Union armies in the ongoing American civil war. Slavery is formally abolished after the war ends, in 1865.

Samuel Ajayi Crowther (from Nigeria) is the first African to be ordained a bishop by the Anglican church.

The Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica leads to reprisals from the colonial governor, Edward John Eyre, in which hundreds are flogged and up to a thousand homes burned down. A Jamaica Committee is set up in Britain which condemns Eyre’s actions. This committee has large working-class support and such luminaries as Charles Darwin supporting it.

After the American civil war, black people in the United States fight for and gain the right to vote and participate in political life. But over the next few years, after a sustained backlash including intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan, most African Americans lose the right to vote.

Francis Galton tries to use his newly minted science of biostatistics to prove that Africans are intellectually inferior.

This theory profoundly affects issues of intelligence and education as well as founding eugenics. A book called Superior, by Angela Saini, outlines how Galton's ideas have persisted into the 21st century.

The role of black cowboys, previously ignored, is now coming to be recognised as an important part of the “cowboy story” in the American west. At least two black cowboys have been inducted into the cowboy hall of fame.

The Zulus inflict temporary defeat on the British army at Isandlwana.

The European powers gather together in Berlin to divide Africa among themselves at a meeting called by the German chancellor, Bismarck. Great Britain, France, Germany and Belgium lay claim to African territory and agree how further disagreements on territorial claims will be settled. Many of the decisions at this conference have significant consequences (fuelling long- running ethnic tensions and, in many cases, civil wars), as the national boundaries - some

of them crudely drawn using a ruler take little account of the needs, history and languages of different African peoples.

shortages. Black sailors and blackowned businesses are targeted and attacked by white crowds in cities including Glasgow and London.

Ghana gains independence, becoming one of the first African states free of colonialism, led by Kwame Nkrumah.

Slavery is abolished in Brazil. There are many earlier instances of enslaved Africans resisting slavery, most notably the “Negro Republic” at Palmares in Pernambuco. In events very similar to Haiti in 1804, enslaved Africans in Brazil manage to escape and form a community that persists throughout the 17th century. From 1672 to 1694 the Portuguese send an expedition every 15 months to crush this long-running slave revolt until it finally succumbs. Brazil to this day contains one of the largest populations of African descendants in the world.

Gandhi starts his passive resistance movement for Indian self-rule. He later becomes a profound infuence on Martin Luther King.

Althea Gibson becomes the first black Wimbledon champion. In 1975, Arthur Ashe becomes the first black man to win the title.

The Tulsa race massacre. In one of the most serious episodes of racial violence against African Americans in the history of the United States. A thriving black area, Greenwood - dubbed “Black Wall street” - endured two days of attacks by white mobs resulting in the deaths of up to 300 people, a further 10,000 left homeless, and 1,400 business premises destroyed by re. Largely ignored by history books until the 1990s, this event entered popular consciousness when featured in the Watchmen TV series in 2019.

Mauritania, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Nigeria and Gabon are among more than a dozen African states that gain their independence. British prime minister Harold Macmillan acknowledges that the British Empire is crumbling, declaring that a “wind of change” is blowing through Africa.

Booker T Washington publishes his landmark work Up from Slavery. His central idea is that black people have to improve their lives through their own efforts.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is formed and becomes a major force in the fight to gain the vote for African Americans. The ideas of one of its founders, WEB Du Bois, were to influence black activists throughout the world.

During his two-year stay in London, Marcus Garvey writes for a monthly journal called the African Times and Orient Review. He later says that his stay was crucial to the formation of his ideas of black pride. Garvey goes on to lead the first black nationalist mass movement in the US in the 1920s, which called on black people to return to Africa.

John Richard Archer is elected as London’s first black mayor, in Battersea.

Allan Glaisyer Minns is thought to be Britain’s first black mayor, elected in Thetford, Norfolk, in 1904.

The First World War. A great number of soldiers from the West Indies, India and across the British Empire join the war effort and many are killed. In France, Italy and Mesopotamia (of which modern day Iraq is a part), more than 15,000 soldiers serve in the British West Indies Regiment. Walter Tull, one of the first black men to command white soldiers in action, is killed in battle.

During the war, Garrett Morgan, an African American, invents a prototype gas mask. In 1922 he patents a forerunner to the modern automatic traffic light.

Race riots break out across the British Isles, sparked in part by housing

CLR James’ play about the Haitian revolution, Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History, is first performed in London.

Paul Robeson plays the title role.

African American Jesse Owens wins the 100 metres, 200 metres, long jump and 4x100 metre relay at the Berlin Olympics. Germany’s Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had hoped the event would demonstrate Aryan supremacy.

Troops from the British empire play a crucial role. Around 2,600,000 men and 100,000 women actively serve in the war. There are 1,200 in the Caribbean regiment; 5,500 in the RAF as ground crew; 300 Africans and Caribbeans in the RAF as air crew; 13 Victoria Crosses are awarded to “colonial soldiers”; and the UK imports huge quantities of grain, tea, fish and other commodities from the British empire.

In South Africa, 69 peaceful antiapartheid demonstrators are killed by police in the Sharpeville massacre

Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is murdered. His death sparks outrage and demonstrations across the world.

The March on Washington, where Martin Luther King makes his famous 'I have a dream' speech.

Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders are sent to prison by the apartheid regime. The struggle for their release spawns a mass movement across the world. Many South African exiles, both black and white, move to the UK.

After the governor of the Eastern region of Nigeria declares Biafra an independent state, a civil war ensues that costs almost a million lives. TV images of malnourished children with bloated stomachs shock the world.

Trinidadian-born George Padmore organises a Pan-African Conference in Manchester. Padmore becomes one of the most powerful ambassadors for PanAfricanism, which advocates the linking in solidarity of black people across the world. In attendance at the conference are many future leaders including Jomo Kenyatta (first president of Kenya), and Kwame Nkrumah (first president of Ghana).

The Afrikaner nationalists take power in South Africa and legalise white domination under what is known as apartheid (derived from the Afrikaans word for separateness). South Africans are divided into different racial categories: whites, coloureds (mixed race people), Indians and Pakistanis, and Bantus (black Africans). From its very inception the system sparks opposition.

Tommie Smith and John Carlos give the black power salute during a medal ceremony at the Mexico Olympics. The effect at the time is electrifying, as a defiant image of black power is beamed around the world.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou is published.

Idi Amin overthrows Milton Obote of Uganda. During Amin’s brutal reign some 300,000 Ugandans are killed and 80,000 Ugandan Asians deported. Many of them come to live in Britain, adding to the growing racial tension in the wake of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech

The Portuguese colonies Angola, GuineaBissau and Mozambique gain their independence after a long struggle.

Demonstrations begin in South Africa against the teaching in schools of Afrikaans (the language of the country’s white rulers). In Soweto the police fire on unarmed crowds, killing hundreds. One of the first children killed is 12-year-old Hector Pieterson.

Steve Biko, a South African black consciousness leader, is killed in police custody.

Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai becomes the first African woman to receive the Nobel peace prize.

A flood in New Orleans throws into bold relief the problems of class, race, and the persistent legacy of slavery in the US. The black urban poor are seen to get little assistance from the government, in the full glare of the international media.

Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old, is shot dead by George Zimmerman.A year later, after Zimmerman is acquitted of Martin’s murder, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter is used for the first time.

The death of two young men of North African origin while running away from the police in north-eastern Paris leads to rioting across France. The government imposes a range of emergency measures including curfews.

Malorie Blackman, author of Noughts and Crosses, becomes the UK’s children’s laureate.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf takes office as president of Liberia, becoming African’s first elected female head of state. Joyce Banda becomes the second, in Malawi in 2014.

Barack Obama is elected as the first African American president of the United States

Nelson Mandela, released from prison in 1990, is elected president of a multiracial South Africa.

After 32 years in power, the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko is deposed. In the ensuing civil war, lasting several years,

12 Years a Slave, directed by Steve McQueen, takes the Best Picture award at the Oscars. Over the following years, black movie-making reaches new heights: hits include Get Out, Hidden Figures and Moonlight (this story of a black gay man wins the Best Picture Oscar in 2017). Biggest hit of all is the Marvel superhero movie, Black Panther, one of the most-watched movies of all time.

South Africa hosts the football World Cup finals, the first time the tournament has been held in Africa.

South Sudan separates from Sudan and becomes Africa’s 54th independent nation.

Boko Haram kidnaps over 200 girls from a school in Chibok, north-east Nigeria.

An international campaign, #BringBackOurGirls, is launched. Some girls are eventually released but 100 remain missing.

Tamir Rice, 12, is shot dead by a police officer while holding a toy gun.

Chineke!, an orchestra for black and minority-ethnic musicians, is founded. In 2017 the orchestra performs at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms.

The Rhodes Must Fall campaign begins to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Rhodes, a 19th-century mining magnate and politician, was seen as an ardent British imperialist and white supremacist. A month later the statue is removed. But the campaign moves to Oxford university, where another statue of him sits within Oriel college. The college refuses to take down the statue but, years later, it reconsiders its decision.

A database is established at University College London, aiming to record every individual compensated by Britain at the abolition of slavery in 1833, and to show how widespread slave ownership was.

Also in 2015, Britain’s bill to pay those slaveowners is finally paid off - after 182 years.

Eric Garner dies after being put in a chokehold by arresting officers in Staten Island, New York. In the video later released, he is heard pleading “I can’t breathe” 11 times.

Mass genocide in Rwanda. As many as half a million Rwandans die as the Hutudominated army, militias and others massacre the Tutsi population.

Kofi Annan is the first sub- Saharan African to be elected to the top position within the United Nations as he takes on the role of secretary general.

Britain expresses regret and agrees to pay compensation to those it had tortured during the Mau Mau’s 1950s uprising against colonial rule in Kenya.

Veterans of the insurgency had won a legal action in the High Court.

The contagious disease Ebola spreads quickly across Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, killing 11,000 people.

White rule ends in Rhodesia after a bloody struggle, and the state of Zimbabwe is declared. Robert Mugabe becomes prime minister and stays in power until 2017.

Cape Town’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu wins the Nobel peace prize for his outspoken criticism of the apartheid regime. Meanwhile, an international boycott of cultural and trade links with South Africa grows.

Michael Brown, 18, is shot six times by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Large scale protests take place. Demonstrators, who believe he was surrendering to the police when shot, chant, “Hands up, Don’t shoot.”

Black Lives Matter becomes an internationally known campaign.

an estimated five million people are killed.

Mark Duggan is shot dead by the police in Tottenham, north London. His killing sparks riots which quickly spread across the UK. A Guardian investigation, Reading the Riots, shows mistrust of the police is a major factor in the unrest.

Poverty and instability across Africa and the Middle East spark a huge increase in migration to Europe. Hundreds drown while crossing the Mediterranean. Those who survive arrive mainly in Italy, provoking a political crisis across the European Union over border controls.

Immigration fears fuel the UK’s Brexit debate.

Edward Enninful becomes editor-in-chief of British Vogue magazine. His multiethnic first edition features mixed-race model Adwoa Aboah on the cover.

Vanessa Kingori becomes the magazine’s publishing director.

Nine African-Americans are shot dead by a white supremacist during a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina.

White supremacists rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. They march shouting racist and antisemitic slogans.

On the second day of the protests, a neoNazi deliberately drives into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing Heather Heyer. President Trump says there are very fine people on both sides".

Sarah Reed dies in Holloway prison, London. Reed, who had suffered from mental illness following the death of her baby daughter in 2003, had in a separate incident been violently assaulted by a police officer.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is opened in Washington DC. The biggest museum of its kind, it demonstrates the significance of African Americans in US and world history. President Obama leads the opening ceremony.

A Guardian investigation reveals that thousands of Caribbean migrants who had the right to settle in the UK have been denied NHS treatment and legal rights, wrongly detained, or in some cases deported. A public outcry ensues because these people and their families had been invited to Britain to help it rebuild after the second world war.

Hollywood actor Meghan Markle wows the nation as she weds Prince Harry.

Invited performers include cellist prodigy Sheku Kanneh-Mason, and London gospel singers the Kingdom Choir.

Colin Kaepernick, an African- American footballer, chooses not to stand during the national anthem during a preseason game. He explains: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour.” He is vilified, but “taking a knee” becomes a symbol of resistance to racial oppression across the world.

Ahmaud Arbery, while out jogging near Brunswick in Georgia, is confronted by two white residents and shot dead.

Initially police take no action, but when the video of the incident is made public and goes viral, charges are brought.

Covid-19 spreads across the planet, killing thousands, and disproportionately impacting on Black, Asian and minorityethnic people. Health workers and those

Demonstrators in Bristol target a citycentre statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston. He had personally been involved in transporting 84,000 people into slavery, around 19,000 of whom had died during the transatlantic voyage. The protestors tear down his statue, then drag it through the streets and throw it into the nearby river Avon. Historian David Olusoga says: “This was not an attack on history. This is history.”

Breonna Taylor, a 26-year- old medical worker, is shot dead by plainclothes police officers while asleep in her home in Louisville, Kentucky.

George Floyd, arrested in Minneapolis on suspicion of using a fake banknote, is filmed being held down by the neck, under the knee of a white police officer, Derek Chauvin. Passers-by protest, but another officer prevents them intervening. After four minutes Floyd loses consciousness, but in total Chauvin holds his knee down for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Protests immediately spring up: people take to the streets across America. As public anger grows, Chauvin is charged with second- degree murder. The protests grow globally, as the sense of injustice over Floyd’s death resonates with racial minorities elsewhere.

DNA analysis of a 10,000-year-old skeleton found in Cheddar Gorge suggests that the first modern Britons had dark brown skin.

Somali-born Ilhan Omar and AfricanAmerican Ayanna Pressley are elected to the US Congress. Together with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib they form “The Squad”, four women of colour pushing for progressive change.

Barack Obama ends his term as US president, to be replaced by Donald Trump, who used racist messaging throughout his election campaign.

in frontline jobs face the biggest risks from the coronavirus.

After the killing of Rem'mie Fells and Riah Milton, two black trans women, in the US within 24 hours, a campaign grows declaring that Black Trans Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter - a movement for change sweeps the world

Rosa Parks starts the Montgomery bus boycott when she refuses to give up her seat for a white passenger in Alabama (the boycott lasts a year). This launches the civil rights movement in the United States which aims to end racial segregation and remove the legal barriers to voting and education for African Americans.

President Eisenhower calls in federal troops and the National Guard to make sure that nine black students in Little Rock, Arkansas, can get past bigoted crowds which oppose them attending the formerly all-white high school. In 1954 the US Supreme Court had outlawed segregation in public education in a landmark case (Brown v Board of education). Southern Christian Leadership Conference set up by Martin Luther King and others. Becomes a leading force in the civil rights movement.

The Civil Rights Act is enacted, making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion or national origin.

Angela Davis is put on the FBI’s most wanted list over her links to the Black Panther Party.

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner (one black man and two white men), who had been working to see that black people could vote in Mississippi, are murdered. Evidence suggests the Ku Klux Klan, an extreme white supremacist organisation, is responsible.

Affirmative action to redress racial discrimination is given a legal basis with the passing of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act.

Martin Luther King is awarded the Nobel peace prize.

Negro History Week, created in 1926, becomes Black History Month.

Toni Morrison, author of Song of Solomon and Beloved, becomes the first African American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature.

Malcolm X is assassinated.

The TV series Roots, based on the novel

by Alex Haley, is a major hit. Not only does it secure the highest TV ratings ever but it also deepens the debate about race as many Americans, both black and white, learn the story of slavery in the United States for the first time.

Million Man March is organised by Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. The aim of the march, in Washington, is one of “atonement” for African-American males.

Passing of the Voting Rights Act makes it easier for black people to vote. Some of the worst rioting explodes in Watts, leaving 34 people dead, 3,500 arrested, and property damage of about $225m.

The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee mobilises students to challenge segregation in the south.

Action includes freedom rides and lunch counter protests.

Images of non- violent protestors being attacked by the police in Birmingham, Alabama, are caught on camera and shock the world.

Martin Luther King delivers his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech to more than 250,000 people in Washington.

Bomb attack on a black church in Birmingham kills four girls.

Malcolm X breaks from the Nation of Islam after months of rumours following his suspension from the organisation for saying that the assassination of President Kennedy was a case of “chickens coming home to roost”.

Tom Bradley is elected the first black mayor of Los Angeles.

Hundreds of thousands of black women take part in the Million Woman March.

The focus this time is on healthcare, education and self-help.

The leader of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, Stokeley Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), begins to advocate “black power” as an organising principle.

A TV documentary called The Hate That Hate Produced raises the profile of the Nation of Islam, introducing a broader audience to its brand of black nationalism. Malcolm X is featured in the documentary and later becomes one of the Nation’s most prominent members.

Riots in Los Angeles as four white police officers are acquitted after being filmed by a passer-by beating up an African American, Rodney King.

Guion “Guy” Bluford Jr is the first African American to go into space, on the Challenger Space Shuttle.

President Ronald Reagan passes a bill for an annual holiday to mark Martin Luther King’s birthday.

The formation of the Black Panther party

by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in California. Martin Luther King initiates Poor People’s Campaign to unite people of all races.

There are 40 riots and 100 other disturbances across the United States, most notably in Newark and Detroit. The first African-American Supreme Court judge, Thurgood Marshall, is elected.

Interracial relationships between black and white people are illegal in 16 states until the Supreme Court rules in the Loving v Virginia case that it is unconstitutional to prevent such unions.

Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Inner cities across America explode: as many as 125 cities experience riots.

Shirley Chisholm is the first AfricanAmerican woman elected to Congress, taking office in January 1969.

A bronze bust of Martin Luther King is set in the halls of Congress, the first of any African American. The Oprah Winfrey Show begins its run.

Colin Powell becomes secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice becomes national security adviser, and Roderick Paige secretary of education. The cabinet of the incoming president George W Bush contains more African Americans than any before.

An estimated 1,700 people die as Hurricane Katrina passes over the United States gulf coast. The African-American population bears the brunt of the flood when the levees break around New Orleans, but the federal government is slow to respond.

Congress overrides a presidential veto to pass the Civil Rights Restoration Act. Jesse Jackson gets 1,218 votes at the Democratic convention but fails to win his party’s nomination for the US presidency.

Colin Powell is appointed head of the US armed forces, another African- American first.

African American Douglas Wilder is elected state governor in Virginia.

Barack Obama becomes the first African American to secure the Democratic party nomination, and goes on to be elected president.

public services, and employment on the grounds of ethnicity.

MPs Bernie Grant, Paul Boateng, Keith Vaz and Diane Abbott are elected to parliament.

The Race Relations Act comes into force, and makes it illegal to refuse housing, public services, and employment on the grounds of ethnicity.

The Empire Windrush arrives from Jamaica. The National Health Service is established and later, in the 1960s, Enoch Powell leads a recruitment drive in the Caribbean for nurses. Much of the workforce that helps to build this institution comes from the Caribbean.

Bernard Coard publishes the landmark pamphlet How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System. The book inspires a movement for equal access to educational opportunity for black schoolchildren. A new Immigration Act is passed, further restricting migration from Commonwealth countries.

Trevor McDonald joins ITN and later becomes first black British newsreader on national TV.

Billy Boston is the first black rugby league player to represent Great Britain.

Notting Hill riots break out. After growing racial tensions, the newly arrived West Indians fight back against teddy boy gangs who are attacking them armed with iron bars and knives. Riots impact national consciousness and start a debate about race relations that continues to this day.

David Pitt becomes a life peer, Lord Pitt of Hampstead. He later becomes chair of the British Medical Association.

The Fosters, a sitcom with an all- black cast, arrives on British TV, making a star out of Lenny Henry, among others. Race Relations Act strengthens laws against discrimination and establishes the Commission for Racial Equality.

The National Front, an extreme rightwing party, is prevented by anti-Nazi protestors from marching through Lewisham, south-east London.

Kelso Cochrane, a black man, is murdered by a gang of white youths in west London. The murderers are not caught. Activist Claudia Jones organises a campaign to draw attention to this issue.

Commonwealth Immigrants Act is passed with the aim of reducing immigration from the former British empire. Six years later the controls are tightened further.

Margaret Thatcher says that many British people feel “swamped” by a different culture, during the build-up to the following year’s general election. In doing so, she wins over voters from the far-right National Front.

Rock Against Racism carnival brings together black and white teenagers. This movement helps introduce reggae to a wider audience and changes the nature of punk. Artists like Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols and Big Youth in Jamaica form a musical symbiosis that helps shape the way British music develops.

Black History Month is made a fixture in the UK for the first time.

Blair Peach is killed during an anti-racist demonstration. The circumstances of his death remain unclear to this day.

Riots in St Paul’s, a district of Bristol.

This is a harbinger of the far more serious riots to sweep Britain a year later. A disproportionate number of young black men are stopped under the 1824 Vagrancy Act (originally designed to stop begging) during this period. This stop and search was more commonly known as the “sus law”. Black people, while a small part of the general population, are 17% of the prison population by this point; 36% of young prisoners are black.

This feeds much of the resentment that will explode in riots the following year.

Ben Okri wins the Booker prize for his novel The Famished Road.

New Cross fire. In January, 13 young African-Caribbeans die in a house fire.

The seeming refusal of the police to take seriously claims by witnesses that the house had been fire- bombed by racists leads to a deepening anger among the African-Caribbean community.

Paul Ince becomes the first black captain of the senior men's England football team.

The Brixton riots break out in April and are replicated up and down the country (most notably in Toxteth, Liverpool).

Years of marginalisation, heavy-handed policing and general alienation explode, leaving millions of pounds-worth of damage and injuring hundreds. In their wake, the Scarman Report makes recommendations to challenge racial disadvantage. The sus laws are also repealed.

Moira Stuart becomes the first black female news presenter on national British television.

Police and Criminal Evidence (Pace) Act stipulates that the police must give a reason why they are stopping someone.

The Race Relations Act comes into force, and makes it illegal to refuse housing,

Stephen Lawrence is murdered at a bus stop in London.

Chris Ofili wins the Turner Prize.

The Macpherson report on the police investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence is published. The report’s recommendations represent a watershed in UK race relations, identifying institutional racism for the first time.

Damilola Taylor is murdered. This incident raises questions about gang culture and urban poverty.

Paul Boateng is appointed chief secretary to the Treasury, becoming the first black cabinet minister. The following year Baroness Amos becomes the first black female cabinet minister.

Jason Robinson becomes the first black captain of the England rugby union team.

John Sentamu becomes the first black Archbishop of York.

Notting Hill Carnival, originally founded in 1959, takes to the streets.

Enoch Powell makes his “Rivers of Blood” speech denouncing immigration.

There are disturbances across the UK in support of his speech, and some workers march to show their support for him.

Bill Morris becomes the first black leader of a major British trade union.

Frank Bowling becomes the first black artist to be elected to the Royal Academy of Arts.

Viv Anderson becomes the first black footballer to play for England's senior men's team

Riots in Tottenham are sparked by the death of Cynthia Jarrett during a police raid on her home in the Broadwater Farm estate.

Barack Obama flies in to the UK in the run-up to the US presidential election.

His visit begs the question: will there ever be a black British prime minister?

Oxburgh Hall: Thousands of 'rare items' found in attic

The roof repair work is being funded by a number of different charities and organisations Including The National Lottery Heritage Fund

A 600-year-old manuscript was discovered under floorboard in Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk

Thousands of "rare items" dating back to the 15th Century have been found in the attic of a Tudor house.

An archaeologist made the "unique discovery" while working alone Decapitated: a statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Park in June 2020 through lockdown at Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk.

A 600-year-old manuscript, fragments of medieval books, Elizabethan textiles and an empty wartime chocolate box were among the items found at the National Trust property.

The trust said some of the items had been "perfectly preserved".

The moated manor house was built by Sir Edmund Bedingfield in 1482 and his descendants still live in part of the building.

As part of a ÂŁ6m project to restore the roof, floorboards in the attic were removed and archaeologist Matt Champion conducted a fingertip search of the exposed area.

National Trust curator Anna Forest said the "rare items" had been

Two ancient rats nests containing more than 200 fragments of textiles such as silk, velvet, satin and leather were also discovered.

A builder also found an "almost intact" copy of a book called the King's Psalms, which was dated 1568 and was complete with leather binding.

Russell Clement, general manager of Oxburgh Hall, said the finds were "far beyond anything we expected to see".

"These objects contain so many clues which confirm the history of the house as the retreat of a devout Catholic family, who retained their faith across the centuries," he said.

"We will be telling the story of the family and these finds in the house, now we have reopened again following lockdown."

Oxburgh Hall was built as a statement of "power and prestige"

"undisturbed for centuries".

Ms Forest said inches of dust and a layer of lime plaster had drawn out moisture in the attic which "resulted in much of it being perfectly preserved for centuries".

"The value of underfloor archaeology to our understanding of Oxburgh's social history is enormous," she said.

A wartime chocolate box was one of the items discovered in the attic

The Bedingfields were devout Catholics, which led to the family being ostracised and persecuted, but they used the manor to shelter clergy members.

The manuscript fragment, which was unearthed by a builder, "may well have been used in illegal masses and hidden deliberately", the trust said.

A few fragments of the King's Psalms had previously been found in a rats nest

Š BBC

Forgotten heroes: when the Empire went to war Jemadar Abdul Hafiz (1925–1944), VC, 9th Jat Regiment, 1944 Lesley Franklyn (b.1900)

Sepoy Kamal Ram (1924–1982), VC, 8th Punjab Regiment Henry Marvell Carr (1894–1970)

In recent months, public statues have become a symbolic battleground for our understanding of race and history. As Black Lives Matter protests have called for a rethinking of who we honour in public art, opposition groups have gathered, claiming to 'protect' war memorials.

However, the idea that BLM protesters would damage war memorials erases the sacrifices made by black and brown people from across the British Empire in wartime. In fact, the movements for civil rights and independence born in part from the frustration of World War veterans across the Empire are echoed in the spirit of the contemporary BLM movement.

The nation's public art collections hold a few precious records of the Empire's diverse army. Contemporary artist Barbara Walker (b.1964) began researching this history while working on a project on contemporary conflicts.

Naik Yeshwant Ghadge (1921–1944), VC, 3rd Battalion 5th Mahratta Light Infantry, c.1944, Marie Temple

Rifleman Thaman Gurung, VC, 1/5th Gurkha Rifles (Frontier Force) unknown artist

confronts the erasure of black soldiers by reinserting their presence through a pen and ink drawing which is laid over an archival image of a white soldier. By using tracing paper Walker ensures the white soldier is still visible while reinserting the black soldier into the image, demonstrating that the reexamining of history is not an erasure of stories we already know.

Walker's black soldier is unnamed. He may have been one of 15,000 Caribbean men from islands colonised by Britain who served with the West India Regiment or the British West Indies Regiment during the First World War. At the start of the war, these men were given labouring jobs and were not allowed to fight alongside white soldiers until 1916. Walker's soldier may well have been from one of the African countries within the Empire; if so he might have served with the West African Frontier Force or the King's African Rifles.

Sepoy (later Subadar) Namdeo Jadhav (c.1922–1984), VC, 1st Battalion 5th Mahratta Light Infantry; Marie Temple

Regimental Sergeant Major Sulimani, 3rd Battalion, King’s African Rifles, Dorothy King (active c.1939)

soldiers from the Indian sub-continent served alongside British troops. These soldiers came from a range of countries, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and practised various religions, including Sikhism, Hinduism and Islam.

The struggle between the Empire and those it colonised is also alluded to in I Was There V, with two red letters W and E representing the familiar dichotomy of West and East, which the wars broke down.

While Walker uses archives to connect to these men,

A Jemadar of Indian Cavalry, 1938 David S. Barrow (Major) (1911–1944)

Soldier of the King's African Rifles, Ceremonial Dress J. Gilson

Askari, Corporal of the 5th Kings African Rifles Gaby Remnant

Sergeant Ali Jebba, Royal West African Frontier Force unknown artist

We know from Munnings' notes that the two soldiers he met were called Madat Ali and Bhagwan Singh. It appears Munnings did not have much time to make these sketches, as only their faces are fully fleshed out, but what is there is an important record of the individuals who formed part of the Indian regiment on the front lines of the war.

Little more is known about Ali and Singh, but there is a painting by Henry Charles Bevan-Petman which tells us more about the experiences of a soldier from the Indian subcontinent. This is a portrait of Khudadad Khan (1888–1971), who was the first Indian soldier to be awarded the Victoria Cross in 1915 for his actions on 31st October 1914.

war artists like Alfred Munnings (1878–1959) captured portraits of them on the Western Front.

In February 1918, while Munnings was embedded with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, he sketched two Indian soldiers.

Despite being wounded, Khan remained to man his gun and held off the opposing forces just long enough for reinforcements to arrive. It is this extraordinary act of bravery that would have made Khan an appropriate subject for a portrait, which becomes an important record of his story.

During the First World War, he joined the Football Battalion where he was promoted to the rank of Sergeant and became the first black officer in the British army. He was killed crossing No Man's Land on 25th March 1918.

In London, Hyde Park's Commonwealth Memorial Gates were unveiled in 2002 to commemorate the armed forces of the British Empire who served in the two World Wars.

In Windrush Square in Brixton, South London, the African and Caribbean War Memorial was unveiled in 2017.

Alongside artworks of the servicemen and women, there are public memorials across the country which commemorate soldiers from the Empire. In Brighton, the Chattri Monument commemorates the 12,000 Indian soldiers who were wounded on the Western Front and hospitalised at sites around Brighton.

All those who fought in the wars should be remembered for their bravery and sacrifice, but far too often the lives of those who came from across the British Empire are forgotten.

These artworks and memorials capture their stories.

They help us to expand our understanding of race and Britishness, by allowing us to understand the history of racism, colonialism and Empire alongside that of sacrifice, independence and diaspora.

Not all of the black and brown soldiers who fought during the First World War were born outside Britain.

Walter Tull (1883–1918) was born in Folkestone, Kent, like his mother Alice. His father Daniel had emigrated from Barbados to England. Tull became a footballer, playing for Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town. soldier becomes a symbol for all these individuals, whose stories often go untold or are forgotten.

Alongside drawings of black soldiers, I Was There V features an archival photograph of an Indian soldier.

During the First World War, over one and a half million

Piper, 42nd Deoli Regiment, c.1914 unknown artist

while cremating and scattering the ashes of their comrades.

Richard Austin's sculpture of Tull in his football kit was installed outside the Northampton Guildhall in 2017. Representing Tull in his football kit reminds us of the rich lives those who fought in the World Wars lived, many of which were cut short.

Tull's ability to rise through the ranks was exceptional and impossible for most black soldiers due to colour bars. Outside of the armed forces, racial discrimination was felt by those who settled in Britain post-war and for those who returned to their countries of origin. There was frustration that despite their sacrifices they remained under British rule, leading for renewed calls for independence across the Empire.

Had he served in the Second World War he might have been of the 5,500 Caribbean RAF personnel, who were also joined by Caribbean women, with 80 of them within the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and 30 within the Auxiliary Territorial Service. This unnamed

Captain Effendi Juma, 3rd Battalion, King’s African Rifles Dorothy King (active c.1939)

It is located on the site where 53 Hindu and Sikh soldiers who died in hospitals in Brighton were cremated. Funeral ceremonies were carried out by fellow soldiers who conducted traditional prayers

Chloe Austin, curator, art historian and art writer

© Art UK

Mary, Queen of Scots in art and literature

play). The gold and black dress embodies both Mary’s martyrdom and queenship.

'But she was earnest with me to declare which of them I judged fairest. I said "She was the fairest Queen in England and mine the fairest Queen in Scotland."'

–

Preparatory Sketches of Mary, Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley c.1854 Richard Burchett (1815–1875) (studio of) Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), at Fotheringhay 1929 John Duncan (1866–1945)

But tragedy soon struck, and François died suddenly in 1560. His mother, Catherine de' Medici, became regent for her next son, the ten-year-old Charles IX. Now a widow, Mary embraced her Scottish heritage and came back to her native Scotland.

conspirator against both England and Protestantism with her constant correspondence to France and Spain, in which she begged to be rescued and insisted she be put on the English and Scottish thrones as the rightful queen of both kingdoms. It was this behaviour that was to lead to her beheading at Fotheringhay Castle, in 1587.

To some extent, one could say that the costumes, in turn, inspired some representations of the Scottish queen and her second husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, which were painted in the second half of the nineteenth century. Mary’s representation as a chaste Catholic martyr undoubtedly dominated the ways in which she was perceived by nineteenthcentury artists and playwrights.

people, Mary remains a victim who died for her faith.

She remains a martyr and a lost queen.

Mary, Queen of Scots 1991 Lys Hansen (b.1936)

By the early twentieth century, Mary, Queen of Scots’ head is more or less the only thing left in representations of her – portraits are painted to remember her execution, and what many people see as being her tragic death.

Mary, Queen of ScotsPhoto credit: National Trust for Scotland, Falkland Palace & Garden Mary, Queen of Scots early 17th C

Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587) c.1559 François Clouet (c.1515–1572) (follower of)

complex. Half-Scottish and half-French, she is remembered both as a Scottish queen and a French queen with a ‘French life,’ whose marriage to the French dauphin, the future François II of France, on 24th April 1558 reinforced the Franco-Scottish alliance. François Clouet – one of the greatest French painters of the sixteenth century – captured the young queen’s determination to rule over more than one country. Indeed, one cannot overlook the fact that in the early stages of her life, Mary, Queen of Scots had the world at her feet.

M

Mary, Queen of Scots c.1610 Nicholas Hilliard (1547–1619) (after) Mary, Queen of Scots: The Farewell to France 1867 Robert Inerarity Herdman (1829–1888)

Over the centuries, portrayals of Mary as a martyr wearing black increased, with French playwrights using these portraits as a basis for costumes assigned to the actresses playing Mary, Queen of Scots on stage.

Elizabeth I (1533–1603) British (English) School

ary, Queen of Scots (also known as Mary Stuart) – like her cousin, Elizabeth I of England – has intrigued historians, writers, poets, playwrights, and painters for centuries. Her tragic fate, a consequence of her tumultuous relationship with the last Tudor queen, resulted in her being one of the most memorable historical figures of the age. Elizabeth is remembered as Gloriana and the Faerie Queen, Mary as a Catholic martyr. Yet portraits of the queens produced in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries illustrate striking parallels between the two women – especially Elizabeth’s well-known ‘fairy wings’, which were appropriated by Mary – reminding us that after all, they did share Tudor blood.

From a martyr to a siren to a traitor to a whore, representations of Mary Stuart remain wide and

Mary, Queen of Scots Bidding Farewell to France, 1561 1851 William Powell Frith (1819–1909)

Mary, Queen of Scots c.1560–1580 François Clouet (c.1515–1572) (after)

Both of these paintings are nineteenth-century portraits depicting Mary’s departure from France. Her sadness here is clear, and in many ways this is true to life. After all, Mary loved France and was very much cherished by the French people. Not only did she have to say goodbye to the country that essentially raised her, she had to say goodbye to a crown that was no longer hers.

Her return was not to be a happy one. Due to a fair amount of misguided decisions, in 1568 Mary was forced to abdicate and leave her homeland, heading to her greatest enemy’s kingdom, England. This was where Mary spent eighteen years of her life as a prisoner, at the mercy of Queen Elizabeth’s goodwill.

Mary forged her reputation as a traitor and

Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587) 17th C unknown artist

There’s a striking resemblance between the dress in this portrait, which was painted in the seventeenth century, and the costume worn by the actress who played Mary Stuart in Pierre-Antoine Lebrun’s 1820 tragedy (based on Schiller's 1800

Mary, Queen of Scots 1934 R. J. S. Paterson

Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587) c.1600 Flemish School

Mary, Queen of Scots has become a symbol of both Catholicism and martyrdom. The above portrait – which was commissioned by one of Mary’s ladies, Elizabeth Curle – is entitled The Memorial Portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Marguerite A. Tassi, an English professor and an expert in representation, has argued that this portrait played a crucial role in how Mary was remembered after her death, mainly by the Catholic community (see her chapter in ).

For some, Mary was also seen as a more sexual creature. Debra Barrett-Graves, another English professor specialising in the Renaissance, has studied the ways in which the Protestants remembered Mary, discovering far less flattering images of the queen: as a mermaid, a siren, a sexual creature who would lead men to their deaths. These images can be found in the National Archives. Yet none of the later painters chose to continue this myth around the Scottish queen, and for most

Even in this painting – dated 1934 – Mary’s head is what catches the viewer’s eye. Here, she is the lost queen of Scotland who was executed for treason by her English cousin. Interestingly enough, Mary Queen of Scots is still very much cherished by her native Scotland, a country that chose to have a Calvinist reformation as early as 1560 and which would despise any Catholic rites or icons.

Overall, Mary, Queen of Scots’ martyrdom and religious piety has dominated the ways in which she has been remembered in the arts. In the twenty-first century, Mary and Elizabeth (as one cannot completely be understood without the other, or so it seems) are receiving even more media attention with the upcoming movie, Mary, Queen of Scots, directed by Josie Rourke and starring Saoirse Ronan as Mary and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth. Based on John Guy’s My Heart Is My Own, the interest is in, as Guy puts it, seeing her 'as a whole woman' rather than as simply a martyr or traitor.

In my opinion, the story of Mary Stuart, whose life is entangled with Elizabeth’s, will continue to inspire new writers, poets, painters, screenwriters, playwrights, historians, and the public, for centuries to come.

© Art UK

How one woman pulled off the first consumer boycott – and helped inspire the British to abolish slavery

By Tom Zoellner, Professor of English, Chapman University While many companies have trumpeted their support for the Black Lives Matter movement, others are beginning to face consumer pressure for not appearing to do enough.

For example, some people are advocating a consumer boycott of Starbucks over an internal memo that prohibits employees from wearing gear that refers to the movement. And advocates are urging supporters to target other companies under the Twitter tag #boycott4blacklives.

Consumers boycotts, which put power into the hands of people of even modest income and can lend a sense of “doing something” in the face of injustice, have a mixed track record. There have been some notable successes, such as consumer-led efforts to end apartheid in South Africa. But others, such as boycotts of the National Rifle Association and of Israel, have yielded little.

But it may hearten Black Lives Matter consumer activists to learn that the first-ever boycott – organized over 50 years before the term was even coined – was ultimately a success, if not in the way the woman behind it intended. I stumbled upon this history during research for my just-published book about the end of slavery in the British Caribbean.

An illustration of a sugar plantation in Antigua.

A printed illustration of sugar cane in Jamaica in the 1800s.

A poster advertised a chapel service in celebration of the abolition of slavery in 1838.

Decapitated: a statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Park in June 2020

In the 1820s, Elizabeth Heyrick felt disgust over Britain’s enslavement of people on islands such as Barbados and Jamaica in the West Indies, where large sugar plantations produced virtually all the sugar consumed in Western Europe.

Although England banned the British Atlantic slave trade in 1807, it still permitted people to own slaves in its colonies in the early 19th century.

Heyrick joined the abolition movement from a position of privilege and wealth. But after an early marriage to a hothead husband ended with his death in 1797, she converted to Quakerism and vowed to give up “all ungodly lusts.” She eventually found a passion for the antislavery movement, though with marked frustration for the slow-moving process of pushing bills through the English Parliament.

Contemptuous of the male abolitionists in Parliament whom she regarded as too willing to appease the wealthy slaveholders who clung to slavery as an economic pillar, Heyrick launched a campaign to get ordinary Britons to quit using the sugar produced on these islands and for grocers not to carry it.

If people must have the “sweet dust,” she said, they should at least make sure it was grown in Britain’s colonies in the East Indies – Bengal and Malaya – where canefield laborers were impoverished but at least technically free.

Her campaign involved writing a series of booklet-sized polemics. In one such broadside, she asked those who favored gradual emancipation to reflect “that greater victories have been achieved by the combined expression of individual opinion than by fleets and armies; that greater moral revolutions have been accomplished by the combined exertions of individual resolution than were ever effected by acts of Parliament.”

Heyrick pulled no rhetorical punches: “Let the produce of slave labor henceforth and for ever be regarded as ‘the accursed thing’ and refused admission to our houses,” she wrote.

“Abstinence from one single article of luxury would annihilate the West Indian slavery!!”

Her focus on citizen-driven change through deliberate consumer activism was unpopular with her contemporaries who preferred negotiations among government officials to achieve their ends.

Heyrick grew despondent with the seeming lack of progress from her boycott effort and died in 1831 without seeing her goal of “imminent emancipation” achieved. Her passing was barely noticed by British newspapers, yet her efforts would come to bear astonishing results very soon after her death.

Heyrick could not have known that an enslaved Baptist deacon in Jamaica named Samuel Sharpe was – while she was pushing for a boycott – reading about the anti-slavery movement she did so much to fuel, almost certainly including the “Quit Sugar” movement.

Heartened by the news that many people in the faraway capital of the empire were actually sympathetic to him and his fellows, he began to formulate his own revolutionary vision and preached about it and his plans for rebellion to select groups of elite slaves.

Sharpe’s rebellion, known as the Baptist War, began on Dec. 27, 1831. The uprising lasted less than two weeks and resulted in the destruction of dozens of buildings and killing of at least 500 slaves – both during the fighting and in reprisals. A giant pit had to be dug outside Jamaica’s Montego Bay to hold all the bodies. Sharpe was hanged a few months later.

But the mere demonstration of military competence – the rebels defeated the island militia in at least one head-to-head confrontation – made an impression like no other uprising had before and helped inspire the British Parliament to pass the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which abolished slavery in the West Indies. Full freedom wasn’t achieved until 1838.

The headlines of 19th century newspapers thus performed a double-function as they crossed the Atlantic. News of the sugar boycott helped inspired enslaved people to revolt, and news of their visceral unhappiness to the point of mayhem helped inspire the British Parliament to push for immediate abolition – which is what Heyrick had been saying all along. © THE C

NVERSATION

HS2 works unearth skeleton of possible iron age murder victim Other finds include lead lined Roman coffin and Stonehenge-like wooden structure A skeleton believed to be a murder victim from the iron age has been discovered by archaeologists working on the HS2 project in Buckinghamshire.

The skeleton discovered near Wellwick Farm with its hands bound.

The timber monument has features aligned to the winter solstice.

HS2 said the find was made during excavation work at Wellwick Farm, near Wendover. Archaeologists found the skeleton of the adult male buried face down in a ditch with his hands bound together under his pelvis.

spanning 4,000 years came as a bit of a surprise to us.

“The death of the Wellwick Farm man remains a mystery to us but there aren’t many ways you end up in a bottom of a ditch, face down, with your hands bound. We hope our osteologists will be able to shed more light on this potentially gruesome death.”

She said the three discoveries helped to “bring alive the fact that people lived, worked and died in this area long before we The unusual burial position suggested the came along”. man may have been the victim of a murder or The archaeological works had revealed execution, it said. evidence of human activity dating from the neolithic to the medieval period, HS2 said.

Osteologists were examining the skeleton for further evidence of foul play, HS2 said.

HS2’s lead archaeologist, Mike Court, said Work on the site for the high-speed rail the discoveries would be shared with project has also revealed a large circular communities and the public through virtual monument of wooden posts 65 metres lectures, open days, and in an upcoming (213ft) in diameter, with features aligned documentary. with the winter solstice, similar to Stonehenge in Wiltshire; and a skeleton in a “We are uncovering a wealth of archaeology coffin lined in lead, an expensive material that will enrich our cultural heritage,” he indicating high status. said. “The sheer scale of possible discoveries, the geographical span and the Dr Rachel Wood, an archaelogist working on vast range of our history to be unearthed the project, said: “We already knew that makes HS2’s archaeology programme a Buckinghamshire is rich in archaeology, but unique opportunity to tell the story of discovering a site showing human activity Buckinghamshire and Britain.” © The Guardian

What is the future of the UN in the age of impunity?

A security council meeting in 1953. Some countries are questioning whether the UN, set up after the second world war, is still relevant or holds any power.

Even at the best of times, there is a wide scope for misunderstanding in modern international relations, says António Guterres, the UN secretary general. “When two diplomats meet”, he says, “there are at least six perceptions to manage: how the two perceive themselves, how they perceive each other – and how they think the other perceives them”.

Four months into the coronavirus epidemic and it is the worst of times – and the opportunities for misperception have multiplied. The virus has left the UN members talking past one another, and advocates of multilateralism increasingly looking anywhere but the security council to promote liberal democracy, seek compromise or campaign for accountability.

For Guterres, this is deeply frustrating. He was one of the first world leaders to grasp the seriousness of the pandemic, and saw an opportunity for the 15-strong UN security council to play a convening role.

He tried, for instance, to make the UN relevant back in late March by calling for a worldwide ceasefire to give the doctors space and time to save lives. It was unashamedly idealistic, but some militias in Cameroon, Thailand and the Philippines, agreed to time out.

But then arguments between China and the US over Covid-19 held up the resolution for months. The US objected to any positive reference to the UN World Health Organization in the text. The only body to be demobilised, Guterres discovered, was the UN itself.

Three months later, the resolution was finally agreed, excluding any direct reference to the WHO. In the meantime, 12 million people had been infected by the virus and 500,000 had died – and momentum on the ceasefire had been lost. By contrast, in 2014 the security council had passed a resolution on Ebola in one day.

Similarly, a declaration drafted to mark the UN’s 75th birthday, due to be adopted at the September general assembly, led to long disagreements in the security council. The US opposed references to the climate change. The west, including Britain, also suspected China was trying to slip some Chinese communist thinking into the resolution, and objected. Agreement was finally reached, but for most people it was a theological dispute comprehensible to a handful of diplomats Guterres admits the security council at this supremely global moment had offered little but paralysis. “Relations between the most important powers, the USA, China and Russia, are more dysfunctional than ever. Unfortunately, where there is power, there is no leadership, and where there is leadership, there is lack of power. Furthermore, when we look at multilateral institutions, we have to recognise that they have no teeth. Or, when they do, they don’t have much of an appetite. They don’t want to bite”.

This degree of gridlock has had consequences way beyond the loss of an abstract concept – the liberal rules-based order. We are, in the words of David Miliband, CEO of the international rescue committee and a former Labour foreign secretary, “living through the age of impunity”.

“Anything goes. And the law is for suckers. A time where war crimes go unpunished and the laws of war become optional. A time when militaries, militias, and mercenaries in conflicts around the world believe they can get away with anything, and because they can get away with anything, they do everything,” he said.

Fires rage after Russian planes struck a village in Idlib, Syria, in January 2020, killing at least 26 civilians.

Syria is ‘exhibit A’ in proving the point that ‘anything goes’.

Syria acts as exhibit A to illustrate Miliband’s point. Geir Pedersen, the fourth UN special envoy since the civil war started in 2011, already questions his value. “When I asked friends and colleagues should I take on this job, they said you must be crazy, I thought maybe after eight years of conflict the time was getting more ripe for settling the conflict,” he says. “What I expected was the lack of trust between the parties, but not the deep distrust between the international parties and that is something I am struggling with”.

Russia has used its veto power an astonishing 16 times in Syria, twice in the last month to block humanitarian aid into the country.

Pedersen says: “I brief the council every month and sometimes I think there is not much new to say. There is a deep frustration that after nine and a half years the political process has not been able to deliver any progress. No progress on the economy, detainees or what you can do for the dignified return for refugees.

“I told the UN security council ‘I need your help if we are to make progress’. With a conflict that has been going on for so long, I worry it becomes part of the normal scenery.

I struggle with this. We have thousands of people killed and it is not even close to headlines anymore.”

Libya could act as exhibit B. It, too, has been locked in an on-off civil war since 2011, while the UN watches its own arms embargo openly flouted.

Ghassan Salamé, the former UN special envoy for Libya, makes a brutal wider analysis of what is going wrong. “In the cold war, the security council was blocked by the mutual veto. Nowadays we are blocked by the disintegration of the idea of collective security. It is not there in the council. We went in the 80s through a period of financial deregulation, what is called neo-liberalism … We are now going through a period of de-regulation of force. Now everybody who has the means to do something – and a lack of internal constraints, such as a parliament – has the means to act and there is no one to tell them ‘you cannot do that’. Let’s face it, it makes democracies weaker. Why do we not say that publicly?

“It is not because democracies produce weak regimes, but democracy needs multilateralism. It needs everyone to have domestic and internal constraints, to put limits to behaviour. If you can ignore your constitution, your parliament and public opinion and you do not have an external power constraint, whether it is the security council or the great powers, then it is a free-for-all.

“As a result, the constraints on external meddling by medium-rank powers no longer exist.”

Libyan army recruits patrolling the city of Tarhunah.

‘Libya could act as exhibit B.’

Kosovo, Hashim Thaçi, has felt obliged to attend a special war crimes court. In April in Germany Anwar Raslan and Eyad al-Gharib, two Assad regime torturers, were put on trial for war crimes.

Mitchell says Scotland Yard can do the same with five Rwandans accused of mass genocide living in the UK. London has signed up to the new breed of Magnitsky human rights sanctions, already pioneered in the US, and the EU is following suit.

Joseph Nye, the first exponent of “soft power” and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy school of government, has developed such examples into the outline of a new order. Writing in Project Syndicate, he said: “If Joe Biden is elected, the question he will face is not whether to restore the liberal international order. It is whether the US can work with an inner core of allies to promote democracy and human rights while cooperating with a broader set of states to manage the rules-based international institutions needed to face transnational threats such as climate change, pandemics, cyber-attacks, terrorism, and economic instability.”

Such a new order would involve two tiers of multilateralism for the US, one with allies and the other with rivals. China and Russia would have to be treated as revisionist participants in the existing international order, not solely as enemies standing outside of it.

Europe, he confides, is powerless, and has been reduced to the role of the peace banker, offering to finance reconstruction once others finish the fighting.

Harold Koh, legal adviser to the State Department under Barack Obama and professor of international law at Yale University, argues that we are living through a pivotal moment, second only to the second world war. “Back in the 1790s Immanuel Kant made a very simple argument. He said we do not need world government. What we need is democratic nations committed to human rights and the rule of law cooperating for shared ends.

“Essentially he was calling for a United Nations system. The alternative, less clearly expressed, is Orwell’s 1984 – spheres of superpower influence where there are no values, people lie, change enemies and friends day to day. Leaders are authoritarian at home, and pat dictators on the back abroad.”

Most believe that the Orwellians are winning – if only because China and the US’s visions of the post-imperial world order appear so incompatible.

Women picket outside the UN in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis calling for peace.

But Mary Robinson, the chair of the Elders, the group of senior former UN leaders, says it is too soon to read the last rites for multilateralism. The movement has gone through a bumpy undefended period, she recently told Chatham House, the non-profit organisation that aims to analyse and promote the understanding of major international issues. But as recently as 2015 the world came together on climate change and global development goals, she said.

This may require some decoupling economically, but not politically. Instead, in the view of the former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, it will require the same level of political engagement with China, but operating with clearer guide rails.

America has to move from unpredictable episodic strategic competition with China, the custom under Trump, to systematic strategic competition. Clearer red lines between China and the west would paradoxically allow multilateralism to thrive.

“No event could have more clearly made the case for multilateralism – the simple idea of cooperation between countries to solve problems that are too big for one country,” she says. Populists, salesmen of distrust and nationalism have been found wanting faced by a pandemic without a passport. Even in America, Trump’s familiar tunes play to emptying stadiums.

But what would renewal of multilateralism look like?

If Joe Biden wins the US election this November, probably the most pro-Atlanticist politician in America will enter the White House. He has already said he will review Donald Trump’s troop withdrawal from Germany and promised to hold a summit of democracies, a proposal that might dovetail with the UK’s plans to create a democratic 10 group of nations. Above all, the whole tone of transatlantic discussion would change.

Europe is desperate for a new world order. “If we want to be seen and respected by China as an equal partner we need to organise ourselves,” Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has said.

In 2019 France and Germany formed the alliance for multilateralism, an informal ad hoc grouping of 50 or so members (though not the UK) that was instrumental in ensuring the WHO passed a resolution backing a review of its handling of Covid-19.

But a Biden White House would not end the trade or political rivalry with China and Russia, or restore the rare period of American hegemonic power at the end of the cold war.

Nor would it lift the roadblocks to reform at the UN and its subsidiary bodies such as the WHO. All sides agree the 15-strong security council is a museum piece built to reward the winners of the second world war, and does not reflect the modern balance of power. Most people, including Ban Ki-Moon, the previous UN secretary general, agree there is no point relaunching efforts to reform the security council or the veto.

But a widening of security council membership was proposed by another former UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, in 2003-2005. Annan thought he could catch a wave and seize the opportunity to rush through change of the security council, but his vision was crushed by the entrenched interests of security council members unwilling to cede any power to the likes of India or Nigeria.

In Europe, there is a surprising optimism bubbling under the surface. Arancha González, the Spanish foreign minister, said: “We are at an incredible moment in Europe deciding whether we want to make a huge investment in EU institutions to protect our citizens.”

She describes it as the invention of a new social contract between government and people. “I do not see a world that is de-globalising. It is re-globalising but we do not yet have a system of governance for this re-globalised world. There is an absence of global rules.”

Samantha Power, the former US ambassador to the UN, told the UK foreign affairs select committee that if the main multilateral institutions could not be reformed, the task would be to find “workarounds”, or what she described as hustling for liberal democracy outside the UN security council.

And progress can be made outside the framework of the council, argues Stephen Rapp, former US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, and the chief prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone from 2007 to 2009.

The wider general assembly voted by 105 to 15 to set up the international independent mechanism to look into war crimes in Syria. And despite frantic Russian objections last year, the UN chemical weapons watchdog, the OPCW, was given powers to investigate and attribute responsibility for chemical attacks in Syria. It has started doing so.

The UN human rights council – where the debilitating veto does not exist – has launched an investigation into war crimes in Libya, as well as in Venezuela. The president of

The UK talks of a D10 – the G7 democracies plus Australia, Korea and India. It is a version of an idea first proposed at the end of 2018 by James Lindsay, the director of studies at the council on foreign relations, in what he described as “the committee to save the world order” .

Similarly, the EU foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, feels Europe is ready to step up to the plate. “We need to reset our mind to stop being the nice guy in all circumstances and learn to say ‘no’,” he recently told the European council on foreign relations.

“Europe has to learn the language of power. If you have to learn it means at present we do not know. Other actors know how to use not just the language of power, but power itself. In Libya and Syria, Turkey and Russia have been using power and not the language of power. Like it not, they have become the masters of the game.”

Remarkably, one of the optimistic views on the future of international co-operation comes from the man who oversaw the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian former general and senator who served as force commander for UNAMIR, the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, between 1993-1994, said: “I think we are in a revolutionary time … The under-25s are going to start to be very active and they are going to start demanding that humanity is treated as one.

“They are a generation without borders. This generation will have the means through the incredible weapons of social media. They have the power to push aside the leaders that hold them back.”

© The Guardian

Spellbook forms part of exhibition of Hebrew works at British Library

Show delayed by lockdown set to open at London library in September

The earliest dated copy of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, his most important philosophical work, Decapitated: a statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Park inwill Junealso 2020be part of the display.

Like any good spell book it’s got all the important magical recipes; how to escape demons, obviously, as well as safe travel, catching thieves, successful love-making, and the more mundane problems of how to overcome fever, diarrhoea and swallowing a bone.

Now the small 16th-century spellbook containing 125 recipes is about to go on public display at the British Library as part of its delayed Hebrew Manuscripts exhibition.

The library has a rich and wonderful collection of more than 3,000 Hebrew manuscripts and, before lockdown hit, completed a six-year project to digitise them.

“It was an extremely demanding and challenging initiative, but we are so proud to have accomplished it,” said the curator, Ilana Tahan. “We wanted to celebrate that by exhibiting a selection of manuscripts, some of which have never been on public display before.”

The plan was to open the show in March. It will open to members this week and to the general public on 1 September.

About 40 manuscripts will go on display, dating as far back as the 10th century and spanning science, religion, law, music, philosophy, alchemy and Kabbalah. And magic, of which the spellbook is a good example. “It is a charming little manuscript with 125 magic recipes. It is so sweet and has some beautiful decorations.”

Among the spells is one “to increase love between bridegroom and bride”, which involves writing their names in honey on to two sage leaves and giving them each other to eat. “I dare anyone to try it,” said Tahan.

To catch a thief, simply write the names “Kematin kanit kukairi ve-hikani yazaf” on kosher parchment and hang from the neck of a black rooster. Circle around suspects and the rooster will jump on the head of the thief.

To make yourself invisible, burn the skin of a snake in March and sprinkle the ashes in your eyes. People can use those same ashes if you meet a king – simply hold in your hand and they will heed your words.

And for a person who has swallowed a bone, the spell reads: “One who swallowed a bone, take a bone of the same kind and place it over his head without his knowledge, then whisper the following: nehash, nehash, har, har, mena’, mena’, tsa, tsa.

And it is tested.”

Examples of spells in a book containing 120 magical and medical recipes

Another highlight of the show will be documents shining light on Moses Maimonides, a 12th-century Jewish philosopher who was born in Cordoba, Spain, and went on to become the spiritual leader of the Jewish community in Egypt, where he was physician to the sultan, Saladin. He was the greatest Jewish polymath leader of the middle ages, his name known across Europe.

Thousands of Jews wrote to Maimonides asking for advice and legal rulings. The exhibition has a handwritten letter written by him in Arabic, but in Hebrew script, to a teacher who needed specific help.

Tahan said the teacher taught two young girls in a remote Jewish community in Egypt. “For some reason, which is not quite clear from the documents – maybe somebody said something derogatory about him – he took an oath to stop teaching the two girls. In those times, when you took an oath, you stuck to it.”

But the teacher felt the girls were missing out on an education, so he evidently wrote to Maimonides asking how to go back on the oath. He replied that the teacher needed to get three Israelite witnesses to cancel the oath. “He was always pragmatic. He always thought of how he could help someone and not put them through a very complicated process.”

Also on display is the earliest dated (1380) copy of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, considered to be be his most significant philosophical work.

The story of Maimonides also speaks to more harmonious times between Muslim and Jewish communities. “When Maimonides passed away, not only Jewish communities mourned him, but also all the Muslims in the city came to mourn him,” said Tahan.

“He was known across Europe and across the three main faiths.”

Other highlights include a letter written to Henry VIII by an Italian rabbi in 1530 regarding biblical laws that could support the king’s claim to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

The opening of the Hebrew Manuscripts exhibition is part of the next phase of the British Library’s gradual reopening after lockdown.

Also reopening on 1 September is the Treasures gallery, which includes objects ranging from Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbooks to Andrea Levy’s working drafts for Small Island and The Long Song.

• Hebrew Manuscripts 1 September-11 April 2021 at the British Library.

© BBC

Hadrian’s Wall dig reveals oldest Christian graffiti on chalice Lead piece etched with religious iconography found in remains of 5th-century church The ruins of Vindolanda Roman fort in Northumberland where the chalice was found.

Each fragment of a chalice, once the size of a modern cereal bowl, bears lightly etched images. If it was a ceremonial artefact, passed around the congregation, its symbols convey meanings that have yet to be unlocked.

Letters in Latin, Greek and possibly Ogam, an early medieval script, are yet to be deciphered.

Vindolanda was built by the Roman army before Hadrian began constructing his 73-mile defensive barrier to guard the north-western frontier from invaders in AD122. It was an important garrison base, demolished and rebuilt repeatedly. It was there that archaeologists unearthed a cavalry barracks, finding extraordinary military and personal possessions left behind by soldiers, including the famous writing tablets, offering insights into their everyday lives, and rare cavalry swords.

Decapitated: a statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Park in June 2020

Birley said: “The discovery [of the chalice] helps us appreciate how the site and its community survived beyond the fall of Rome and yet remained connected to a spiritual successor in the form of Christianity.”

A 5th-century chalice covered in religious iconography has been discovered in Northumberland, to the astonishment of archaeologists, who describe it as Britain’s first known example of Christian graffiti on an object. With its complex mass of crosses and chi-rhos, angels and a priestly figure, as well as fish, a whale and ships, it is believed to be without parallel in western Europe.

Made of lead and now in 14 fragments, it was unearthed at the Vindolanda Roman fort, one of Europe’s foremost archaeological sites, near Hadrian’s Wall, during an excavation that has also discovered the foundations of a significant church of the 5th or 6th century.

Dr Andrew Birley, director of Vindolanda excavations, told the Observer that finding church foundations inside the Roman stone fort was significant enough, but that uncovering a vessel “smothered both inside and out with Christian iconography is quite incredible”.

He said: “You’ve got crosses, a whale, fish, ships with lovely rigging and little flags, little angels, a priestly figure seemingly holding a crook with a big smiley face, ears of wheat.

“It’s just remarkable.

Nothing in north-western Europe comes close from the period.”

The first fragment was found by Lesley Walker, an Australian care worker who joined the Vindolanda excavations as a volunteer last year. “I was amazed that I had found something as important as this on my very first excavation,” she said. “The whole experience at Vindolanda makes me want to come back and learn more.”

Dr David Petts, a Durham University specialist on the post-Roman period and early Christianity, is now researching the chalice. He said: “It is genuinely exciting. When we think of graffiti, we tend to think it’s unauthorised vandalism. But we know from many medieval churches, that people would put marks and symbols on buildings. What is unique about this is finding them on a vessel.”

A fragment of the decorated lead chalice.

The foundations suggest that the church was large enough for about 60 parishioners. The structure somehow collapsed in on itself, but the chalice had been securely sealed under the rubble, perhaps in a ceremony marking the end of the church.

Birley said: “Being able to prove you’ve got a church of the 5th or 6th century is hard unless you find associated material within it. What’s really important about this chalice is that it is a definite Christian artefact. It helps us to re-evaluate the other similar buildings on Hadrian’s Wall of the same period, which have similar features but don’t have artefacts preserved.”

The chalice will be unveiled this week at Vindolanda’s museum, in a new exhibition that highlights Christianity and the site’s last periods of occupation, and is supported by the National Heritage Lottery Fund. © The Guardian

Nora Waln: Quaker journalist whose memoir tried to understand the Nazis Her commitment to finding common ground with everyone she met sprang from her Quaker faith, seeking to recognise that there is “that of God in everyone”. But her memoir makes for uncomfortable reading at times, for example, when she remembers being pleased to hear that Hitler had liked her first book: “To write clearly is not easy. I am thrilled when I satisfy a reader.”

Writing after Kristallnacht (but before the world knew about the Final Solution), she seems to pre-empt accusations that she had been complicit in immoral Nazi policies: “I may be particularly stupid, but it never occurred to me when in Germany that I should continuously criticise the Nazis lest my silence be taken as a sign that I approved of all their activities.” After resisting the urge to categorise the Germans as either “good” or “bad” people for so long, the internal logic of this statement suggests that Waln was finally becoming prey to a kind of either/or thinking – either you oppose the regime constantly or you are complicit with its every policy.

Culture war Waln’s statement raises serious questions today, not only because we know the full extent of Nazi atrocities, but also as we navigate our own current “culture war”. In the heated discussion of contemporary issues such as Britain’s imperial legacy, immigration policy, and justice for women and transgender people, we frequently hear that “silence is violence”. Does Waln’s memoir reinforce this message?

In some ways her nuanced approach is admirable. Waln tried to understand the historical and psychological impulses that led some Germans to choose the Nazi culture of domination. She also understood the terrible fear which made opposition impossible for so many. In this way, her memoir resists the rigid “victim/perpetrator” binary that has structured post-war discussions of the Third Reich and Holocaust and offers a more humane view of Germany’s tragic slide into totalitarianism.

“I have striven to give a clear, true, and balanced picture”, wrote Nora Waln in the account of her years in the Third Reich.

An American journalist, she had moved there from China with her musician husband in 1934. They spent the next four years exploring Germany, Austria, and then Czechoslovakia, mixing with the “cultured classes”, and soaking up the music scene.

But Waln was later compelled to resist the Nazis more directly.

According to her obituary in the New York Times, she sent a copy of her memoir to the Nazi police chief Heinrich Himmler with an “insolent” inscription. In retaliation, he arrested seven of her friends’ children. Waln then offered herself as a hostage for their release. When Himmler offered to release the children if she would limit

A few months before Kristallnacht – the Nazi-led night of anti-Jewish pogroms on November 9 1938, the Walns left Germany for England. There, the following year, Nora published her memoir of the period, Reaching for the Stars (reiussed in 1992 as The Approaching Storm: One Woman’s Story of Germany, 1934-1938). Waln’s approach seems shocking today, as she insists on seeing both the good and bad in the people around her in these early years of the Nazi regime. She was determined not to write off a country she loved, but was deeply shaken by its political trajectory.

Her memoir presents a broad range of sources and people, and her voice is rarely critical. Some subtle critiques emerge in moments of contrast and irony, though.

For example, a countryside Christmas scene in 1934 shows the early nature of Nazi antisemitism, as nonsensical as it was pernicious. She hears carollers singing “Freu dich, o Israel” (Rejoice, oh Israel), but also records that “at the entrance and exit of every village, and sometimes before houses, stood a sign against the Jews”.

She reports on the suffering of Jews made to lose their jobs and homes (though not yet deported), alongside stories of loved ones sent to concentration camps for opposing Nazi ideas. There are stories of denunciations by neighbours, tragic suicides and one account of a missing husband returned to his wife as ashes in a cigar box, “marked with a swastika, and the word "traitor” before her husband’s name".

Common ground Waln’s account does not separate the sufferers of Nazi oppression into Jews and non-Jews (“a distinction in tragedy of which I did not see the point”). She also refuses to demonise the Germans that she meets – whether they supported the National Socialists or not. On the contrary, she travels widely in order to understand the Nazi phenomenon better: “It had become imperative that I know who were Nazi, and why […] I had to learn these things by actual acquaintance with National Socialists.”

Waln forged a number of close friendships on her travels. One example is an aristocratic family of foresters on the Wiegersen estate in Lower Saxony, who shared her deep love for trees. Remembering how she was welcomed into the heart of the family, she reflects: “In such ways only will humanity get past the false barriers of nationalism which have so corrupted human society.”

her writing on Germany to “romantic novels”, she refused. “If you make a bargain like that, God takes away the power to write. If you don’t tell the truth you lose your talent”, she wrote.

Waln may have been slow to speak out at first, but she ultimately refused to compromise with Nazism. Her admission in Reaching for the Stars that she could have acted sooner is a timely reminder to highlight injustice whenever we see it today. Perhaps, though, like Waln, we can do so in a way that resists the polarising approach of “us” and “them”.

© THE CONVERSATION

mentioned with accessible nonchalance: among them are John of Salisbury’s 12th-century Polycraticus and Metalogicon, copies of which the author is believed to have given to Becket.

Such esoteric subjects as the bibliographical predilections of certain monastic orders also make an appearance. It’s a useful introduction to medieval book cultures, as well as a crash course in the dispute between Church and State that led to Becket’s martyrdom and de Hamel’s lively prose conjures up the rich and well-connected world of 12th-century Canterbury.

This is not to say the book will prove uncontroversial. For instance, de Hamel rarely acknowledges the biases implicit in the medieval sources and glosses over what interest the Canterbury monks may have had in presenting a psalter as a special relic of Becket (bearing in mind that, as de Hamel notes, David’s conflict with Saul resonates with and therefore elevates Becket’s dispute with Henry II).

Art historians may also resist de Hamel’s interpretation of a mosaic from Monreale in Sicily, made shortly after the archbishop’s death, which shows the saint carrying a small jewel-bound book ‘the right size for a Psalter’. Is it an image of the same ‘little book’ mentioned in a text by his friend, Herbert of Bosham? Is it MS 411? While de Hamel acknowledges that ‘holding a book was a conventional medieval symbol of saintliness’, he does not mention that this symbol was all but ubiquitous and referred to the iconography of Christ holding the Gospels. Nor does he acknowledge that medieval art is famously unreliable in terms of accurate depictions of size. Such moments in the

What’s left of Thomas Becket? – ‘The Book in the Cathedral’, reviewed

The frontispiece and opening of the MS 411 psalter. Photo: Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

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his December marks 850 years since the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral by four of Henry II’s knights. At the time, the martyr’s blood was collected, diluted and sold in leaden flasks to pilgrims. The cathedral was refurbished with red and white marble, and purple stone was used to construct a shrine that shimmered red in the light of votive candles. The shrine was destroyed during the Reformation but now, in a book published to coincide with the anniversary of Becket’s death, Christopher de Hamel argues that its only surviving relic has been discovered.

The text, aptly bound in vermilion red, is only 58 pages long, which belies the magnitude of its claim: that there is a book of psalms (a psalter) in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, which was once treasured by St Thomas Becket and was later exhibited to pilgrims as a relic. The psalter, known by its shelf mark MS 411, dates to the late 10th century and has pages decorated in the so-called Franco-Saxon style (they can be viewed online via the Parker Library’s digital facsimile). The first clue connecting the manuscript to Becket was brought to de Hamel’s attention by the biblical historian Eyal Poleg, during a conversation over lunch and coffee in Cambridge. Poleg showed de Hamel an entry in a 14th-century inventory of treasures in Canterbury Cathedral. Translated from Latin, the entry reads: ‘Item, a binding with the Psalter of St Thomas, bound in silver-gilt decorated with jewels’. De Hamel immediately remembered reading the line elsewhere: on the flyleaf of MS 411 in the Parker Library, where he was then head librarian. The two scholars rushed to check the manuscript for themselves. Sure enough, there it was: a 16th-century note at the end of the 10th-century text, describing the now-lost binding and identifying the book as having belonged to Thomas Becket.

An authority on medieval manuscripts, de Hamel has a flair for storytelling, tracing the journeys of books through time as if following a migrating swift. In The Book in the Cathedral, a range of contemporary sources are mined for evidence – from medieval biographies of Becket and the manuscript itself to portraits of the saint in mosaic and stained glass. Titles of texts rarely encountered by non-specialist readers are

Detail of stained glass window in Canterbury Cathedral, showing Becket holding a book.

argument will doubtless spark debate.

However, de Hamel is also conscious of the human fascination with heroes. The book opens with a discussion of relics. Whether the bones of a saint or draft sheet music by the Beatles, these material remains of famous names have long attracted reverent crowds. In Spring 2021 much of the surviving paraphernalia of Becket’s medieval cult will be assembled for an exhibition at the British Museum. Fragments believed to be from the shrine will glow red in the low light of the gallery. The pilgrims will return. Meanwhile, de Hamel’s little book has elevated MS 411 as no other story could have. Whether or not The Book in the Cathedral is guilty of fetishisation is a matter of opinion. It depends, indeed, on your reaction to what may be the book’s most memorable line regarding Becket’s relationship with the psalter he may once have owned: ‘He probably took it to bed.’

The Book in the Cathedral: The Last Relic of Thomas Becket by Christopher de Hamel is published by Allen Lane.

The accepted history of anatomy says that it was the ancient aristocrat in 168 BCE. The tombs Greeks who mapped the human body for the first time. of Lady Dai and her family were Galen, the “Father of Anatomy”, worked on animals, and opened in 1973, and the A security anatomy council meeting in 1953. Some countries questioningfor whether UN, set 1,500 up after the second worldMawangdui war, is still relevant or holds any power. wrote textbooks thatarelasted thethenext manuscripts were years. Modern anatomy started in the Renaissance with discovered.

Andreas Vesalius, who challenged what had been handed down from Galen. He worked from human beings, and wrote They are clearly precursors to the the seminal “On the Fabric of the Human Body”. famous acupuncture texts of the Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Internal Scientists from ancient China are never mentioned in this Medicine (Huangdi Neijing), which history of anatomy. But our new paper shows that the oldest was copied and recopied through surviving anatomical atlas actually comes from Han Dynasty history, and is revered in China as China, and was written over 2,000 years ago. Our discovery the source of acupuncture theory changes both the history of medicine and our understanding and practice. The descriptions of of the basis for acupuncture – a key branch of Chinese meridians and points found in it medicine. are still the basis of traditional Chinese medicine today.

There is an ever increasing body of evidence-based research that supports the efficacy of acupuncture for conditions as The earlier Mawangdui texts don’t varied as migraine to osteoarthritis of the knee. The most actually mention acupuncture points, and the descriptions recent draft NICE guidelines, published in August 2020, they give of meridians are simpler and less complete. But recommend the use of acupuncture as a first line treatment some passages from them have clearly been directly copied for chronic pain. into the Yellow Emperor’s Canon, all of which shows that these texts were written first.

During an acupuncture treatment session, fine needles are inserted into the body at specific points (acupoints) in order Man with meridians drawn on Meridian pathways have to promote self healing. This happens because the needles always been interpreted as being based on esoteric ideas (somehow) create balance in the life force or “Qi” of the about the flow of vital energy “Qi” rather than as empirical person. How this happens is the subject of much research. descriptions of the body. But what the Mawangdui text The underlying assumption is that acupoints have some as describes is a set of meridians – pathways through the yet undiscovered physiological property that is probably body. In later texts, these are usually illustrated pictorially neurologically based. as lines on the skin.

Mawangdui Manuscript, ink on silk, 2nd century BCE.

Chinese characters on a brown manuscript.

The texts we worked on are the Mawangdui medical manuscripts, which were lost to us for two millenia. They were written during the Han dynasty and were so valued that a copy was buried with the body of Lady Dai, a Han dynasty

A meridian is described in terms of how it progresses through the body. The arm tai yin meridian, for instance, is described as starting in the centre of the palm, running along the forearm between the two bones, and so on. We wondered: what if these descriptions are not of an esoteric energy pathway, but of physical anatomical structures?

To find out, we did detailed dissections of the human body, looking for pathways which ran through it along the routes described in the Mawangdui.

This is a very different view of the body than that of the Western scientist. In modern western medicine, the body is divided into systems that each have their own distinct function: like the nervous system or cardiovascular system.

We therefore believe that the Mawangdui manuscripts are the world’s oldest surviving anatomical atlas based on direct observation of the human body. The authors’ purpose presumably was to record the human body in detail.

Anatomical examination of this kind would have been a rare privilege, available only to a select group of scientists favoured by the Emperor. It is likely that the purpose of the texts was expressly to pass this knowledge on to others.

Physicians and students of medicine could use the texts to learn about anatomy, and engage in medical debate based on a sound knowledge of the human body.

Illustration of traditional Chinese medicine.

That clearly wasn’t what the writers of the Mawangdui were doing. Their descriptions are more focused on how different structures interlink to create a flow through the body. They pay no attention to the specific function of the structures.

We think this is because these scientists were making their observations of the human body for the first time, and purely described what they saw.

For our research, the anatomical substance of the work had to be unearthed by carefully replicating the authors’ scientific dissections. This was problematic. They had left us no pictures of what they were describing, so we had to reconstruct from their texts. Later Chinese anatomists, from the Song dynasty, did make pictures. These works were based on the recorded dissections of a criminal gang for whom dissection was a part of their punishment.

Then there was the issue of translation: so much can get lost when we translate texts, especially ancient ones, and one of us (Vivien) spent huge amounts of time cross-checking and confirming translations of the meridian descriptions. Finally, An ancient acupuncture statue. we had to look at Han-era society and show that anatomical examination would fit in their cultural context.

This gives us new insights into the scientific prowess of Han dynasty China, which is famous for its wealth of discoveries.

What we found was very exciting. Each of the Mawangdui That Han scientists also did anatomy would make perfect meridians mapped onto major structures of the human sense, and adds richness to our understanding of their body. Some of these structures are visible only to science. anatomists through dissection, and cannot be seen in the living person. To return to arm tai yin, for instance, the Our work also has fundamental implications for acupuncture pathway is described at the elbow as going “below the sinew theory and so for modern research. The Yellow Emperor’s to the bicep”. When we look at the dissected human elbow, Canon quite clearly draws on and develops the content of there is a flat band of tissue called the bicipital the Mawangdui. If the Mawangdui is an anatomical atlas, it aponeurosis, and the arteries and nerves of the arm pass is highly likely that the succeeding texts are grounded in underneath it. anatomy too.

We think this is what the ancient Chinese anatomists were describing. There is no way to know about these structures except by doing anatomy, or reading the work of someone who has.

The research shines a light on the hitherto unrecognised contributions of Chinese anatomists, and repositions them at the centre of the field. This new information challenges the perceived esoteric nature of acupuncture, and roots it instead in anatomical science. © The Conversation

The UK’s best forgotten ruins: readers’ travel tips From millennia-old stone circles to 20th-century military remains, Guardian readers share their favourite hidden ruins Winning tip: Pagan significance, Dorset Knowlton church may be the only church within a preChristian earthworks circle in the UK. Not only is it spectacular – in a small-scale way – it is also accessible and usually quiet enough to enjoy either walking the circle or exploring the site around the derelict flint church which served the now-abandoned village of Knowlton. There are two large yew trees adorned with ribbons, which obviously have a spiritual significance, overlooking a field of sheep and a copse hiding another earth circle. Views are pleasant all round, and nearby Wimborne and Wimborne St Giles offer more options for a day out. My personal fave Dorset place to be.

Circle time .... Knowlton church, near Wimborne, Dorset.

True Shakespearian love, Hampshire Titchfield Abbey, in Titchfield, Hampshire, is an English Heritage site that gets very little notice and no longer even charges admission. It was A security council meeting in 1953. Some countries are questioning whether the UN, set up after the second world war, is still relevant or holds any power. home to Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron for whom many of his most famous sonnets were written. It is thought some of Shakespeare’s plays were written and first performed there. It’s a beautiful ruin rich in history – and totally undervalued.

‘Miracle’ well, Penzance, Cornwall Up a steep hill from the town of Penzance, Cornwall, and out into the moors, there is a delightful little spot called the Madron Holy Well, where I discovered the ruined remains of a small chapel next to a stream. The branches of trees overhanging the stream were festooned with strips of cloth or “clouties” left by people hoping for a cure for an ailment. It is thought that pagan rituals were carried out at the chapel many centuries ago, which gives the holy well an enchanting yet haunting quality – the tree-lined footpath that leads up to the chapel also has an eerie feel to it. The holy well is free to enter, and though it can be hard to find, it is well ‘Clouties’ left on a tree at Madron Holy Well. worth it to get a sense of Cornwall’s pagan past!

Secret castle, Anglesey It’s a steep, invigorating walk up a hill to Aberlleiniog Castle, a truly secret castle on the Isle of Anglesey, but you will be rewarded by free entry and an atmospheric welcome of ancient walls, towers and turrets, with sweeping views over the Menai Strait. Look back to England on a clear day, or to the wild Atlantic waves out to the west. Take a picnic and enjoy the area, surrounded by forests and woodland. The castle is maintained by local volunteers, and has a colourful history, dominated by Welsh princes, Viking invaders and plundering pirates. Its location, at the heart of an area of wild natural beauty, gives it an eerie, timeless vibe – imagination on, mobile off.

Secret neolithic wonder, Pembrokeshire Hidden on a hill just below the stark Preseli mountains near Nevern in Wales is Pentre Ifan burial chamber: a mini Stonehenge where you

can take your children right up to the stones and imagine being cavemen and druids. Position yourself to watch the sun line up with the stones and the surrounding peaks. Not a house to be seen and not a car to be heard – just a backdrop of wild countryside. Free entry – all you have to do is negotiate the tortuous lanes to get there.

Iron giant, Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire I am a keen cyclist and love exploring the Nottingham and Derbyshire canals. On one trip, I came across an industrial relic which even local residents weren’t aware of. The Bennerley Viaduct is a disused railway bridge spanning the Erewash valley between Awsworth and Ilkeston, not far from Nottingham. It is an iron giant, with the rails nearly 19 metres above the Erewash River and the wrought-iron latticework spanning 442 metres. It’s free to view, if you make the short trip from the Erewash canal trail in Derbyshire. It even survived an airship bombing raid on 31 January 1916, when it was targeted as part of the Midlands railway line.

Military leavings, Spurn Point, East Yorkshire At the mouth of the Humber estuary, the narrow peninsula of Spurn point has been a strategic part of the UK’s defences for more than 200 years, particularly during the first world war when a 500-strong garrison was stationed there. Highlights of its military past are the Spurn Point military railway, first world war artillery batteries and the sound mirror which was used as an early form of radar. Spurn is now looked after by Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, which has created a history trail around the peninsula. It’s also one of the most underrated places to birdwatch in the country and access is free.

Other ruins include two 19th-century lighthouses and an abandoned lifeboat station.

Rich man’s whimsy, North Yorkshire High above Pateley Bridge is Yorke’s Folly, two towering columns of stone with commanding views of the valley of Nidderdale. In summer, heather-clad Nought Moor behind it is a gorgeous haze of mauve and a fine foraging spot for bilberries. It was built in the late 18th or early 19th century by John Yorke, who indulged his wealth and whimsy by offering local men a loaf and a shilling a day for labour. The walk up here starts at a medieval chapel, passes fishponds created by the monks of Fountains Abbey, and continues along Guise Cliff, such a beautiful place of peace, far from the maddening crowds.

Turned to stone, eastern Cumbria One the largest stone circles in England is Long Meg and her Daughters, situated in Cumbria not far from the town of Penrith. The circle, more than 100 metres across, has more than 60 stones plus Meg, a tall red stone that is decorated with ancient carvings. Legend has it a wizard turned Meg and her daughters to stone. Despite its impressive size, Long Meg is seldom busy as most tourists head to the Lake District. It’s a great place to visit on evenings when the sun throws elongated shadows across the grass. A small road passes through the circle and there is easy parking.

Watching out for Vikings, Angus How many tides have ebbed and flowed under the crumbling watch of Red Castle, in Angus, Scotland? Still protecting these isles from Viking invasion, the 13th-century ruin shimmers over Lunan Bay at sunrise, its red sandstone coalescing with the pink hue of the beach below. Ponder the feuds which led to its ruin; tumult which in fact did not come from Scandinavia – nor England – but from within. Its wistful lessons on ephemeral power are contextualised by nature’s might with each undulation of the tide. © The Guardian

Gallery: ‘Colour Photography before the Great War’ at MartinGropius-Bau Before the outbreak of the First World War, the French banker Albert Kahn commissioned a series of colour photographs and films from around the world. Martin-Gropius-Bau presents a selection of these remarkable images, which sought to promote understanding between different nations and cultures at a time when the world was heading inexorably towards conflict.

Albert Kahn, Les Archives de la planète Stéphane Passet

France, Paris, a family in the Rue du Pot de fer, 24 June 1914

‘The World c. 1914: Colour Photography Before the Great War’ is at Martin-Gropius-Bau from 1 August–2 November.

Turkey, Istanbul, group of Armenian women and girls, September 1912

China, Peking, Palace of Heavenly Peace, Fourth Courtyard, eastern annex, a Buddhist Lama in ceremonial dress, 26 May 1913

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, dealer of homemade bread on the market.

15 October 1912

India, Bombary, Brahmins and Sadhus, 17 December 1913

Mongolia, close to Ulaanbaatar, probably Damdinbazar, the eighth incarnation of the Mongolia Jalkhanz Kuthugtu, 17 July 1913

Serbia, Krusevac, saleswomen of poultry on the market, 29 April 1913

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mostrar, Old Bridge, 29 April 1913

France, Paris, XVIII arr., Boulevard de Clichy, Le Moulin Rouge, June–July 1914

Morocco, Benguerir, village people, December 1912/January 1913

India, Uttar Pradesh, Agra, Mausoleum Taj Mahal of Shah Jahan for Mumtaz Mahal, 19–21 January 1914

The daring nun who hid and saved 83 Jewish children

By Niamh Hughes BBC News

Two Jewish girls from north-eastern France found themselves in great danger when Germany invaded 80 years ago. But while their parents and younger sister were caught and murdered, they survived - with dozens of other Jewish children thanks to the bravery of a nun in a convent near Toulouse.

"The luck of my life is that my cousin, Ida, had gone to buy bread - that's why sometimes I believe in miracles. So my aunt said this is Estelle, Henri, Hélène and, pointing at me, Ida." Not long after Annie's arrival in Toulouse, her aunt received a letter from Hélène, from her hiding place near Tours. She then made arrangements for her to be rescued.

So one night a young woman from the French Resistance, the Maquis, knocked at the door of the house where Hélène was staying.

"She said that she came to find me, to cross the demarcation line," Hélène remembers. To show that she could be trusted, the visitor pulled out a photograph of Hélène that her aunt had provided.

It was a difficult journey. The young woman had false papers in which she and Hélène were Helene and Anne's mother, Cecile Bach described as students, even though Hélène was so young.

They were stopped and questioned several times.

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welve-year-old Hélène Bach was playing in the garden with her younger sister, Ida, when they saw a military truck approaching and rushed inside.

The two girls and their mother had left their home in Lorraine, north-eastern France, after the German invasion in May 1940 and started travelling towards the "free zone" in the south of the country.

To reduce the risk of the whole family being caught, it had been decided that the father, Aron, and oldest daughter, Annie, would make the journey separately. But when Aron and Annie were arrested in 1941 and taken to a detention camp near Tours, Hélène's mother rented a house nearby. And they were still there a year later, when the German soldiers came driving up the road.

Hélène and eight-year-old Ida ran into the kitchen to warn their mother.

"My mother told us to run - to hide in the woods," Hélène says. "I was holding my little sister by the hand but she did not want to come with me. She wanted to go back to my mother. I could hear the Germans. I let her hand go and she ran back."

Isolated in the woods, Hélène hid until she felt the coast was clear.

Then she crept back to the house and found some money her mother had left on the table.

"She knew I would come back," she says.

Hélène went to stay with a friend she'd made in the area. She never saw her mother or younger sister again.

Hélène's older sister, Annie, had her own narrow escape. After a year at the camp near Tours, she succeeded in escaping through some fencing and running away.

Aged 16, Annie succeeded this time in making the journey alone to her aunt's home in the southern city of Toulouse, but even there she wasn't safe. While her aunt's family were not officially registered as Jews and could pretend to be Catholics, this wasn't an option open to Annie.

One day in the autumn of 1942, the police rang at the door "They ordered, 'Show your family book and all your children, we want to check!'" she says.

The "free zone" in the south of France did not live up to its name. The government of Marshal Philippe Pétain, based in Vichy, passed anti-Jewish laws, allowed Jews rounded up in Baden and Alsace Lorraine to be interned on its territory, and seized Jewish assets.

On 23 August 1942 the archbishop of Toulouse, Jules-Geraud Saliège, wrote a letter to his clergymen, asking them to recite a letter to their congregations.

"In our diocese, moving scenes have occurred," it went. "Children, women, men, fathers and mothers are treated like a lowly herd. Members of a single family are separated from each other and carted away to an unknown destination. The Jews are men, the Jewesses are women. They are part of the human race; they are our brothers like so many others. A Christian cannot forget this."

He protested to the Vichy authorities about their Jewish policy, while most of the French Catholic hierarchy remained silent. Out of 100 French bishops, he was one of only six who spoke out against the Nazi regime.

Saliège's message struck a chord with Sister Denise Bergon, the young mother superior of the Convent of Notre Dame de Massip in Capdenac, 150km (93 miles) north-east of Toulouse.

"This call deeply moved us, and such emotion grabbed our hearts. A favourable response to this letter was a testament to the strength of our religion, above all parties, all races," she wrote after the war in 1946.

"It was also an act of patriotism, as by defending the oppressed we were defying the persecutors." The convent ran a boarding school and Sister Denise knew it would be possible to hide Jewish children among her Catholic pupils. But she worried about endangering her fellow nuns, and about the dishonesty that this would entail.

Her own bishop supported Pétain so she wrote to Archbishop Saliège for advice.

She records his response in her journal: "Let's lie, let's lie, my daughter, as long as we are saving human lives."

By the winter of 1942, Sister Denise Bergon was collecting Jewish children who had been hiding in the wooded valleys and gorges of the region around Capdenac, known as L'Aveyron.

As round-ups of Jews intensified - carried out by German troops and, from 1943, by a fascist militia, the Milice - the number of Jewish children taking refuge in the convent would eventually swell to 83.

Among them were Annie Beck, whose aunt realised she would be safer there than in Toulouse, shortly followed by Hélène, taken directly to the convent by her guide from the Resistance.

Hélène finally felt safe, though was overwhelmed with emotion on her arrival.

"At the beginning, Madame Bergon took me into a room and she tried to make me feel as if my parents were here, and so she was like a mother really," she says.

At the same time, the fate of her younger sister, Ida, weighed heavily on her.

"Every evening, we had to first do our homework. And then when we finished we could go out and play. I always thought if my sister had not let go of my hand, she would have been in the convent with me," she says.

Another Jewish refugee from Alsace Lorraine was a boy called Albert Seifer, who was a few years younger than the sisters.

"Surrounded by big walls, we were like in a fortress," he says. "We were very happy." We did not really feel the war despite the fact that we were surrounded by danger."

Parents and guardians would send their children with money, jewellery or other valuables in order to pay for the children's upkeep, before they did their best to escape from France. Sister Denise kept careful records.

"From the beginning of 1944, the round-ups of Jews were becoming tighter and numerous," she recalled in 1946. "Requests come from all sides and we received around 15 little girls, some of whom have just escaped in a miraculous way from the pursuit of the Gestapo."

She added: "They had simply become our children, and we had committed ourselves to suffer everything so as to return them safely to their families."

Other than Sister Denise, only the school's director, Marguerite Rocques, its chaplain and two other sisters knew the truth about the children's origins.

The other 11 nuns were aware that a number of the children were refugees from Alsace-Lorraine, but did not know they were Jewish - and nor did the officials whom Sister Denise pressed for more and more ration books.

The children's lack of familiarity with Catholic rituals threatened to expose them, but an explanation was found.

"We came from the east of France, a place with many industrial cities and Annie and Sister Denise a lot of workers who were communists," says Annie. "So we posed as communist children who knew nothing of religion!"

The longer the war continued, the more dangerous the children's position became and Sister Denise began to worry about possible searches.

"Even though all compromising papers and the jewellery from the children's families had already been hidden in the most secret corners of the house, we did not feel safe," she wrote in her 1946 journal. "So, late at night, when everyone was asleep in the house, we dug a hole for the hidden things in the convent's garden and we buried as deep as possible anything that could be compromising."

In May 1944 a battle-hardened elite SS Division known as Das Reich arrived in the area from the Eastern front.

About this time, Annie remembers that a member of the Resistance arrived with an alarming warning.

"One day the doorbell rang. Since the sister in charge of the door was a bit far, I opened it myself," she says.

"A young man was standing there. He said: 'Quick! I must speak to your director! It is very, very urgent!'

"The man told us that we had been denounced. News had spread that the convent was hiding Jewish children."

Sister Denise hatched a plan with the Resistance, who agreed to fire warning shots if the enemy was approaching.

"The children would go to sleep, the older ones paired up with the younger ones and, at the first detonation heard in the night, in silence but in haste, they must get to the woods and leave the house to the invaders," she wrote in 1946.

But soon she decided to hide the children without waiting for the invaders to arrive. One group, including Annie, was taken to the chapel.

"The chaplain was strong and could lift the benches. He opened a trap door.

We slid down in there," she says.

The tiny underground space was 2.5m long and less than 1.5m high.

Seven children huddled together there for five days. They could not stand up or lie down to sleep during the long nights, and were only allowed out for short periods in the early hours of the morning, to exercise, eat, drink and go to the toilet.

Air came through a small vent that opened on to the courtyard.

"After five days there it was no longer possible to endure," Annie says.

"Imagine if the nuns had been arrested," she adds.

Those days hidden underground marked Annie for life - she has slept with a night-light ever since.

Hélène was fortunate enough to be housed instead with a local family.

Though they didn't enter the convent, the SS did leave a trail of destruction right on the convent's doorstep.

"We found some maquisards [members of the Maquis] who had been killed and tossed on the road. The Germans set an A window in what was once the children's dormitory example so that others did not resist," Annie says.

Sister Denise wanted to pay her respects to the dead and asked Annie to help her place flowers on each of the dead bodies.

In June 1944, Das Reich was ordered north to join the effort to repel the Allied landings in Normandy. On the way it took part in two massacres designed to punish locals for Maquis activity in the area. Then, on arrival in Normandy, it was encircled by the US 2nd Armoured Division and crushed, losing 5,000 men and more than 200 tanks and other combat vehicles.

After southern France was liberated, in August 1944, the Jewish children slowly left the convent. Albert Seifer was reunited with his family, including his father, who returned alive from Auschwitz.

Annie and Hélène weren't so fortunate.

Although their aunt survived, their parents and younger sister, Ida, were murdered in Auschwitz.

Annie settled in Toulouse, married, had children and recently became a great-grandmother. She still regularly meets Albert, now 90.

Hélène married and had a son, settling in Richmond, west London. Aged 94 and 90, the sisters travel between London and Toulouse to see each other as often as they can.

They refer to Sister Denise Annie next to the trap door in the chapel as "notre dame de la guerre" - our lady of the war.

They were sad to say goodbye to her, and regularly visited her for the rest of her life.

When Annie's children were young she often took them with her, in order to keep this period of history alive for them - a constant reminder of what the Jewish people endured.

Sister Denise remained at the convent and continued working until her death in 2006 at the age of 94.

Later in life she helped disadvantaged children, and then immigrants from North Africa.

In 1980, she was honoured by the Holocaust Memorial Center, Yad Vashem, as Righteous Among the Nations. A street is named after her in Capdenac, but apart from that the only memorial is in the grounds of the convent.

It says: "This cedar tree was planted on 5 April 1992 in memory of the saving of 83 Jewish children (from December 1942 to July 1944) by Hélène and Annie at the entrance to the convent Denise Bergon… at the request of Monsignor Jules-Geraud Saliège, archbishop of Toulouse."

It stands close to the spot where Sister Denise buried the jewellery, money and valuable items parents left behind - and which she gave back, untouched, after the war to help the families start again.

Hélène (left), Annie (right) with Sister Denise and the memorial Albert Seifer is standing at the back

© BBC

S

he was the 19th-century pioneer of modern nursing, dubbed the “lady with the lamp” for her continuous care of wounded soldiers in the Crimean war. In an earlier age of contagion, she was far ahead of her time in realising that cleanliness, fresh air and open-air exercise helped patients recover from injury and disease.

Now a previously unpublished letter that Florence Nightingale received as a teenager from her father reveals that he was a major inspiration in shaping her radical approach to a healthy mind and body.

In 1835, William Nightingale wrote to his daughter setting out a strict regime for keeping fit: “Exercise for 10 minutes every day before breakfast.

Before you dress do the exercise of the arms 20 times. In the course of the day 20 minutes’ exercise must be done and if not well done 10 minutes more. Run down to the gate before breakfast by the road …

Every day you must be an hour out of doors before dinner unless you have permission to do otherwise.”

The same letter reveals that he was just as disciplined about other aspects of his daughter’s conduct and wellbeing: “Never sit down to tea without changing, if not changed it must be taken upstairs … Some new poetry to be learned & two things prepared for this evening. I always prefer varied poetry. Practise sacred music for half an hour … If any of these things are omitted you will work them up the next day.”

The letter will feature in a forthcoming book, Florence Nightingale at Home, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in November. The letter is among unpublished archival material on which the book’s four authors have drawn, and which offers new insights into her pioneering work.

Nightingale had a privileged childhood at a time of widespread child labour and high infant mortality, and when most people lived in cramped, insanitary dwellings and hospitals were filthy and badly run, with many patients having little hope of coming out alive. Her own parents were horrified to learn that she wanted to become a nurse in an age when nurses were thought of as drunk and promiscuous.

William Nightingale’s 1835 letter was among unpublished material unearthed from piles of dusty boxes at Claydon House, the Buckinghamshire stately home where Nightingale’s sister lived, now a National Trust property.

The letters “illustrate the extent to which Nightingale’s early life, while enormously privileged and cultured, was heavily constrained”, according to Paul Crawford, professor of health humanities at the University of Nottingham and one of the book’s four authors.

“When Nightingale first became famous, people marvelled at the idea that someone used to life in a country house would give that up in order to nurse among squalor. This reinforced the hagiography and myth-making. But for her the opposite was true – country-house life was so constrained by sharply defined expectations and scrutiny.”

Another unpublished letter, written in 1856 by a family member to William Nightingale, records a “festival of peace” in which hundreds of Derbyshire villagers celebrated the end of the Crimean war. It shows how the nation’s most famous contemporary heroine was understood on a local level without nationalist triumphalism, Crawford said.

The letter records: “There were miners, ploughmen, weavers, sawyers and stoneworkers, farmers and their wives Florence Nightingale’s father, William. … There certainly was a good spirit prevailing … Children … sang their hymns and spiritual songs … Then we moved down to the lower part of the field to await fireworks, waiting time well filled by cheers and music … Three times three for Florence Nightingale …

“There was a figure as large as life of Miss Nightingale, dressed in a white skirt and blue jacket, compliment doubtless to sailors, seated in a chair, cushion underfoot and inscribed above in flowers ‘The Good Samaritan’.”

Florence Nightingale: how the lady with the lamp was guided by father’s advice

Letters reveal that the 19thcentury pioneer’s radical approach to healthcare was inspired by a strict family regime

Face to Face with the Abbot A facial reconstruction of John of Wheathampstead.

Picture: Liverpool John Moores University and Facelab

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entral to the work of colleagues at the History of Parliament is the pursuit of as full a knowledge as possible of the personalities of long-dead parliamentarians, and, where no depiction survives, it is often unavoidable to speculate what these men might have actually looked like. For the early centuries, we occasionally get a heavily stylised image in a stained glass window, manuscript or monumental brass. In a few fortunate instances, we have a full funeral monument, showing the man commemorated in 3D, and, where remains of colouring survive, with an indication of the original technicolor. Yet, even these serenely slumbering figures are difficult to translate into real, living people.

It is thus all the more exciting when the discovery of the remains of an early parliamentarian combined with technological advances makes it possible, quite literally, to put a face on a man of whom we have long known, and – as is today widely reported in the media – this has just been done for John Wheathampstead, abbot of St Albans.

A ‘local lad’ from Hertfordshire, Wheathampstead was educated at the school of the abbey that he would enter as a novice at a still young age, and in 1420, only in about his late 20s, went on to become its abbot. He was to preside over the house during and beyond the minority of Henry VI, but after some 20 years resigned his abbacy in 1440. Yet, his retirement was not to last, for following the death of Abbot John Stokes in 1451 the monks – perhaps under the impression of the previous year’s political upheavals – once more turned to their experienced former head and Wheathampstead accepted election for a second time. He might well have regretted this decision, as this second abbacy coincided with the successive crises of King Henry VI’s collapse into mental and physical incapacity, and the first phase of the Wars of the Roses, most notably two pitched battles in the streets of St Albans and its surroundings, which left their mark on the abbey and its estates.

In the period before the Reformation, the heads of a number of the great abbeys of England, St Albans among them, were summoned to the House of Lords, and Wheathampstead’s two long abbacies thus made him one of the most experienced parliamentarians of his age. During his first abbacy, he was

The news this week is shaping up to be full of Abbots and of particular interest to the History of Parliament is a certain Abbot of St Albans cathedral who was also a long-serving parliamentarian in the fifteenth century, John Wheathampstead. The editor of our 1461-1504 project, Dr Hannes Kleineke, explains… summoned to nine successive parliaments, and this played his part, inter alia, in framing the arrangements for the government of England during the young Henry VI’s long minority. It is likely that in this period his relationship with the king’s uncle, the Protector Humphrey duke of Gloucester – who would eventually be buried in St Albans abbey – came to the fore.

Wheathampstead’s second abbacy saw much high political drama played out in the six further Parliaments to which he was summoned, and his experience may have been valued on questions such as the conduct of the government during the King’s incapacity, and later, in 1460, over the duke of York’s claim to the throne.

Wheathampstead was a shrewd observer and an articulate commentator, whose abbatial ‘registers’ contain some interesting insights. A particular target for his venom was Thomas Charlton, a Hertfordshire landowner, who was elected Speaker of the Commons in 1454 following the arrest and imprisonment of his predecessor, Thomas Thorpe. The abbot was hardly an impartial observer, for to his mind Charlton had merely sought the Speakership in order to circumvent the common law and deprive his abbey of the manor of Burston.

Although Wheathampstead admitted with grudging admiration that Charlton was ‘prudent,… astute and precise’, he did not tire of fulminating against this ‘seditious knight’ with his ‘fox-like habits’ and his ‘haughty heart’, who had not only availed himself of ‘a simple and ignorant man’ in the pursuit of is immoral ends, but who, after being foiled by the experienced abbot in Parliament in 1454, had ‘returning to his own vomit, in the manner of a dog’ dared to make a second attempt to wrest Burston from the monks.

The discovery of Wheathampstead’s remains in 2017 has now allowed the Face Lab group at Liverpool John Moores University to create an impression of what he may have looked like in real life, and enables us, for once, to come literally face to face with a central figure in the parliamentary history of the fifteenth century.

H.W.K.

A slavery tour of London: the guided walk laying bare atrocities of the past From a kneeling slave at the Royal Exchange to the coffee house that was at the heart of the trade, a new tour is revealing a side of London that is often glossed over programme. “We’re trying to make space for others, with events that tackle everything from colonial histories and how race intersects with cultural spaces in the city, to workshops on climate action and food waste.”

The coronavirus pandemic has meant that a festival predicated on encouraging thousands of strangers to flood into normally closed-off ‘We’re looking the past squarely in the eye’ … I ldiko Bita outside the pub where buildings for a nosey around has had the Jamaica Coffee House once stood. to have a rethink. A large number of sites will still be open, with social distancing in place, but the programme has also been supplemented by a range of films and virtual tours that will take place online and via Zoom.

A pre-recorded series of 33 building tours includes films of Tooting Bec Lido, Ernő Goldfinger’s Glenkerry House housing co-operative and the self-built Walter’s Way in Lewisham, with stories told by their residents and users. There are cycling and walking tours, too, with one strand looking at radical housing projects, showcasing developments built in the heady days of decent space standards, which would have probably been more bearable places than most to spend the lockdown. And for those who can’t get out into the city (or who are sick of Zoom), Open House is planning to bring the city to them, via a range of cardboard model buildings to cut out and make at home.

T

ucked down a narrow alleyway in the City of London, hidden in the medieval muddle of courts and backstreets, stands an ornate terracotta-fronted pub. Beneath a moulded frieze and a ye olde Dickensian lantern, a plaque declares that this was the site of London’s first coffee house, opened in 1652. The Jamaica Coffee House was founded by Pasqua Rosée, the Armenian servant of a coffee merchant, and frequented by the likes of Samuel Pepys. What the plaque fails to mention is that this little establishment was also at the very centre of the transatlantic slave trade.

“A huge amount of the City of London’s wealth came from slavery, but the connection is mostly invisible today,” says tour guide Ildiko Bita. To redress this situation, Bita and her group, Six in the City, have put together a revealing walk, titled Slavery and the City. Part of this weekend’s Open House festival, the walk unpicks the intimate connections between the City’s Lord Mayors, priests, financiers and the highly profitable atrocities of the slave trade. “Most walking tours tend to gloss over anything a bit difficult and end with funny anecdotes,” says Bita. “But this one is different. We’re going to look the uncomfortable aspects of the past squarely in the eye.”

The quaint backstreet pub, site of the former Jamaica Coffee House, is one of the many eyeopening stops on the route. Where usually a guide might regale you with stories of the birth of London’s coffee culture, or charming details about the facade, Bita paints a graphic picture of a place where sugar plantation owners would meet with slave ship captains to broker deals over the fate of hundreds of enslaved Africans, thousands of miles away.

Adverts offering rewards for runaway enslaved people were frequently posted on the walls of the coffee house, while news of the latest mutinies and shipwrecks in the Caribbean was read out to enrapt punters. “Went away from his master,” begins a plaintive advert in an edition of The Post Man newspaper from January 1718. “A Negro boy named James … whoever brings him to the Jamaica Coffee House in Cornhill shall have ten shillings reward.” Another article records news of an insurrection in St Domingo in the Caribbean, first reported in the coffee house: “The Coloured People have risen, and subdued the inhabitants with dreadful massacres.”

Just a few metres from where the slave traders and sugar tycoons mingled, those plotting their downfall were also gathering. Through a covered alley, past the George and Vulture, one of Dickens’ favourite pubs, we reach a small yard facing the back of a nondescript office block. It is the site of a former Quaker bookstore and printing shop where the abolitionist movement first began – not that you would know based on the service entrance there today.

On 22 May 1787, the print shop at 2 George Yard hosted the very first meeting of what would become the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The chain of events begun that afternoon, wrote French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville years later, was “absolutely without precedent …

If you pore over the histories of all peoples, I doubt that you will find anything more extraordinary.”

James Phillips’ printing house published the famous diagram of the Brookes slave ship, starkly depicting 454 enslaved people packed together like sardines, which went on to be reproduced in countless newspapers and pamphlets, instilling the true horror of the Middle Passage in all who saw it. But if you visit George Yard today, you’ll find no statues or memorial plaques, just an empty stone courtyard dotted with ventilation shafts.

But the chief thrust this year is on opening up the festival to those who might not have considered going along before, with events like a walking tour of the old Chinatown in Limehouse and a symposium with the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust on expanding the definition of heritage. “The kind of buildings that are considered worthy of inclusion in heritage registers often aren’t places that are important to the BAME community,” says assistant Where abolition began … curator Hafsa Adan. “The George Yard in the City of London discussion will look at how different communities have influenced the planning and design of sites that are important to them.”

Much of this new focus has been steered by Phineas Harper, who took the reins of Open House in March, just as the lockdown began. “It has always been a popular festival, but perhaps we haven’t really challenged people when they get there,” he says. “This year we’re trying to be a bit more provocative and politically engaged. Ultimately, it’s all about making London a more equitable city.”

Another innovation has been to rethink the usual printed pocket guide as a proper book, edited

by Owen Hatherley. The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs is an entertaining anthology of unexpected personal stories, ranging from Daisy Froud’s poetic tales of the Harrow Civic Centre to Aydin Dikerdem’s colourful piece on Stoke Newington’s history as a hotbed of radical Turkish politics, before the brunching classes arrived.

Back on the Slavery and the City tour, we come to Bank junction, where the classical portico of the Royal Exchange looks across at the Bank of England, with the glass penthouse of the Rothschild headquarters peering above Mansion House in the background. Look closely at the pediment of the Royal Exchange, and you see an African enslaved man kneeling in a tableau of imperial commerce – carved more than 30 years after the slave trade had been abolished.

Easy to miss … the pediment of the Royal Exchange, which features an enslaved African man kneeling.

No mention of the slave trade … the plaque on the site of the first London Coffee House.

Meanwhile, the looming Rothschild presence is fitting: the banking family organised a £15m loan to compensate slave owners when the trade was outlawed, with the government adding an additional £5m. The total sum represented 40% of the government’s yearly income in those days, equivalent to hundreds of billions today – a debt so huge that it was only paid back by the British taxpayer in 2015.

The Slavery and the City walk is one of several new additions to London’s Open House programme this year, many of them geared towards widening the scope of the festival and broadening its audience. Running for almost 30 years, the annual weekend bonanza typically sees around 250,000 people welcomed into buildings that are normally closed to the public, every September bringing the spectacle of largely middle-aged white couples, thermoses in hand, queueing around the block to get into the Gherkin or have a peek inside a Barbican flat.

And finally there’s the Bank of England, which issued a formal apology in June this year for its “inexcusable connections” with slavery, after it was found that at least 25 of its former governors and directors had been owners of enslaved people or were linked to slave trading.

The bank says it has commenced a review of its collection of images to ensure none of the figures with slavery connections remain on display.

“Architecture is often a very white male-dominated space,” says Nyima Murry, one of the two new assistant curators appointed to Open House in July, tasked with diversifying the

“The question is what other meaningful action can big institutions like this can take,” says Bita.

“I’m not sure that putting the pictures in the cellar is enough.”

© The Guardian

John Lacy, a Restoration actor and playwright, satirised puritans, including in his role as Mr Scruple in The Cheats

by John Wilson (right). John Michael Wright

Mayflower 400: how society feared and ridiculed puritans

E

ngland in the 17th century was what’s known as a “confessional state” – everyone was supposed to practice religion in the way the government decided. But puritans didn’t much like the way religion was practised by the Church of England.

Puritans thought there should be more stress on the bible and opposed any religious practice not clearly sanctioned by it. This included everything the Church of England retained from Catholicism: clerical dress, images, the Common Prayer Book and the church festivals associated with it. Nonpuritans thought such objections unreasonable and a threat to the authority of both church and state. Thus the government increasingly sought ways to counteract the puritans’ influence.

Many of the things puritans argued about caused social friction. They wanted to outlaw non-religious activities such as drinking and sports on Sundays, putting them at odds with ordinary people who wanted to enjoy their only day off. Another issue was the puritan habit of “sermon gadding” – going elsewhere to listen to popular preachers, instead of their own parish church.

The authorities were suspicious of people who travelled about: “vagabonds” were enthusiastically whipped and Quakers later imprisoned for their peripatetic evangelism.

the trades of artisans – cobblers, soap boilers and button makers – getting on to tubs to preach.

The mood of defeated royalists was black – their satire became unrestrained invective. One compared sectarianism to the rape of a dismembered woman, another joked about a nonconformist’s lack of testicles. They relished the grotesque murder of an adulterous puritan minister, his brains, struck by an axe, spilling out of bed into “an open Close-stool” (a covered chamber pot).

Misogynistic depictions of sexually rapacious female devotees became a staple feature, part of an atmosphere of abuse that endured for decades after the Restoration. The daughters of a Northamptonshire minister were “infamous whores”, wrote one loyalist in the early 18th century, in a letter held in the Walker archive at the Bodleian Library, “who have given the Pox to some Gallants, that have adventured on them”.

The restoration of the monarchy and traditionalist Anglican religion in 1660 ushered in a flood of satire targeting the outgoing interregnum puritans.

Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1663), a clever parody of epic romance with a puritan anti-hero, was a bestseller.

Puritans were a minority, but could not easily be ignored. Their powerful supporters amongst the elite lobbied for religious change and pointedly criticised the Church. The government responded by suspending some puritan clergy, fining and excommunicating sermon-gadders and separatists meeting outside the church. In 1637 three of Charles I’s most prominent puritan critics had their ears nailed to the pillory and cut off. But state persecution of puritanism was more limited than that imposed on Catholics, who were seen as the greater threat.

Laughter as a weapon Persecution risks creating martyrs: powerful things in England where Foxe’s Book of Martyrs – an account of the burnings of Protestants under Mary Tudor – was a key religious text. A more sophisticated and politically palatable way of dealing with a threat was to make it socially unacceptable via ridicule.

My research shows that anti-puritan satire took many forms: anecdotes, poems, parodies, character-sketches, and particularly – since puritans opposed the theatre – the stage puritan.

First appearing around the 1590s, the stage puritan was stereotypically a tradesman, ill-educated and suspicious of learning. “Zealous Knowlittle, a Boxmaker” in The Rivall Friends (1632) was a typical example.

Puritans were portrayed as hypocrites, claiming virtue while secretly both sexually voracious and corrupt. “Thus do we blind the world with holiness,” says a character in the comic morality tale A Knack to see a Knave (1592).

Poems mocked the puritan preaching style: “eyes, all white and many a groan, as well as their habit of speaking "through the nose”. Many joked about the ridiculous affectation and noisiness of puritan sermons – and their length, which made congregations fall asleep or desperate for the toilet.

For a century the basic formula hardly changed. But during the English Civil Wars the tone darkened. Earlier anti-puritan satire is playful. “Zeal-of-theLand Busy” in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), tears down idolatrous gingerbread stalls, before losing a debate with a puppet. The aim was to belittle puritans, not acknowledge them as a potential threat or understand them.

Shakespeare was the exception, creating sympathetic, if wrongheaded, puritan characters, such as Malvolio in Twelfth Night, and Angelo in Measure for Measure – a prescient thought-experiment as to what might happen if puritans ran the state that anticipated the English Civil Wars by 40 years.

Power of the word From 1640-1660 puritans dominated Church and state, radically reforming English religion by military force. Nobody now thought them harmless.

Pamphlets warned of the strange religious sects now emerging and catalogued

Hudibras Sallies Forth: Puritans were a rich source of satirical targets in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Even bishops staged mock-Presbyterian sermons. Dramatists, like musicians working variations on a familiar theme, populated their plays with puritans of a rich variety of type and setting. Mr Scruple, in John Wilson’s popular The Cheats (1663), engages in a verbal duel with an astrologer for obtuseness of doctrine.

An elderly practical joker in Thomas Otway’s The Atheist (1684) disguises himself as a “Phanatique Preacher” to receive a deathbed conversion. In George Etherege’s Man of Mode (1676), the puritan chaplain spends the whole play in a cupboard. Strange puritan names like “Praise-God Barebones”, were laughed at and imitated. There was a trend for character names beginning with “s” to suggest the slippery, serpent-like duplicity of the stage puritan: Snarl, Smirk, Scruple. This persisted: Obadiah Slope in Barchester Towers (1857) and even Severus Snape from Harry Potter reveal how the puritan archetype of the sour-faced, black-clothed kill-joy has persisted.

Puritan values were an important influence on American culture, and can be seen today in their individualistic work ethic, their attitudes to drink and their tendency to divide people into winners and losers, just as the puritans separated the elect and the damned. In England, meanwhile, the reaction against them was more significant. Most English people loved everything the puritans hated: drink, theatre, sports, silly traditions, Christmas. Above all, English humour and irony, the seeds of which were sown during the interregnum, was the only antidote to powerful people who took themselves far too seriously.

© THE CONVERSATION

Time capsule from 1873 found buried in wall of Manchester Jewish Museum A security council meeting in 1953. Some countries are questioning whether the UN, set up after the second world war, is still relevant or holds any power.

Builders renovating oldest surviving synagogue in city make discovery in original cornerstone Hidden deep within a cavity wall of the Manchester Jewish Museum, complete with its wax seal intact, lay a glass jar time capsule buried almost 150 years ago.

As builders renovated the oldest surviving synagogue in Manchester they found the capsule buried next to the Museum’s Ark, the chamber which houses the Torah scrolls, filled with synagogue papers, newspapers and some old coins.

Early synagogue minutes show records of the capsule being laid in the cornerstone of the original building around 1873.

once a thriving Jewish quarter with a congregation of Sephardic Jews, many originally from the Iberian peninsula.

“This timely discovery comes at an apt and symbolic period when millions of Jewish people around the world prepare for the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, the Day of Atonement, a reflective and thoughtful time of year when many observers look backwards as a means to move forwards,” said its chief executive, Max Dunbar.

Dunbar, who has worked at the National Portrait Gallery, Christie’s auctioneers and the World Rugby Museum, added: “We are thrilled and overwhelmed by its discovery and look forward to displaying it in the new museum next spring.”

“We were taking extra care to remove the plaque but never imagined we would find something as old as the building still intact,” said Adam Brown, the site manager.

“It created a lot of excitement around the site. It was obvious a lot of time and effort had been spent placing the capsule all those years ago. To find it in perfect condition felt really rewarding.”

The Grade II*-listed building, described by English Heritage as “one of the highlights of Victorian Gothic architecture in the country”, is the oldest surviving synagogue in Manchester. The local Jewish population moved away from the area in the 1970s, making the synagogue redundant, and it was given a new lease of life as the Manchester Jewish Museum in 1984.

Britain’s only Jewish museum outside London, it became home to more than 30,000 objects, from personal letters and photographs to Torah scrolls hidden from the Nazis during the second world war.

In June last year the Victorian building, Moorish in style and built by Jewish cotton traders from Spain and Portugal, closed its doors for almost two years for an ambitious £5m development project, partly funded by a National Lottery grant of £2.89m in 2017.

Museum leaders now hope the discovery will help to tell the story of the museum’s former life as a synagogue, when it sat in what was

It is hoped the redeveloped museum will increase annual visitor numbers from 10,000 to 40,000 when it reopens in spring 2021.

An interactive street map of Manchester’s historic Jewish quarter will be created in the museum’s new gallery, alongside a variety of displays including a Russian washboard used as a cricket bat, and the belongings of a Holocaust survivor who spent the war hiding in a coal cellar.

New work of art honours trailblazing Edinburgh medics who fought for the right of women to go to university The new work of art inspired by the Edinburgh Seven has been created for the university by photographer Laurence Winram.

Now the “Edinburgh Seven,” the first female undergraduates to matriculate at a UK university, have been honoured in a new work of art unveiled more than 150 years after they started their studies.

A famous Rembrandt painting depicting an anatomy lesson, a copy of which hangs in the university’s medical school, has been “reimagined” to pay tribute to the Edinburgh Seven’s groundbreaking campaign.

Although they paved the way for the universal right to a higher education, the seven students – Mary Anderson, Emily Bovell, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Sophia Jex-Blake, Edith Pechey and Isabel Thorne – encountered regular opposition, bureaucracy and disruption, and were eventually prevented from completing their studies.

The new work of art, created by Edinburgh-based photographer Laurence Winram, has been unveiled just over a year after the seven students who enrolled in 1869 were honoured with posthumous honorary degrees.

They were the young Edinburgh medics who blazed a trail for the rights of women to study at university.

to produce an image representative of the seven women that we could hang on the walls of our medical school alongside the portraits of other notable people from our past.

"The image is a reimagining of a Rembrandt painting from 1632 called ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Nicolaes Tulp’, a

A group of modern-day Edinburgh students, who collected the honorary degrees last year, were reunited to create the new image, which was captured before social distancing regulations were in force.

Simran Piya, Megan Cameron, Ella Crowther, Caitlyn Taylor, Izzie Dighero, Mei Yen Liew and Sorna Paramananthan were pictured alongside teaching fellow Alethea Kelsey and “cadaver” Liam Parkinson.

It has just gone on display in a common room named after Sophia Jex-Blake at the world-leading “bioquarter” complex the university helped create at Little France, in the south side of Edinburgh. She instigated the campaign after her efforts to study medicine were rejected in 1869 on the grounds that the medical school could not put in place the necessary arrangements “in the interests of one lady.”

A stage musical honoring the Edinburgh Seven, billed as “a harrowing, hilarious and heartbreaking fight based on principles and morality” has also been in recent development.

A spokeswoman for the medical school said: “Unfortunately we have very few images of the seven women and none of them together.

"To celebrate this important moment in our history, we commissioned Edinburgh-based photographer Laurence Winram

copy of which hangs in our department of anatomy at Teviot Place.

"The original painting shows a group of male medical students and a male teacher gathered around a cadaver.

"We have reproduced this image with the present day students who represented the Edinburgh Seven at last year’s posthoumous honorary degree ceremony, along with a member of our current anatomy teaching team.”

Professor Moira Whyte, head of the medical school and the college of medicine at the university, said: “This very special image will hang in the heart of the medical school as a constant reminder to all those who come through here of the important lessons the Edinburgh Seven still hold and of our commitment to equal access to education for all.”

300 years on, will thousands of women burned as witches finally get justice?

John Downman’s Witches from Macbeth; Shakespeare wrote the play to please James I and VI, who was obsessed with witches.

Lawyer seeks pardon for 2,500 Scots who were tortured and killed in ‘satanic panic’ begun by James VI It spanned more than a century and a half, and resulted in about 2,500 people – the vast majority of them women – being burned at the stake, usually after prolonged torture. Remarkably, one of the driving forces behind Scotland’s “satanic panic” was no less than the king, James VI, whose treatise, Daemonologie, may have inspired the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Now, almost 300 years after the Witchcraft Act was repealed, a campaign has been launched for a pardon for those convicted, an apology to all those accused and a national memorial to be created.

“There should be an acknowledgement that what happened to these women was a terrible miscarriage of justice,” Claire Mitchell QC, the campaign’s founder, told the Observer. She pointed out that in Salem, the Massachusetts town where a series of infamous witchcraft trials took place in the 1690s, a formal apology for the 200 accused and 20 executed was issued in 1957. In Scotland – where 3,837 people were accused, two-thirds of whom are believed to have been put to death – there has been no such recognition.

A digital reconstruction of the face of Lilias Adie, who died in jail in 1704 before she could be burned for her ‘crimes’.

“In Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh, there are monuments to all sorts of men on horseback, and even a full-size statue of a named bear. But there is nothing to commemorate the hundreds, if not thousands, who died as a result of one of the most horrible miscarriages of justice in Scottish history,” Mitchell said.

A plaque at the Witches Well at Edinburgh Castle marks the spot where more than 300 women were burned at the stake. But, said Mitchell, “it’s not a commemoration, not a memorial, not an apology”.

Support for an acknowledgement of the injustices of the Witchcraft Act, in force between 1563 and 1736, is growing. Last weekend, three plaques commemorating 380 executed women from the communities of Culross, Torryburn and Valleyfield were unveiled on the Fife coastal path at an event organised by Remembering the Accused Witches of Scotland.

An online conference is planned for November, and a podcast will be launched in the coming weeks. An application to the Scottish parliament’s justice committee for a pardon for those executed is expected to be lodged next year.

Mitchell said she “always had an interest in Scottish history but felt a growing disquiet about the lack of female visibility in public spaces”. As a lawyer who mainly handles miscarriage of justice cases, “I thought it would be a good idea if I tried to harness what I know from my day job to bring more public awareness and recognition to what happened to women convicted as witches”.

There was precedent for pardons, she added. In 2017, thousands of men convicted of offences under laws that criminalised homosexuality were pardoned under a new law passed by the UK parliament.

Those arrested under the Witchcraft Act were usually tortured into making confessions. Women, who made up 84% of the accused, were not permitted to give evidence at their own trials. Those convicted were strangled and burned at the stake so there was no body to bury.

According to Mitchell, accusations of witchcraft were four times higher in Scotland than elsewhere, and “they cut across society, from members of the nobility to paupers and vagrants”. Those interrogated were urged to identify other “witches” among their neighbours and relatives. “People were terrified of finding themselves accused of being a witch.”

In Culross, a tiny village on the Firth of Forth, 32 women were accused and executed at the height of the witch hunts. A couple of miles away, in Torryburn, Lilias Adie “confessed” to witchcraft and fornicating with the devil in 1704, and died before trial. Her body was buried in a wooden box under a huge slab on Torryburn beach.

More than a century later, grave robbers opened the grave and took her remains. Her skull went on display at Glasgow’s Empire Exhibition in 1938 and then disappeared, but a reconstruction of Adie’s face was created two years ago from early 20th-century photographs.

Three plaques were placed on the Fife Coastal Path to commemorate the women of Culross, Torryburn and Valleyfield who were accused of witchcraft.

James VI – later James I of England – became obsessed with witchcraft after the execution of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, in 1587. He blamed a violent storm when sailing back from Denmark with his new wife, Anne, on evil spells and ordered a vicious witch hunt.

Macbeth, thought to be first performed at court in 1606, three years after James became king of England, catered to the new monarch’s witch obsession. It was another 130 years before the law was changed and the executions ended.

“It was an incredibly sad period in the history of women,” said Mitchell.

“These women were voiceless, unable even to speak in their own defence. We need to publicly recognise the terrible wrong done to them.”

As a huge database of magic lantern stories go online, researchers reveal how they were used to educate, entertain … and deliver social propaganda

Magic lantern slides for Christmas in Paradise made by James Bamforth of Holmfirth, Yorkshire, in 1893.

‘The threepennorth was consumed, and poor Tommy’s last hope of a breakfast was gone.

Fans of so-called “poverty porn” television shows, such as Benefits Street, Skint and On Benefits & Proud, could be forgiven for thinking that the genre emerged only recently. But new research reveals that the Victorians got there first.

In the late 19th century, working-class audiences were regularly shown slides depicting characters struggling with social deprivation. The slides – originally paintings, later prints or photographs – were displayed on transparent plates that were illuminated using an image projector known as a magic lantern.

The Whiskey Demon: or the Dream of the Reveller, made in the late 1800s

Christmas in Paradise by James Bamforth: ‘The mission was inaugurated by a tea, followed by a meeting.’

The Whiskey Demon’s First House.

‘The first it is a spacious house / To all but sots appalling.’

Vicars, charity workers and others who worked with poor people hoped that the slideshows – which often included images depicting the effects of drink on families and children – would encourage those in need to be more virtuous and the wealthy to be more generous towards them.

“Some of these magic lantern slides may now appear melodramatic or naive to modern viewers, but they were skilfully designed to manipulate emotions,” said Professor Joe Kember from the University of Exeter, one of the researchers.

The slideshows used some of the same principles as today’s reality TV programmes to convey their messages, Kember explained.

These included the use of recognisable characters and dramatic storylines set in extreme situations.

One notable example is Christmas in Paradise, produced in 1893, which tells the story of a loving mother so overcome with drink that she can no longer care for her young son, who dies as a result of her neglect. The slide show reveals that his mother had three pennies to spend on him, but was unable to pass by a pub without going in, an action that seals her son’s fate.

Church ministers, activists and charity workers would have shown the slides at church halls, or at orphanages and workhouses, Kember explained. But they would have also been shown to middle-class audiences at fundraising events.

“The appeal of people watching stories about characters designed to look like them, and live in a similar way to them, should not be underestimated,” Kember said. “The messages in these slides were also made more powerful because they were delivered in familiar surroundings, often by local speakers, whether these were local reverends to their congregations, mission leaders to temperance groups, or charitable organisations to the well-heeled.”

Kember and Dr Richard Crangle, also of the University of Exeter, have worked extensively with museums including the Victoria & Albert in London to research magic lanterns, which waned in popularity as cinema took off. The pair examined thousands of newspaper reports of lantern and film exhibitions in different parts of the UK to discover where they were popular and who watched them.

The records show that many of the slides were designed to be entertaining and educational, featuring topics such as geography, architecture and astronomy. Others depicted firemen, lifeboat crews and sea creatures or were retellings of classic stories.

However, a large number were designed as social propaganda and drew attention to the extremes of poverty and social deprivation. Others promoted religion. Where is the Bible?

(1901), which depicted how a husband and wife were saved by reading the scriptures, proselytised for Christianity.

The slides often featured death, and especially the death of children, but always ended with characters being redeemed, a common theme that has been reprised in today’s poverty porn television shows.

Interest in magic lanterns continues to this day. The Magic Lantern Society (MLS), which dates back to 1977, publishes a quarterly magazine and promotes events around the world. It also publishes an online list of active lanternists in the UK and other countries.

The devices’ earliest incarnations can be traced to the 15th century, although the manipulation of light to produce an image dates back millennia. In the late 18th century, showmen used lanterns to produce horror shows, or phantasmagoria. Terrifying images were produced, including ghosts projected on to smoke and shapes that moved on walls.

However, the MLS explains that it was towards the end of the Victorian era that the lantern trade flourished.

In the 1880s and 1890s, more than 30 firms were engaged in the production of lanterns and slides in London alone. As the shows gained in popularity, they were set to music or the spoken word.

Crangle and colleagues have digitised thousands of slides to produce the Lucerna Magic Lantern Web Resource the largest database of lantern slides in the world. Free to use, it contains more than 43,000 images of lantern slides and 200,000 slide records.

cemetery, but set apart from the rest of the community. “He’s buried north-south, that’s his orientation, but directly overlooking the River Thames,” he said. “He is positioned deliberately to look over that territory.”

The remains of the Marlow Warlord are unearthed.

Thomas said that, taken together with his wealth, it suggested the man was a tribal leader – a conclusion that offered a new perspective on the area.

“We know from later historical sources and bits of archaeology that [this sweep of the Thames that runs through Marlow and Maidenhead] was a kind of borderland. At various periods in the Anglo-Saxon centuries it was contested between neighbouring kingdoms,” Thomas said.

“What this burial suggests is that [this area] had its own identity as a powerful tribal unit before these kingdoms muscled in.”

Vessel found at the site.

The final resting place of what appears to be an Anglo-Saxon warrior has been unearthed in a field in Berkshire, in a discovery archaeologists say sheds fresh light on the rise and fall of local tribes.

Buried with an array of weapons including spears and a sword with its scabbard, the skeleton of a man dating from the sixth century was found in August – two years after metal detectorists discovered bronze bowls at the site and alerted experts.

Dr Gabor Thomas, a specialist in early medieval archaeology at the University of Reading who worked on the subsequent

Sword and scabbard found with the remains.

excavation, said there had been much debate about whether individuals buried with such goods were warriors or were buried with weapons as a symbolic gesture.

“Being macho at this period … it was a significant part of people’s lives,” Thomas said.

But it seems the newly unearthed individual – known as the Marlow Warlord – could well have swung his sword in earnest: not only was he about 6ft but analysis of the skeleton suggests he had well-developed muscles.

“The word that comes to mind is pretty butch,” Thomas said.

He said that unlike many burials of the time, the Marlow Warlord was not buried in a

The bronze bowls and spearheads will be displayed at Buckinghamshire County Museum in Aylesbury, where it is hoped the other items from the grave will also rest once conservation and analysis are complete. To support such efforts the team has launched a crowdfunding campaign.

Experts will also conduct further examination of the skeleton to narrow down the man’s age, and explore whether he had any diseases – early signs of arthritis have already been found, while his teeth show signs of wear.

Prof Helena Hamerow, of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the work, said the discovery was significant.

“We have few if any burials of that period from the middle Thames region that are so richly furnished, especially in comparison with the lower Thames and upper Thames,” she said, adding that some of the grave goods were likely to have been imported from what was now northern France or the Rhineland.

“Both the location and grave goods seem to be designed to project the power and importance of that individual.” © The Guardian

Cavalier attitudes – the complicated visual legacy of the English Civil War When he visited the Palazzo Pitti in Florence during the Interregnum, the Royalist traveller John Bargrave was angered to see a portrait of his enemy Oliver Cromwell, now England’s Lord Protector, ‘hanged up amongst the heroes’ in the Grand Duke of Tuscany’s gallery. ‘On occasion it is as easily taken down as it was hanged up,’ the Medici ruler assured him. The retrospective history of the English Civil War was full of such reversals: portraits displayed and removed, memorials installed and desecrated, political lineages publicised and then quietly swept under the carpet. Families loyal to one side or the other saw their fortunes waver as the Stuart monarchy fell to the Commonwealth and the Commonwealth in its turn fell to another monarchy in 1660. Depending on whom you asked (and when), the beheaded Charles I might be a tragic martyr or an overweening tyrant; Cromwell could be anything from a brave defender of the people’s freedom to a vicious regicide.

Commemorative objects bore physical evidence of the period’s contested history. The magnificent bronze equestrian statue of Charles I created by the French sculptor Hubert Le Sueur fell into Parliamentary hands during the war, when it was ordered to be taken down and sold for scrap. The shrewd purchaser marketed knife and fork handles allegedly made out of the statue’s metal to nostalgic former Cavaliers, while keeping the real statue intact and safely concealed. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, he brought it out of hiding and sold it back to the monarchy for a vast sum.

Equestrian statue of Charles I (1633), Hubert Le Sueur, erected at Charing Cross in 1675.

Cromwell and Charles I (1831), Paul Delaroche.

Stephen Bann’s history tracks visual evidence of relatives have a tendency to lose their force by the Civil War’s lingering presence from the straying too far into the byways of family history.

Restoration to the end of the 19th century. His But the latter half of the book, focussing on focus is both on what he calls ‘traces’ of the reconstructed ‘scenes’ of the war as imagined by conflict – the visible marks and pointers of 19th-century history painters, offers a fascinating memorial inscriptions, monuments, vandalised account of the growth of interiority in the tombs – and ‘scenes’, images produced in depiction of Charles and Cromwell. The period retrospect as part of an ongoing reinterpretation appealed to Victorian painters in the first instance of the war’s meaning. His approach directs because of the technical opportunities it offered. attention towards civic or popular forms: the ‘There is variety of colour, stuffs, Leathers, facade of Worcester’s Guildhall, for instance, armour, Beards, strong Horses, and other good designed during the reign of Queen Anne to matters,’ as the artist James Ward wrote celebrate the town’s proud identification with her appreciatively in 1824. But it also appealed Stuart ancestors, and featuring a tiny grotesque because of its dramatic potential, as the backdrop representation of Cromwell – so Worcester to the clash of two great opposing personalities. tradition would have it – pinned by his ears to the Cromwell in particular became a major keystone. It also involves noticing absences, beneficiary of the 19th century’s sympathetic traces of things that were once present but now imagination. Bann persuasively traces the are not. There is a story influence of the French painter Paul Delaroche’s to the shattered glass Cromwell and Charles I fragments that make up the west window of (1831) on subsequent representations of the Lord Winchester Cathedral, Protector, arguing that smashed by i c o n o c l a s t i c Delaroche’s depiction of Cromwell’s inscrutable Parliamentary troops; stare as he gazes into his and likewise, also at Winchester, to the enemy’s coffin endued him with the intensity and mutilated, noseless introspection we see in cherubs adorning the Augustus Egg’s The Night tomb of the 1st Earl of Portland, Charles I’s Before Naseby (1859), or Hamo Thornycroft’s Lord Treasurer. It took until 1917 for a stern bronze statue of 1899 with guidebook writer to its absorbed, downcast gaze. debunk the belief that James II himself, in a fit of rage, was In his final chapter Bann discusses the most selfresponsible for striking the nose off the effigy of conscious of the 19ththe Parliamentary century representations, the so-called ‘problem commander Sir William Waller in Bath pictures’, compositions A grotesque face, said to represent Oliver Cromwell, Abbey. that leave narrative gaps on the facade of the early 18th-century Guidhall, Worcester. and test viewers’ Some visual responses familiarity with the to the war were bold political statements. The historical facts. There is Ford Madox Brown’s retired Cavalier Sir Peter Leicester had to wait Cromwell on his Farm at St Ives, 1630 (1873–74), until after the Restoration to begin building a which takes a deliberately eccentric look at the long-planned private chapel on his Cheshire part of Cromwell’s biography about which least is estate, as a space where he could enjoy the lavish known; and, most famously, William Frederick aesthetics and church music banned by the Yeames’s And Where Did You Last See Your Puritans. A limewood carving commissioned from Father? (1878), which ‘plants the viewer in the Grinling Gibbons by James II and his wife in midst of an inquisition’, as Bann writes, in the around 1685 included a delicate rendering of the disorientating in medias res moment suggested text of a poem protesting against the regicide by by the ‘And’ of the title. Such sophisticated and the poet James Shirley, which could be published offbeat treatments, the chapter argues, were a only after Cromwell’s death in 1658. Some product of the confidence of English history decades later, in the early 18th century, the painters by the mid 19th century that there was gardens of New College in Oxford were still no longer anything at stake politically in their proudly displaying the arms of Charles I in the representations. In the right light Cromwell could form of an intricate parterre, demonstrating be ‘marvellously commonplace’, as Heinrich retrospective loyalty to the Stuart family during Heine once suggested: standing over the dead the dangerous years of the Jacobite uprisings. king, ‘beholding his work almost like a woodman who has just felled an oak’.

Bann’s readings of the affective power of memorials to the Civil War dead and their © APOLLO MAGAZINE

‘Where are the posters to inform and persuade us in a pandemic?’

The global pandemic has revealed a surprising lacuna in the fight against the virus. Where are the posters and visual messages to inform and persuade us? The history of graphic and communication design, especially in poster form, is full of useful and inspirational examples that remind us of the power of simple language.

The poster was the first form of image designed to be seen from a distance and while the viewer was on the move. In the first instance, its effectiveness derived from the greater scale and colour effects made possible by lithographic printing. Later, the more complete integration of word and image allowed the poster to keep pace with the accelerating machine-ensemble of modern life, and to communicate instantly.

The origins of modern graphic design, in the aftermath of the First World War and especially in the experiments of Soviet constructivism, show how colour and form can be used to powerful effect. El Lissitzky’s famous ‘Red Wedge’ poster of 1919 uses a simple red triangle to represent the dynamic and percussive force of the Red Army. The effectiveness of communication through this new form of information design made it attractive beyond the command economy of the Soviet Union. In the United States, the ideas of mass communication were developed, by Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays, into strategies that aligned information with the dominant structures of market economy, commercial advertising and public relations. Lester Beall’s posters for the Rural Electrification Administration’s activities in the 1930s combine colour and abstraction, but add elements of photographic detail that humanise the message of modernisation and progress.

In Britain, the public information poster reached its most sophisticated form during the Second World War, although the propaganda efforts of the Ministry of Information got off to a muddled start. The first three posters produced by the ministry in 1939 adopted a tone that was understood to suggest an usand-them approach to preparedness and collective effort (‘Your ‘A Turn of the Hand’ (1930s), Lester Beall.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Courage, Your Cheerfuln ess, Your Resolution – Will Bring Us Victory’ and ‘Freedom is in Peril – Defend it with all Your Might’). Ironically, the most famous of the posters – ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ – is the one that wasn’t used. Over the course of 1940, the messages aimed at both military personnel and civilians became clearer and more coherent and, from 1941 onwards, aligned with the objectives of post-war reconstruction.

In the military context, the designer Abram Games produced a series of remarkable posters representing his philosophy of ‘maximum meaning and minimum means’. Games was able to combine, through his skill in design-thinking and simplification, two ideas into a single message. The poster he designed to promote good health and hygiene across the British Army can be found in the Wellcome Collection. Another series Games designed for the Ministry of Health addressed the associated dangers of coughs and sneezes (‘spread diseases’).

The humourist and illustrator Cyril Kenneth Bird, known as Fougasse, is best remembered now as the designer of the ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ series of posters. Writing in 1946, he outlined his approach to effective communication: eye-catching design to attract attention and curiosity, humour and intelligence to engage the spectator, and a space to allow the viewer to reach the conclusion on their own. ‘In propaganda,’ Fougasse writes, ‘the poster must attract, persuade, so as to provoke action […] each of these is a necessary characteristic without, on its own, being sufficient. Each of the three must be considered together.’ He noted that shouting at people was hardly ever effective and that it was important to help people feel that they had made a considerate contribution through their actions. Fougasse also created posters for London Transport, and for the Thomas Tilling bus company, about passenger etiquette and the convenience of staggered travel times. These themes of consideration towards fellow passengers could translate easily to those of social distancing.

A similar approach was adopted by Ernest Bevin’s Ministry of Labour in promoting the industrial and road-safety messages of

the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. Their campaigns combined simple messages, humour, consistency and continuous repetition, to promote tidiness and consideration as expressions of collective effort and decency.

One of the society’s most important campaigns was to promote the wearing of safety goggles in workshops and factories. That’s not so different from asking people to wear masks. After the war, the appeal to safety as a means of increasing economic production was recast as common courtesy and consideration.

The new systems and structures of the post-war settlement also required the same kinds of public information in relation to the availability of resources and services. The Ministry of Information was re-badged as the Central Office of Information and continued to make public information posters, often by Reginald Mount and Eileen Evans, and information films until it was finally closed in 2011. There is also a sense in which the poster has moved to the internet, where it has become a meme.

The common-sense messages of public information have, over the years, been shifted to the mass audiences of television soap-operas and dramas. We may expect the storylines of Eastenders and Coronation Street, when they resume, to be full of health anxieties, community spirit and resilience.

The paucity of clear and consistent public-health messaging during the pandemic has exposed a huge problem for the effective communication of public information. The fragmentation of the media landscape combines with the costs attached to securing media space to price these communications out of the national market. Also, it looks as if these messages are better created outside straightforwardly commercial organisations. It will be interesting, in the months ahead, to see how the power of communication can be mobilised beyond the immediate demands of public relations.

The present circumstances provide an ideal opportunity for us to reconnect with the simple and effective power of the poster.

Posters are immediate and inexpensive, and their history shows us how to combine information, communication and direction.

Paul Rennie is head of context in graphic design at Central Saint Martins, London. His book Tom Eckersley: A Mid-century Modern Master will be published by Pavilion Books in 2021.

‘Please Pass Along the Platform’ (1944), Cyril Kenneth Bird, known as ‘Fougasse’.

© APOLLO MAGAZINE

‘Wear Your Goggles’ (1942)

1968

the year that set the How Neville Chamberlain’s world adviser tookon spinning for the PM to new and dangerous levels fire Neville Chamberlain wanted to avoid war at all costs. Adolf Hitler felt differently.

If the distinguished investigative author Tom Bower is correct, Dominic Cummings is a uniquely powerful Downing Street adviser who has won an election and remains determined to deliver Brexit and “revolutionise Britain’s decrepit government machine”. But if intense loyalty to a prime minister and his cause are the qualities of a truly dedicated special adviser, Cummings has a powerful predecessor who is almost forgotten today.

Unlike Cummings, George Steward, the personal press officer to Neville Chamberlain (British prime minister between May 1937 and May 1940), was a career civil servant. But he used every trick in the spin doctor’s book to defeat the Foreign Office’s opposition to his employer’s policy of appeasement. The media historian Richard Cockett describes in his book, Twilight of Truth, how Steward helped Chamberlain curb the hostility of British newspapers towards Nazi Germany and converted most of them to active support for appeasement.

James Margach, then the lobby correspondent of the Times, has described how Chamberlain worked “to manipulate the press into supporting his policy of peace at all costs”. And Steward was willing to go beyond spin. On Wednesday, November 23, 1938, MI5 spotted him sneaking into the German embassy on London’s Carlton House Terrace.

There, between the hours of 1.15pm and 3.50pm, Steward conducted private negotiations with the Nazi regime.

Inside the embassy, George Steward met Dr Fritz Hesse, press attaché and confidant of Joachim von Ribbentrop, then Hitler’s minister of foreign affairs.

MI5 had an additional informant inside the embassy. This invaluable source reported that Steward visited as “a representative of the PM”.

The intelligence agency obtained a complete version of the report Hesse sent to von Ribbentrop.

It explained that George Steward had offered concessions that could “serve as the basis for a General Anglo-German understanding”. Steward said that these should be negotiated “direct between the Fuhrer and Chamberlain”. Dr Hesse reported that: “Great Britain is now ready … to accept practically everything from us and to fulfil our every wish”.

Whether the man, described in MI5’s report as “5ft 9in tall” and “of medium build” with blue eyes and “a slight squint in his right eye”, was acting on his own initiative or at Chamberlain’s request the records do not reveal. But Chamberlain refused to dismiss Steward when the foreign secretary Lord Halifax – despite his own tendency towards appeasement and at the insistence of his own senior adviser – confronted the prime minister with MI5’s report of Steward’s clandestine meeting.

Steward continued to work for Chamberlain until the latter’s premiership ended in May 1940.

Since joining Chamberlain’s Downing Street team in 1937, Steward had manipulated parliamentary lobby correspondents to present appeasement as the only practical policy. This he achieved by undermining the long-established Westminster tradition whereby senior political journalists spoke freely to MPs, ministers and civil servants. Steward decided that all significant news about government policy must reach lobby correspondents from his lips or those of a loyal minister.

He turned his own frequent lobby briefings into the Foreign office mandarin, Sir Alexander Cadogan.

without attribution, thus conveying the impression that it was an unalloyed fact.

Evidence in the national archives reveals that Sir Alexander Cadogan, permanent under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office, believed Steward’s conciliatory approach to the Nazi regime could “only result in discomfiting the moderates in Germany, in confirming the extremists in power, and in some bogus settlement which will be the beginning of the end of the British empire, chloroformed as it will be by a totally false impression of security”.

If that was too extreme a fear, there can be no question that Steward’s loyalty to Chamberlain was at least as intense as that of excellent Downing Street communications chiefs such as Tony Blair’s Alastair Campbell or Margaret Thatcher’s Bernard Ingham. At a time when nearly 80% of British households read a daily national newspaper, he bent the Westminster and Whitehall lobby correspondents to his will and ruthlessly crushed a counter-briefing operation run by his rival, Reginald “Rex” Leeper, at the antiappeasement Foreign Office.

Leeper had gathered around him a dedicated team of diplomatic correspondents who regurgitated his briefings accurately but unattributed. When their newspapers bowed to Chamberlain or Steward, Leeper’s pets, as they were known, would brief one of the private anti-appeasement newsletters then circulating, such as Claud Cockburn’s The Week. Among the leading “pets” were influential correspondents including Vernon Bartlett of the liberal News Chronicle, Victor Gordon-Lennox of the Conservative Daily Telegraph and Norman Ewer of the Labour-supporting Daily Herald.

But by the time of Steward’s clandestine mission to the German embassy, Leeper and his principal backer at the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart (Cadogan’s predecessor) had been forced out of their jobs at the prime minister’s insistence.

Sir Reginald Wildig Allen (‘Rex’) Leeper

We know little about what sort of man George Steward was. The MI5 field agent who watched him approach the German embassy on that afternoon noted that he wore a homburg and a dark grey suit with narrow-cut trousers. He also had a light grey tweed overcoat and walked with his feet turned out.

But we know more about the result of his visit to the German embassy. Steward’s efforts to consolidate Chamberlain’s ambitions came in the immediate aftermath of the Munich Agreement of September 1938 by which Britain and France consented to the German annexation of the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia.

key source of political news. To remain in the know, lobby correspondents had to attend. And, as lobby rules required, they reported what Steward said

Chamberlain’s reputation as a defender of peace was at its peak – and Steward hoped an extended agreement with Hitler could secure his reputation as the hero of the age. The awkward squad in the Foreign Office must get no credit at all. And we know how that turned out. © THE CONVERSATION

Latrines are valuable sources for microscopic and molecular information.

Study seeks to compare microbiomes of our ancestors for clues to modern diseases.

medieval poop was unique from modern humans, including those who lived hunter-gatherer lifestyles.

“It seems latrines are indeed valuable sources for both microscopic and molecular information,” Bos Researchers working knee-deep in 14th- and 15thsaid. “We’ll need many more studies at other century latrines have found that bacterial DNA from archaeological sites and time periods to fully human excrement can last for centuries and provide understand how the microbiome changed in human clues to how our gut contents have changed significantly since medieval times.

Handout photo issued by the University of Cambridge of a wooden latrine from medieval Riga.

Analysis of two cesspits, one in Jerusalem and the other in the Latvian capital, Riga, could help scientists understand if changes to our microbiome – the genetic makeup of the bacteria, virus, fungi, parasites and other microbes living inside us – affect modern-day afflictions.

Those variations may be linked to many of the diseases of the industrialised world, such as inflammatory bowel disease, allergies, and obesity, according to the study, which was published this week.

“At the outset, we weren’t sure if molecular signatures of gut contents would survive in the latrines over hundreds of years,” said Kirsten Bos, a specialist in ancient bacterial DNA from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and co-leader of the study.

“Many of our successes in ancient bacterial retrieval thus far have come from calcified tissues like bones and dental calculus, which offer very different preservation conditions.”

One of the big challenges in working with an archaeological dig was differentiating what was faeces and what was dirt. However, researchers were able to identify a wide range of bacteria, parasitic worms, and other organisms known to inhabit the intestines of humans.

They choose latrines believed to have been used by many people in an attempt to gather insight into the intestinal flora of whole communities. The study, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, found the microbial content of the

groups over time.

“However, we have taken a key step in showing that DNA recovery of ancient intestinal contents from past latrines can work.”

Piers Mitchell, a paleopathologist at Cambridge University who worked on the study, said ancient latrines could become a key source of biomolecular information and allow scientists to explain how modern lifestyles affect human health.

“If we are to determine what constitutes a healthy microbiome for modern people, we should start looking at the microbiomes of our ancestors who lived before antibiotic use, fast food, and the other trappings of industrialisation,” he said. © The Guardian

How do pandemics end? In different ways, but it’s never quick and never neat

‘A Court for King Cholera’: A cartoon from Punch magazine in 1852 on a cholera outbreak in London.

Just like the Black Death, influenza and smallpox, Covid-19 will affect almost every aspect of our of lives – even after a vaccine turns up

O

n 7 September 1854, in the middle of a raging cholera epidemic, the physician John Snow approached the board of guardians of St James’s parish for permission to remove the handle from a public water pump in Broad Street in London’s Soho. Snow observed that 61 victims of the cholera had recently drawn water from the pump and reasoned that contaminated water was the source of the epidemic. His request was granted and, even though it would take a further 30 years for the germ theory of cholera to become accepted, his action ended the epidemic.

As we adjust to another round of coronavirus restrictions, it would be nice to think that Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock have a similar endpoint in sight for Covid-19. Unfortunately, history suggests that epidemics rarely have such neat endings as the 1854 cholera epidemic. Quite the opposite: as the social historian of medicine Charles Rosenberg observed, most epidemics “drift towards closure”. It is 40 years since the identification of the first Aids cases, for instance, yet every year 1.7 million people are infected with HIV. Indeed, in the absence of a vaccine, the World Health Organization does not expect to call time on it before 2030.

However, while HIV continues to pose a biological threat, it does not inspire anything like the same fears as it did in the early 1980s when the Thatcher government launched its “Don’t Die of Ignorance” campaign, replete with scary images of falling tombstones. Indeed, from a psychological standpoint, we can say that the Aids pandemic ended with the development of antiretroviral drugs and the discovery that patients infected with HIV could live with the virus well into old age.

The Great Barrington declaration, advocating the controlled spread of coronavirus in younger age groups alongside the sheltering of the elderly, taps into a similar desire to banish the fear of Covid-19 and bring narrative closure to this pandemic.

Implicit in the declaration signed by scientists at Harvard and other institutions is the idea that pandemics are as much social as biological phenomena and that if we were willing to accept higher levels of infection and death we would reach herd immunity quicker and return to normality sooner.

But other scientists, writing in the Lancet, say the Great Barrington strategy rests on a “dangerous

fallacy”. There is no evidence for lasting “herd immunity” to the coronavirus following natural infection. Rather than ending the pandemic, they argue, uncontrolled transmission in younger people could merely result in recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccines. ‘‘Water! Water! Everywhere; and not a Drop to Drink’: Another Punch cartoon, this one on the London outbreak of 1849.

It is no coincidence they have called their rival petition “the John Snow memorandum”. Snow’s decisive action in Soho may have ended the 1854 epidemic, but cholera returned in 1866 and 1892.

It was only in 1893, when the first mass cholera vaccine trials got under way in India, that it became possible to envisage the rational scientific control of cholera and other diseases. The high point of these efforts came in 1980 with the eradication of smallpox, the first and still the only disease to be eliminated from the planet.

However, these efforts had begun 200 years earlier with Edward Jenner’s discovery in 1796 that he could induce immunity against smallpox with a vaccine made from the related cowpox virus.

With more than 170 vaccines for Covid-19 in development, it is to be hoped we won’t have to wait that long this time. However, Professor Andrew Pollard, the head of the Oxford University vaccine trial, warns that we should not expect a jab in the near future. At an online seminar last week, Pollard said the earliest he

thought a vaccine would be available was summer 2021 and then only for frontline health workers. The bottom line is that “we may need masks until July”, he said.

The other way the pandemic could be brought to a close is with a truly world-beating test-and-trace system. Once we can suppress the reproductive rate to below 1 and be confident of keeping it there, the case for social distancing dissolves.

Sure, some local measures might be necessary from time to time, but there would no longer be a need for blanket restrictions in order to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed. Essentially, Covid19 would become an endemic infection, like flu or the common cold, and fade into the background. This is what appears to have happened after the 1918, 1957 and 1968 influenza pandemics. In each case, up to a third of the world’s population was infected, but although the death tolls were high (50 million in the 1918-19 pandemic, about 1 million each in the 1957 and 1968 ones), within two years they were over, either because herd immunity was reached or the viruses lost their virulence.

The nightmare scenario is that Sars-CoV-2 does not fade away but returns again and again. This was the case with the 14th-century Black Death, which caused repeated European epidemics between 1347 and 1353. Something similar happened in 1889-90 when the “Russian influenza” spread from central Asia to Europe and North America. Although an English government report gave 1892 as the official end date of the pandemic, in truth the Russian flu never went away. Instead, it was responsible for recurrent waves of illness throughout the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign.

Even when pandemics eventually reach a medical conclusion, however, history suggests they may have enduring cultural, economic and political effects.

The Black Death, for instance, is widely credited with fuelling the collapse of the feudal system and spurring an artistic obsession with images of the underworld. Similarly, the plague of Athens in the 5th century BC is said to have shattered Athenians’ faith in democracy and paved the way for the installation of a Spartan oligarchy known as the Thirty Tyrants. Even though the Spartans were later ejected, Athens never regained its confidence. Whether Covid-19 leads to a similar political reckoning for Boris Johnson’s government, only time will tell.

© The Guardian

Weird, wacky and utterly wonderful: the world's greatest unsung museums A bullring full of blood, a house full of sweet wrappers, a power station full of sculpture, a roundabout full of plants … Hilton Als, Mary Beard, Russell Tovey and more pick their alternative favourite museums Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza de Caballería de Sevilla, Spain

some of its machinery. It’s hardly ever visited now though. It’s not easy to get to and it’s in quite an industrial place – where you’d expect a power station to be. So you often have the place to yourself. The contrast between good Roman sculpture and extraordinary industrial brutalism is wonderful.

Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago but at any time this is a retreat from the world right in the centre of the big city.

Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil

Jessie Burton, novelist A tourist might more prosaically call this the world-famous bullring of Seville. I lived in Andalucía in my 20s and the culture of bullfighting was unavoidable. I had a kid in my class who, at 16, was a trainee fighter.

Whatever your thoughts on the ethics, I defy you not to be captivated by this building and the exhibits within its corridors. It’s a living museum, as bullfights still take place. Standing in the middle of the empty 12,000-seater ring is a hair-raising experience, especially when you notice the wooden panels scarred by horns. The toreador costumes – all camp and skintight glory, butterfly colours and braiding – belie the fully equipped emergency room, a place of blood loss and death since 1749. The matador prayer chapel, the equipment, the bulls’ heads and the black and white photographs seem like relics of a faded world – until you leave and see posters advertising the next fight.

Centrale Montemartini, Rome

Mary Beard, academic and writer A collection of first-rate ancient sculpture, set in a disused power station that still has

Olivia Laing, writer and critic Years ago, when I was working on my book The Lonely City, I made a pilgrimage to Intuit to see the recreation of the artist Henry Darger’s room. Darger was a Chicago janitor who spent his life alone in a boarding house. It wasn’t until he became ill that his landlord discovered an extraordinary trove of artworks. It turned out this lonely man had spent decades creating an enormous body of work about a fantastical universe populated by children, winged animals and soldiers. His room was an artist’s studio, assembled against the odds. It was piled high with materials he’d gleaned from the streets, from balls of string to syringes he shoved pencil stubs in to make them last longer. A monument to indomitable creativity, despite financial and emotional impoverishment.

Olivia Laing’s latest book is Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency Garden Museum, London Maria Balshaw, Tate director Tucked on to a roundabout, this is the most tranquil of spaces inside and out, with a garden by Dan Pearson and a lovely cafe.

At the moment, there is a wonderful exhibition about artist-gardener Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness,

Kwame Kwei-Armah, artistic director of Old Vic Theatre, London When I went about 10 years ago, the first floor of this museum dedicated to AfroBrazilian culture was what you might expect: videos of Pele and football and stuff.

I thought: “This is a bit naff.” But as I went up each floor, the history of Brazil and its connection to Nigeria and West Africa became more apparent, as the art became more abstract. In one room there was an installation of the ruins of a slave ship, which was just wonderful. You could touch the wood, hear the sounds. Then there were these abstract paintings that make you think: “Van Gogh, why did you not say this is who you copied it from?” By the end, I thought: “I need to fly my family over, to show them how a culture is remembered, preserved and celebrated.”

Farleys House & Gallery, East Sussex Katy Hessel, host of The Great Women Artists podcast This is where the photographer Lee Miller and her husband Roland Penrose lived after the second world war. Miller studied with Cordon Bleu and became a chef, so it has

Stephen has lived by the mantra: “I live in this house, but I don’t really live here, I live inside my head.”

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

this amazing kitchen. You can still see all her spices and foodstuffs in the cupboards.

But that’s obviously not the most exciting thing - for this home is where all the surrealists and their network congregated.

Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning and Picasso all came. They still have tiles in the kitchen painted by Picasso. The couple were amazing collectors too, so there’s work by the likes of Eileen Agar and Penny Slinger.

It’s just filled with memories.

lived was. A lot of museums and galleries have community outreach programmes, but SLG’s actually work.

Museo Medardo Rosso, Barzio, Italy

Museo Gypsotheca Antonio Canova, Possagno, Italy

Nicholas Cullinan, National Portrait Gallery director This museum dedicated to the work of the neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova is exquisite, particularly the renovations started in the 1950s by the architect Carlo Scarpa. The original building, which includes a gallery and Canova’s house, is more neoclassical in style, and then Scarpa updated it. He cut cubic glass windows into the upper corners of the walls, which are beautiful in themselves but also light the work beautifully. You can see the shadows moving across during the day, turning the sculptures into sundials. It’s a perfect marriage of art and architecture, building and content. The museum did get some press recently: it’s where that large Austrian tourist broke the toes off the cast of Pauline Borghese, when he sat in her lap to take a selfie.

South London Gallery Ryan Gander, artist This gallery has a rigorous international programme, but still feels very local. It’s very much about the area and the people who live around it. The world has taken a complete turn: we’ve all realised that the things around us matter and we have a different perspective on how global, how centralised, how extravagant, how excessive, and how capitalist the way we

Julia Peyton-Jones, global director, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London Medardo Rosso, who died in 1928, was a fantastic sculptor. Rodin was meant to have been an admirer. But he’s still not widely known. His works are incredibly tender, sensitive and touching, but not in any sentimental way. The museum, northeast of Milan, is incredible: it’s the house where he used to live and work. The works are modest and beautifully presented. People like to tidy art up, put dates on it, make sense of it, but the great thing about art is that it has something intangible at its core.

That intangibility speaks to us in a way beyond words – and Rosso does that in the most fascinating way.

Urara Tsuchiya, artist This museum was built by Jean Dubuffet, who created the term art brut, or raw art, which takes in outsider art but a lot more too. When I visited 10 years ago, there were lots of strange sculptures, such as the work of Morton Bartlett, who made lots of dolls of children and then photographed them.

It’s really creepy – quite wrong, but kind of amazing, as they’re so well made. It’s also funny. Loads of times, I just don’t like a lot of art. But this collection is something else, much more original. There are lots of works that seem really obsessive, which is nice.

You can tell that the art isn’t just thinking about what’s on trend.

Colored Girls Museum and Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

House of Dreams, London

Russell Tovey, actor and host of TalkArt podcast In 1998, disillusioned by the design and fashion world he was working in, Stephen Wright began to make an artistic documentation of his life, through the throwaway and eccentric objects he finds, inherits or acquires. His home in East Dulwich has become a living museum, sprawling out into the gardens. My heart leapt as I recognised the sweet wrappers and toys of my childhood, and it ached when I looked at his “memory boards” which document the passing of both his parents and his lover within a year and a half.

Zoe Whitley, director of Chisenhale Gallery, London The Colored Girls Museum privileges the stories of black women and girls in a way that’s for us and by us. It’s very personally and lovingly presented in a house. The Barnes Foundation, meanwhile, showcases Albert C Barnes’s famous collection. It seamlessly spans anonymous Pennsylvania craftspeople and Picasso, Matisse and Renoir – treating them both equally. We think of collections as big, authoritative and encyclopaedic, but the most interesting ones are super-personal. That’s the hook with these two: works that matter to the individuals who put them together.

The Colored Museum Hilton Als, writer and critic A small museum I love: the imaginary but emotionally real museum in George C Wolfe’s play The Colored Museum. © The Guardian

What Did Elizabeth I Actually Look Like?

This artist has a suggestion

Mat Collishaw’s ‘Mask of Youth’ presents realistic depiction of the Tudor queen, explores her savvy command of public persona.

D

uring her 45-year reign, England’s Elizabeth I carefully cultivated her public image. She did such a good job of managing it that nearly 500 years after her rise to power, her imperial majesty continues to be depicted with a lithe figure, whose shape is emphasized by delicate lace collars, a smooth ivory complexion, and vibrant red hair dotted with precious jewels.

of roughly 55. The pearls in her hair speak to the “chastity” of England’s “Virgin Queen,” while the lace ruff surrounding her face radiates “warmth, beauty and goodness,” per the RMG blog.

a bevy of male heirs, this equation of private and public worked in her favor. When she was

On the wall directly across from this image, a different version of Elizabeth As Jonathan Jones reports for the Guardian, a appears. As Lucy Davies new mixed-media installation by British artist notes for the Telegraph, this Mat Collishaw complicates the visual we have of queen bears all the the last Tudor monarch, showing her as a master hallmarks of her age: of artifice who crafted and controlled the mask sunken eyes, wrinkles, she presented to the world, particularly as she smallpox-scarred skin and grew older and fell victim to increasingly poor even wispy chin hairs. She’s The two Elizabeths are placed face-to-face at the Queen's House in Greenwich health. missing her famed red “The proliferation of portraits seemed to set up a hair—not to mention a smoke screen more than it revealed her true corporeal body. Instead, she is little more than a beyond childbearing years, with her balding grey character, which remained concealed behind her rubber mask installed in a glass box. Behind her hair, wrinkles and rotting teeth partially masked inscrutable appearance,” Collishaw explains in sits a jumble of whirring machinery that dictates by heavy cosmetics and wigs, the emphasis on an interview published on the Royal Museums her movements, from unnervingly blinking eyes appearance proved more problematic.

Greenwich blog. “Years of insecurity, due to the to quavering mouth; the ultimate effect, Jamie Portraits became a key method of maintaining potentially volatile political climate, led her to Rigg writes for Engadget, is that of a silent queen the myth of the queen’s youthful beauty, the create a public mask which became fused with surveying her court, physically unmasked to Telegraph’s Davies notes. Toward the end of her her private self, the two becoming inseparable.” reveal the face behind the facade but concealing reign, Elizabeth issued a “face template” that her inner thoughts just as she did in both portrait artists were commanded to adhere to, Collishaw’s creation, fittingly entitled “The portraits and life. and as Brenda Ralph Lewis of British Heritage Mask of Youth,” renders this theory tangible by recounts, her secretary of state, Sir Robert Cecil, juxtaposing an animatronic, life-like and It’s not surprising that Elizabeth was adept in the once wrote, “Many painters have done portraits realistically unflattering depiction of Elizabeth art of crafting and maintaining an image: As the of the Queen but none has sufficiently shown her with the triumphant "Armada Portrait," which second daughter of a king yearning for sons and looks or charms. Therefore Her Majesty was produced around 1588 to commemorate the product of an annulled union that ended with commands all manner of persons to stop doing Philip II of Spain’s failed invasion of the British her mother’s execution on trumped up charges of portraits of her until a clever painter has finished Isles. adultery, she spent her life hiding behind a mask one which all other painters can copy. Her of her own creation. There were few other Majesty, in the meantime, forbids the showing of On one wall of an exhibition hall in the Queen’s options if she hoped to survive the rise and fall of any portraits which are ugly until they are House, Greenwich, Elizabeth appears serene, the kings and queens who ruled before she took improved.” omnipotent and incredibly youthful for a woman power—an arduous task that she navigated by concealing her true intentions and In an interview with the BBC’s Dan John, beguiling those around her until National Maritime Museum curator Christine Mary I died childless in 1558, Riding says that Collishaw’s “Mask of Youth,” leaving her sister Elizabeth heir to which was produced based on biometric the throne. information drawn from painted portraits, a 3D scan of the queen’s death mask and Determined to maintain her contemporary accounts of her appearance, independence, the 25-year-old doesn’t claim to provide a definitive depiction of queen decided to remain Elizabeth. unmarried. For History Extra, “This is as artificial as the 'Armada Portrait,'” Anna Whitelock writes that the Riding explains. “It may be more lifelike, but queen’s “body was held to be one you can see the mechanics that are whirring up and the same as England.” When every time that she moves. This is no attempt to Elizabeth was young, vivacious say this is Elizabeth I. It is another kind of In the "Armada Portrait," Elizabeth appears serene, omnipotent and incredibly youthful for a woman of roughly 55 and seemingly bound to produce artifice.”

© Smithsonian MAGAZINE

As a huge database of magic lantern stories go online, researchers reveal how they were used to educate, entertain … and deliver social propaganda

Magic lantern slides for Christmas in Paradise made by James Bamforth of Holmfirth, Yorkshire, in 1893.

‘The threepennorth was consumed, and poor Tommy’s last hope of a breakfast was gone.

Fans of so-called “poverty porn” television shows, such as Benefits Street, Skint and On Benefits & Proud, could be forgiven for thinking that the genre emerged only recently. But new research reveals that the Victorians got there first.

In the late 19th century, working-class audiences were regularly shown slides depicting characters struggling with social deprivation. The slides – originally paintings, later prints or photographs – were displayed on transparent plates that were illuminated using an image projector known as a magic lantern.

The Whiskey Demon: or the Dream of the Reveller, made in the late 1800s

Christmas in Paradise by James Bamforth: ‘The mission was inaugurated by a tea, followed by a meeting.’

The Whiskey Demon’s First House.

‘The first it is a spacious house / To all but sots appalling.’

Vicars, charity workers and others who worked with poor people hoped that the slideshows – which often included images depicting the effects of drink on families and children – would encourage those in need to be more virtuous and the wealthy to be more generous towards them.

“Some of these magic lantern slides may now appear melodramatic or naive to modern viewers, but they were skilfully designed to manipulate emotions,” said Professor Joe Kember from the University of Exeter, one of the researchers.

The slideshows used some of the same principles as today’s reality TV programmes to convey their messages, Kember explained.

These included the use of recognisable characters and dramatic storylines set in extreme situations.

One notable example is Christmas in Paradise, produced in 1893, which tells the story of a loving mother so overcome with drink that she can no longer care for her young son, who dies as a result of her neglect. The slide show reveals that his mother had three pennies to spend on him, but was unable to pass by a pub without going in, an action that seals her son’s fate.

Church ministers, activists and charity workers would have shown the slides at church halls, or at orphanages and workhouses, Kember explained. But they would have also been shown to middle-class audiences at fundraising events.

“The appeal of people watching stories about characters designed to look like them, and live in a similar way to them, should not be underestimated,” Kember said. “The messages in these slides were also made more powerful because they were delivered in familiar surroundings, often by local speakers, whether these were local reverends to their congregations, mission leaders to temperance groups, or charitable organisations to the well-heeled.”

Kember and Dr Richard Crangle, also of the University of Exeter, have worked extensively with museums including the Victoria & Albert in London to research magic lanterns, which waned in popularity as cinema took off. The pair examined thousands of newspaper reports of lantern and film exhibitions in different parts of the UK to discover where they were popular and who watched them.

The records show that many of the slides were designed to be entertaining and educational, featuring topics such as geography, architecture and astronomy. Others depicted firemen, lifeboat crews and sea creatures or were retellings of classic stories.

However, a large number were designed as social propaganda and drew attention to the extremes of poverty and social deprivation. Others promoted religion. Where is the Bible?

(1901), which depicted how a husband and wife were saved by reading the scriptures, proselytised for Christianity.

The slides often featured death, and especially the death of children, but always ended with characters being redeemed, a common theme that has been reprised in today’s poverty porn television shows.

Interest in magic lanterns continues to this day. The Magic Lantern Society (MLS), which dates back to 1977, publishes a quarterly magazine and promotes events around the world. It also publishes an online list of active lanternists in the UK and other countries.

The devices’ earliest incarnations can be traced to the 15th century, although the manipulation of light to produce an image dates back millennia. In the late 18th century, showmen used lanterns to produce horror shows, or phantasmagoria. Terrifying images were produced, including ghosts projected on to smoke and shapes that moved on walls.

However, the MLS explains that it was towards the end of the Victorian era that the lantern trade flourished.

In the 1880s and 1890s, more than 30 firms were engaged in the production of lanterns and slides in London alone. As the shows gained in popularity, they were set to music or the spoken word.

Crangle and colleagues have digitised thousands of slides to produce the Lucerna Magic Lantern Web Resource the largest database of lantern slides in the world. Free to use, it contains more than 43,000 images of lantern slides and 200,000 slide records.

Civil rights era photographer Doris Derby: ‘If people were being so brave, it was the least I could do’

By Tim Lewis

A

head of a UK exhibition of her work, the activist and former academic discusses capturing everyday realities of southern black lives A volunteer maths teacher with students at Tufts, Mound Bayou, Mississippi 1968.

D

oris Derby has had a productive 81 years. She’s been an elementary-school teacher, a photographer and a civil rights activist.

She has founded theatre groups and been a professor of anthropology. “I like to say, I’ve worn a lot of different hats,” she tells me with a laugh one morning last week on the phone from her home in Atlanta, Georgia.

Today we are mainly talking about her photographs, a selection of which are to feature in a new exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate called We Will Walk – Art and Resistance in the American South. But the story behind Derby’s wonderful, intimate pictures is enmeshed with the rest of her extraordinary life; she often wore several of her hats at the same time.

Her experience also provides a revealing snapshot of the rupture that America went through in the 1960s and 70s.

Derby grew up in the Bronx, New York, and an engagement with the civil rights movement was in her DNA: her grandmother was an early activist in the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People); her father was a civil engineer often overlooked for jobs he was well qualified for. “When I was in elementary school, nothing in the history books had anything to do with telling me about my history,” she says.

“I’d think: ‘Why aren’t black people being represented in these books?

And stories, movies.’ We weren’t in them. But we were here.”

But Derby became fully committed in 1963: the year of landmark protests in Birmingham, Alabama, and the March on Washington (where Martin Luther King Jr told the 250,000-strong crowd: “I have a dream”). She’d been asked to work on a literacy programme in Mississippi – initially she

said no, but events demanded a rethink. “As many other people were, I was aghast at what was happening in Birmingham,” Derby remembers, “with the police and their dogs and the firehoses and the billy clubs, beating these people who are dressed up orderly, and just trying to see about integrating the facilities there, and seeing about registering to vote. I saw that on the news, and I just decided that if these people were so brave to do that, to fight for the right to vote for all of us as black people, then the least I could do would be to go to Mississippi to work.”

Initially, Derby was involved with teaching and voter registration, but around 1966 she was given a camera by a new organisation, Southern Media, which was setting out to document the civil rights movement.

While many of the most famous images from this period show violent confrontations, protests and the iconic leaders, Derby’s approach was different. She was especially interested in women and children, and the day-

and the men would stay up all night, guns at their side. “They were very brave,” she says. “Especially in the rural areas, they were threatened that if they had anything to do with the civil rights movement, they would be thrown off the land. There could be firebombs shot into their houses and I knew people that happened to.”

Another time, Derby went into a gas station to use the bathroom. “This was a time when civil rights people were integrating bathrooms and other facilities,” she explains. “And a guy came over to me and he put his hand on his waist and he had a gun there.

And he told me which bathroom I’d better use.” What did Derby do? “I just left,” she goes on. “I didn’t go in the bathroom. But I mean, he was prepared to do things. So you never knew when things were going to happen.”

Women’s sewing co-operative, Mississippi, 1968..

Schoolchildren, Farish Street, Jackson, Mississippi, 1968

to-day experience of life in the south at that time. Her photographs didn’t appear on the front pages of newspapers, but were instead used on brochures and leaflets that were distributed directly to the black communities, showing the activities and initiatives that were a less showy but still essential part of the civil rights changes.

Derby’s father had given her a Brownie camera when she was a child, and she had an instinctive eye for detail and storytelling. “I also was a painter before I came to Mississippi,” she says, “so a lot of my pictures, when I look through the lens, I’m looking also from a perspective of: ‘How would this look as a picture, a painting?’”

A women’s sewing co-operative, Mississippi, 1968. Although Derby was not usually at the frontline of protests, there was an ever-present risk in her work. “I had threats around me, I had situations,” she says matter-of-factly.

Derby recalls visiting black farmers

Derby insists that it was not particularly unusual for a woman to chose to move to the south, with all the dangers that entailed. What was rare in her case, though, was how long she stayed: nine years, until 1972, when she went to the University of Illinois to study anthropology. “I was just…” she pauses. “I was very involved in the work in Mississippi. I felt like it was what I should do. And it just seemed like more things came up that could use my skills and it was just my time to give what talent I had. There was such a need, and my skills were needed.”

• We Will Walk – Art and Resistance in the American South runs at Turner Contemporary, Margate, 7 February-3 May © The Guardian

The 10 most misleading American historical sites

By James W Loewen

The Zero Mile Post Marker marked the terminus of the Western and Atlantic Railroad in Atlanta but has now been removed (to a museum).

Historical plaques are often anything but informative.

Here are some of the worst offenders When I was a kid, my dad stopped the car at every historical marker on our family vacations.

He thought he was educating us. But too often these markers were telling us things that never happened and leaving out important things that did. Here’s a quick tour of 10 of the worst historic sites in the US. 1 Wrongest In Almo, Idaho, a slab of stone carved into the shape of Idaho memorializes a shocking incident in the history of the west: “Dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives in a horrible Indian massacre, 1861. Three hundred immigrants west bound. Only five escaped.”

The only problem with this marker is that 300 immigrants were not killed in 1861. Thirty were not; three were not. It never happened at all. A fine western historian, Brigham Madsen, devoted years of research to showing that this event could not have happened. Why, then, does the marker stay up? Well, it’s the biggest thing that ever happened in Almo, even though it never happened!

2 Most ridiculous At the lower tip of Manhattan stands a granite portrayal of a nearly naked Native American, a clothed and befrocked Dutchman, and about $24 worth of beads. It marks the exact spot where this famous purchase of Manhattan never took place. A moment’s thought makes obvious that this story is absurd. Would you trade your village, gardens, your hunting rights on Manhattan, fishing rights around the island – for this paltry string of beads? And do what? Move to New Jersey? People already live across the Hudson, so you’d have to talk with them, perhaps fight with them, before simply moving in …

Then consider the clothing. I have been in Manhattan in February, and if this purchase that never took place took place in February, that is one cold Native American person. I have also been in Manhattan in August, and if this purchase took place in August, then that Dutchman is about to suffer heat exhaustion.

To put it another way, no two people were ever dressed so differently on the same spot on Earth on the same date. We miss noticing this because we are used to portraying Natives as “primitive” – nearly naked – and Europeans as “civilized” – elegantly clothed.

Finally, consider the most famous street in America, Wall Street, named for the wall that the Dutch built at the northern edge of New

Amsterdam to deter attacks from the indigenous owners of the island. Its name also exposes the ridiculousness of the $24 story.

3 Most Eurocentric Overlooking the Atlantic in Newport, Rhode Island, stands two-thirds of a large granite globe, symbolizing the “two thirds of the earth” that Portuguese explorers “discovered”. Of course, from Goa to Angola to Brazil, people already lived there, but they didn’t really count; they were not Europeans.

4 Most racist In the last five years, especially since the white supremacist events in Charleston and Charlottesville, the celebrations of racism that used to dot our landscape from Boston to Seattle and San Diego to Key West have come under attack. The largest of these was the Jefferson Davis Highway, which stretched from Arlington, Virginia, to Richmond and Biloxi and on to San Diego before turning north and terminating at the Canadian border north of Bellingham, Washington. Just this year Arlington renamed its portion of the route, and markers signifying it have also been removed in California and Washington. The only reason this 4,300-mile highway was ever named for Davis was to tell Americans that he was great and we should honor him. And we did not do so because he had been a good senator in the 1840s or secretary of war in the 1850s – no, we honored him because he led a movement that committed treason on behalf of slavery and white supremacy.

5 Getting even the numbers wrong Lee’s surrender at Appomattox ended the larger part of the civil war. In 1926, the United Daughters of the Confederacy marked the end of the army with a plaque at Appomattox saying “Here … Lee surrendered 9000 men, the remnant of an army still unconquered in spirit, to 118,000 men under Grant.” (The last line has been removed but can still be read.) This plaque gets the numbers all wrong – not by accident, but as part of the “Lost Cause” narrative concocted to persuade white Americans that the southern cause was honorable and defeated only by the north’s vastly superior manpower.

6 Most ‘heterosexualized’ Historic houses usually tell heroic stories about their builders, leaving out any “bad parts”. Since we deemed homosexuality “bad” until the very recent past, our public history rarely acknowledged the sexual orientations of gays and lesbians. For many years the most outrageous of these sites was Wheatland, President James Buchanan’s house in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Visitors didn’t learn that he was probably homosexual – or much else about him. (The site now discusses Buchanan’s sexuality, as well as historical debates over many aspects of his presidency.)

There isn’t much doubt about Buchanan’s orientation. For years while serving in the US Senate he lived with William Rufus King, senator from Alabama. The two were inseparable; writers referred to them as “the Siamese twins” and called King Buchanan’s

“better half” and “his wife”. When in 1844 King was appointed minister to France, Buchanan wrote: “I am now ‘solitary and alone,’ having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them.”

7 Least important Every year, the marker program in Texas puts up more than 250 markers, more than most states have ever put up. Some simply don’t merit a sign. Surely that’s true of the plaque for the Magale Building in downtown Galveston, which tells that it used to house “a well-known paint and hardware store”.

8 Impossible, aerodynamically Texas also announces that the Wright brothers were not the first to fly; that honour goes to the “Baptist minister and inventor Burrell Cannon”, who in 1902 flew an airship inspired by “a craft described in the Biblical book of Ezekiel”. The only problem was, it was powered by four vertically mounted paddlewheels. A paddlewheel works fine on a river, because there’s a difference between water and air, but on an airplane, whatever lift the wheel generates from its downward motion is dissipated by its later upward motion. As the Rev Cannon admitted later: “God never willed that this airship should fly.”

9 Most censored Deaf and blind since early childhood, no American struggled more mightily to be heard than Helen Keller. As every schoolchild knows, she learned to write and even to speak. But our public history has silenced her. In 2009, Alabama replaced an out-of-fashion Confederate with Keller in the US Capitol, but not the adult Keller, who became a supporter of the NAACP and a founder of the ACLU. Instead, Alabama installed a statue of her at age seven.

All other representations in America’s “Hall of Fame” are of adults. Keller’s birthplace in Tuscumbia similarly freezes her in childhood.

I don’t think that Alabama’s leaders fear that if Americans learned that Keller was a leftwing activist, we’d all follow suit. I suspect it’s mere manners: we aren’t supposed to say anything bad about the dead, and socialism is bad, right?

For whatever reason, however, Keller has been hushed.

10 Most good-hearted lie If Alabama has quieted a woman who spoke, Wyoming has given voice to one who never said anything. Wyoming was first in the nation to let women vote, as early as 1869. Later, two Wyoming residents decided it would be nice to credit a woman for so doing and chose Esther Morris, who had served briefly as a justice of the peace in 1870. Unfortunately, historians today agree that Morris had nothing to do with the law. Nevertheless, her statues stand at the state capitol and in Washington DC, where she is credited merely with being “present at a dinner in Cheyenne given for Susan B Anthony” in 1895!

• James W Loewen is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont and the bestselling and awardwinning author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lies Across America, Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus, Sundown Towns, and Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition (all from The New Press) • This article was amended on 29 October 2019. An earlier version said Wheatland, the James Buchanan historic site in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, ignored Buchanan’s likely homosexuality as well as his pro-slavery politics. That characterization was based on out-of-date information.

Wheatland now addresses these subjects in detail, as well as what many historians consider the failures of the Buchanan presidency. This article has been corrected accordingly. © The Guardian

Bloody Sunday remembered: civil rights marchers tell story of their iconic photos

By Lauren Aratani

Surrounded by fellow demonstrators, student organizer Harriet Richardson comforts the poet Galway Kinnell, who had been hit with a state trooper’s billy club in Montgomery, Alabama on March 16, 1965.

Fifty-five years ago this month, protesters in Alabama demanded voting rights for African Americans. Four participants ask if the US has really changed. t was one of the most celebrated events of civil rights movement: a march of thousands, met with violence and teargas, that was supposed to cement the right to vote for millions of African Americans who had been denied it by the white majority.

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On Sunday, the last generation of living civil rights leaders and some of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates are gathering in the small town of Selma, Alabama, to celebrate the 55th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches. The Guardian has tracked down four activists who appeared in archival photographs to find out what happened beyond the camera lens, and whether the promise of Selma has been realized.

At the time of the protests, many southern states used arbitrary “literacy” tests and physical intimidation to keep black Americans from the ballot box. As a result, although African Americans comprised 57% of the population of Dallas county, of which Selma is the county seat, only 2% were registered to vote.

The 54-mile march in early 1965 drew global attention to the brutality of police toward peaceful protesters and led President Lyndon B Johnson to pass the Voting Rights Act, a signature achievement of the civil rights era that outlawed voter suppression.

Yet, almost six decades later, has America truly become a place where black Americans can exercise their democratic right to vote without interference?

Thelma Dianne Harris: ‘We were treated as if we were criminals’ The Civil Rights Act was passed in in 1964 after years of demonstrations against segregation in the south, but the act excluded a key protection: the right to vote.

Around late January and early February of 1965, 15-year-old Thelma Dianne Harris was eating lunch with friends outside her Selma high school when a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a national network of student activists, approached and asked if they wanted to join a group organizing at a local church in support of voting rights.

“I was the one who asked, ‘Right now?’ He said ‘Yes’,” Harris, now 70, recalled. Harris and her friends rushed inside the school building to gather their belongings.

The night she joined the marches, Harris and her 13-year-old brother sat down with their mother, the family breadwinner who worked at a cigar factory. “I told her it was because she wasn’t allowed to register to vote and so many other people couldn’t,” Harris said.

Harris skipped school for a week to attend trainings, where they were warned about potential violence from possemen, the nickname for the often-savage volunteer local law enforcement.

Even so, those first marches through town were “jubilant” for Harris. A photograph shows her in a crowd that sang freedom songs and held up signs reading “let my parents vote”.

Harris was arrested twice, had her fingerprints and mugshot taken and had to sleep in a jail cell one night. “We were treated as if we were criminals,” she said.

During those early marches, at least 2,000 demonstrators were jailed in Dallas county.

Despite the arrests, the protests spread to nearby towns. In Marion, Alabama, Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old deacon participating at a peaceful protest, was brutally beaten and shot by an Alabama state trooper on 18 February and later died.

With Jackson’s death, the dam broke.

Martin Luther King, center, leads marchers across the Alabama river during the march to the state capitol at Montgomery.

At 15, Thelma Dianne Harris joined a group of student activists to fight for voting rights.

Charles Mauldin: ‘Either we were going to go forward or were going to die’ After the killing, civil rights group groups called for a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital, and encouraged young people in Selma to join them.

The organizers asked questions like “Why can’t your parents vote?” or “Why do you have to drink from the colored fountain?”, recalled Charles Mauldin, then 17 and a junior at the local high school. He felt like he had no good answers.

“We had been intimidated into accepting segregation so severely that we didn’t think outside of the box. It was too dangerous – we would have been lynched or run out of town had we done that,” said Mauldin, now 73. “We didn’t have the vocabulary to discuss our sense of grievance.”

Mauldin became a student leader, helping to coordinate the march and pass out leaflets for weeks in advance.

On 7 March 1965, he was one of over 600 demonstrators who lined up two-by-two on the street in Selma and marched six blocks from Brown Chapel AME Church, the organizers’ de facto Selma headquarters, to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, spanning the Alabama river. A

Left: A long line of marchers, led by John Lewis, right, and the Rev Hosea Williams, cross the Alabama river in Selma. Right: Charles Mauldin, now 73, took part in the Selma march.

photograph shows him two rows behind civil rights leader Hosea Williams and nowcongressman John Lewis.

There were Alabama state troopers on the other side. Mauldin remembers a colonel telling marchers “This is an illegal gathering. Either go back to your churches or go home.” The group had bowed down to pray when the state troopers began to storm them with billy clubs.

Mauldin was near Lewis as he was brutally beaten by the trooper. “I’ll never forget the sound of his head being crushed. I’ll never forget that.”

Tear gas dispersed the crowd, and Mauldin ran to the river’s edge for a gulp of fresh air.

“At age seven, I was keenly aware that life is precious, that people are murdered because of their political beliefs or because they’re trying to do good in the world. I understood that. I understood hate,” said Abernathy, now 62. “I understood that we were being discriminated against simply because of the color of our skin.”

Although people surrounding the marchers shouted insults and waved Confederate flags, Abernathy recalls never being scared. When her father and King, a close family friend she refers to as “Uncle Martin”, were around, she felt safe.

“We understood that our great grandparents were slaves, and we had to do our part in this small little window of time in order for us to grow up in this world that was free,” she said.

After they made it to Montgomery, Abernathy was backstage when King delivered his famous “how long, not long” speech to a roaring crowd.

Left: The Rev Ralph Abernathy and Juanita Abernathy with Dr and Mrs Martin Luther King and the Abernathy children.

Donzaleigh Abernathy is in the front row of children on the left. Right: Donzaleigh Abernathy, now 62.

As King reached the repetitive part of the speech, chanting “how long, not long,” Abernathy lifted her arms and pumped her hands into the sky in time with the refrain, deeply moved.

“It was an incredible day,” Abernathy said. “A day I’ll never, ever, ever forget.”

Selma in 2020: ‘the struggle continues’ The marches prompted Congress to pass a bill to protect voting rights. On 6 August 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which gave federal authorities oversight of election practices in states where voting discrimination was common.

That day would become known as Bloody Sunday.

“We went past our fears. I’m quite sure at some point, there was an acknowledgement that it was dangerous, but it wasn’t enough to make us quit or slow down,” Mauldin said.

“Either we were going to go forward or we were going to die. Those were the only choices we had.”

President Lyndon Johnson discusses the Voting Rights Act with Martin Luther King Jr.

Harriet Michel: ‘It was just a moment your heart stops’ After Bloody Sunday, organizers spread the word about a larger march in Selma, encouraging people across the country to join them and ratchet up pressure on federal officials to halt the violence.

Harriet Michel, then 22, was one of about 18 students and staff from Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania who heeded the call.

Rather than Selma, they headed to Montgomery, Alabama, where activists were needed to encourage people in predominantly black neighborhoods to register to vote.

For a few days, Michel and her group marched, sang hymns and appealed to African Americans sitting on their porches. Though people were excited to see the group, “they were State troopers attack activists with billy clubs also scared to death to to break up a civil rights march in Selma on 7 March 1965. come off of those In the foreground, John Lewis is being beaten by a state trooper. porches”, said Michel, now 77.

After two or three days, Alabama state police on horseback surrounded the group on a neighborhood street and charged at them.

“When you see a big beast rearing up in front of you with their hooves in the air getting to come down on you or near you, it’s terrifying,” Michel said. “It was just a moment your heart stops and you think, ‘I’m going to die’.”

Michel had been marching next to Galway Kinnell, a friend and poet who had a residency at Juniata. A man with a billy club rushed at Kinnell and started beating him. “He was, in my view, trying to poke his eye out,” Michel said.

The baton hit Kinnell’s eye bone and split his cheek open. A photographer with the Juniata group snapped a picture of Michel, a look of gentle concern on her face, clutching Kinnell, whose shirt is covered in blood.

“It took a long time to make my peace with a horse after the episode,” Michel said.

That night, several national news channels broadcast the picture of Michel and Kinnell.

And President Johnson delivered his now-famous televised national plea to Congress: “It is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. “And we shall overcome.”

Donzaleigh Abernathy: ‘We had to do our part in this small window of time’ Following Johnson’s address, a federal judge overturned Alabama governor George Wallace’s prohibition on demonstrations.

And Johnson ordered the national guard and US army to protect marchers, who began the trek to Montgomery, aiming to cover about 10 miles a day.

In a photo showing the front row on the fourth day of the march, three children are standing in front of Dr Martin Luther King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, singing along with the civil rights leaders around them.

On the left, wearing a striped sweater and a defiant expression, is Donzaleigh Abernathy.

Her activist parents, the Rev Ralph Abernathy and Juanita Abernathy, insisted that their children participate and put them up front so they could keep an eye on them. The kids were given salt tablets so they would not have to use the restroom as frequently.

Yet as the “footsoldiers” of the civil rights movement gather in Selma 55 years later, there is a shared sense of frustration and disappointment. In a 2013, the supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act by striking down the government’s authority to regulate historically problematic jurisdictions.

Voter roll purging and new voter ID laws disproportionately affect minority voters. In 2016, voter suppression in over 30 states curbed black voter turnout, likely altering outcome of the election in key districts. Black Americans entangled in America’s racially biased justice system often lose voting rights as part of their punishment.

“There’s still so much apathy against us as far as voting is concerned,” said Harris, who still lives in Selma and often gives talks at local schools about the importance of voting. “The Voting Rights Act has been tampered with, and it’s like we’re still fighting for our rights.

It’s slowly trying to be taken away from us.

Michel spent her life leading not-for-profits dedicated to the advancement of minority groups.

“I’m what’s called a first-generation civil rights baby,” she said. “I was young enough to know before the legislation was passed what things were like, and then I was old enough to take advantage when things opened up,” she said. Yet today, “the fact that American institutions have buckled so easily, so quickly … it’s ineffable sadness”.

Abernathy, an actress based in Los Angeles, said she is dismayed by the polarizing racism that is rampant: “It’s heartbreaking to realize that we have to continue to fight the fight and to start all over again.”

Mauldin, now living in Birmingham, Alabama, vividly remembers the passage of the Voting Rights Act. His parents were the first and second people to subsequently register to vote in Dallas county. “It was one of the greatest days of my life,” he said.

He is unsurprised by the voting rights rollback. “There have always been dark forces that are always trying to take us back,” he said. “I never thought the struggle would end just because we won some battles.”

In talks about his civil rights work, he emphasizes how the contributions of ordinary people can make a difference. He quotes from King’s speech in Selma: “Truth crushed to the ground will rise again.”

“We are on the side of truth and hope, and when you’re on the side of truth and hope, you will eventually win,” Mauldin said. “I have confidence that we will win, even if it’s not in my lifetime.” © The Guardian

Juneteenth: activists across US inherit a historic battle for racial justice

By Kenya Evelyn

First celebrated in 1865, the holiday marking slavery’s end is both a painful reminder and a celebration of freedom fighters

Musicians play at a Juneteenth celebration in Texas in 1900.

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his year, many Juneteenth events have been revamped as virtual or cancelled altogether as the coronavirus pandemic disproportionately threatens the African American community the holiday represents, commemorating the end of slavery.

But with continuing protests against racism sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, calls for national police reforms during the celebration and federal recognition of the holiday are growing in urgency.

Organizers of the “I, too, am America: Juneteenth Rally for Justice” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Donald Trump postponed a campaign speech planned for the holiday, announced that the civil rights leader Al Sharpton would be the keynote speaker to “call for sweeping reforms within the Tulsa police department and nationwide”.

“Frustrations with watered-down national, state and local efforts disguised as reform have spurred increased calls to action,” organizer Sarah Gray of the Oklahoma Future Fund said in the news release.

As federal and state governments respond to the antiracism protests nationwide, Dr Lopez Matthews of Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Library and Research Center said the present uprisings represented Black Americans’ continuing quest for equality, inherited from the Juneteenth’s original celebrants who fought for their freedom.

“African Americans were not just passive participants in their own liberation,” he said. “It was those African

Americans who learned about the Emancipation Proclamation [in Texas] who essentially freed themselves, demanding their humanity and creating traditions to celebrate it long after.”

Combining the words “June” and “19th”, the holiday commemorates the anniversary of the day in 1865 when the Union army major general Gordon Granger read out Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to remaining enslaved African Americans on a plantation in Galveston, Texas.

The proclamation had been signed by the president two years prior, in 1863.

Following the celebration’s first year, which included dancing, singing, prayers and readings of the Proclamation, themes of Black liberation remained a focal point of Juneteenth. Newly freed Black people gathered each year dressed in their finest to hear speeches, march, and participate in demonstrations – forming some of the

Celebrants dressed to hear speeches during a 1900 Juneteenth celebration in Texas.

A 1865 print commemorates the fulfillment of the promise of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, two years after its signing.

earliest traditions that continue today.

That jubilation became a defiant symbol of freedom in a white society that sought to suppress it. Despite “each new segregation law” or “new textbook whitewashing the mid20th century,”, the historian Dr Henry Louis Gates Jr wrote, Juneteenth largely migrated with the millions of Black Americans who left the south for the midwest and northeast.

“When whites forbade Blacks from using their public spaces, Black people gathered near rivers and lakes and eventually raised enough money to buy their own celebration sites,” he wrote.

Today, Juneteenth is recognized in 47 US states and the District of Columbia as an official state holiday or observance, with Texas becoming the first in 1980. But it had been informally celebrated primarily by African American communities since that day in 1865.

More than 200 official events commemorate Juneteenth in cities and towns all across the US and the world, with Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Buffalo home to the country’s three largest annual festivals.Not every African American saw freedom from the reading of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, however. It did not apply to border states still in the Union at the time. Slaves in these areas weren’t liberated until the ratification of the 13th Amendment nearly six months later, on 18 December 1865.

That painful legacy can make the holiday one of sorrow or remembrance for the descendants of those who never saw freedom.

For Maranda York, an eighth-generation Texan, the holiday is a painful reminder of “Texas being last to consider [her] humanity”.

“It’s disrespectful to our history to not recognize that we weren’t all free until December of that year, according to our constitution,” she said.

York’s four-times-great-grandmother Malinda Dobbins came to Texas after being sold by a slave owner in Alabama just before Texas became a state. In Texas, plantation owners often hid the news of freedom following the Emancipation Proclamation.

“I cringe when we say holiday, because for some of us, it represents the lost ties of an oppressed generation. That’s something to be mourned,” she said.

While Matthews acknowledges the painful reality of antiBlack racism after slavery, he argues that dismissing the joyous nature of Juneteenth in which former slaves took part diminishes their powerful role in the fight for freedom.

“It takes away from the agency of African Americans who were freed, who recovered, built their own communities, institutions and their own societies that were then destroyed by the institution of racism that slavery left,” he said.

As protests and the coronavirus pandemic continue, Matthews says the spirit of Juneteenth makes it a fitting holiday for unprecedented times.

“African Americans have been protesting since we were brought to this country and that history is cyclical,” he said.

“What we’re seeing today is just the modern manifestation of what we’ve always seen.”

From an informal, community celebration passed down through generations to a national jubilee, he said, “Juneteenth is as much a celebration of perseverance as it is of freedom, and that lives on in how we celebrate today.” © The Guardian

Martin Luther King anniversary: the US Civil Rights Trail

By Dolen Perkins-Valdez

and I sit in a pew, listening. No matter how many times I hear his voice, it never loses its power.

Of all the cities on the trail, Atlanta is easily the most metropolitan. It’s a successful example of the New South, its historic markers mixing easily with its modern development. This is especially true of the architecturally stunning Center for Civil and Human Rights. Nestled between the World of Coca-Cola museum and the Georgia Aquarium, it connects the struggle for African American Civil Rights with global human rights campaigns. In Atlanta, I am reminded of what is possible when a city’s citizens work together to move out of a dark past.

That optimism is tempered a bit as I head west to Anniston, Alabama, a 1½-hour drive away. It is not lost on me that I am following the trail of the two buses that set out from Atlanta in 1961 to test federal rulings outlawing segregation on interstate buses. The hills rise around me: Anniston is in the beautiful foothills of the Appalachian mountains. Originally, workers King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel on 4 April 1968. It is now the National Civil Rights Museum. settled here to mine iron ore and operate furnaces. I try to imagine what those Freedom Riders were thinking as they gazed out of the bus windows at the Half a century on from the assassination of Martin Luther passing landscape. The city has created murals to mark the spots where the buses were met and fire bombed by angry mobs.

King, novelist Dolen Perkins-Valdez takes a moving trip

on the newly opened trail, from the great man’s birthplace to the site of his death in Memphis

Some of the injured Freedom Riders made it to Birmingham after

If you want to understand America, you must do the US Civil Rights Trail. A deep journey through the conscience of a nation, the sites commemorating the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights movement reveal a country trying to reconcile its founding principles with its racial inequities. This period marked the most significant division the nation had faced since its civil war. Throughout the trip, I kept asking myself: what would I do for freedom? There is no way to come away from the Trail without feeling transformed. The trip is equal parts history and inspiration.

The US Civil Rights Trail is a visionary idea: it connects the 110 sites and museums – mostly across the south, but stretching from Kansas in the Midwest to Delaware on the east coast – into a coherent map of a nation’s struggle and triumph. It opened officially in January this year, so in honour of next week’s 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr (4 April 1968), over five days I travel the 700-mile segment from his birthplace in Atlanta to the place he died in Memphis.

I begin at the King Center in Atlanta, the house at 501 Auburn Avenue where the great man was born in January 1929. It’s not possible to book a visit online; visitors are just advised to arrive early

A mural in Anniston marking a spot where a bus was met and fire bombed.

being viciously attacked. The city was nicknamed “Bombingham” for the 50 explosions that occurred here between 1947 and 1965 aimed at disrupting racial desegregation. Today, its successful efforts at downtown renewal are evident in many restored historic buildings.

Three of the trail’s sites are within the same block: the Civil Rights Institute, 16th Street Baptist Church and Kelly Ingram Park. Inside the Civil Rights Institute, I approach the exhibit that recreates King’s Birmingham jail cell where he wrote Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

My guide urges me to touch the bars.

“These are the actual jail bars?” I ask.

“Correct,” he says. “They are not a replica.” The rough iron of the bar feels unusually warm beneath my hands.

On the basement wall of the 16th Baptist Church hangs the clock that stopped working at the moment the bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan killed four little girls: 10.22am on 15 September, 1963.

Across the street from the church, I see a diverse group of children playing in Kelly Ingram Park. They are too young to recall the days when student protesters in this park were met with fire hoses and police dogs.

at the centre, as tours are filled on a first-come-first-served basis.

Both King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, are buried on the grounds, their stone tombs sitting atop a blue reflection pool. The Ebenezer Baptist Church across the square, where both King’s father and he were pastors, plays an audio loop of one of King’s speeches,

I stop for a lunch at Niki’s West, a cafeteria-style restaurant which may have the longest soul food buffet I have ever seen. After lunch, I cross several sets of railroad tracks to reach Bethel Baptist Church in Collegeville. On Christmas Day in 1956, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth’s home next to the church was bombed, but he walked out of the house with barely a scratch. Thomas L Wilder Jr has been pastor now for nearly 30 years, and he maintains the historic sanctuary for tours. On my visit, he spreads out a large canvas cloth signed by visitors from all over the world.

The Civil Rights Institute, Birmingham.

The writer at The Edmund Pettus Bridge

Civil rights activists march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, starting the second march to Montgomery.

Montgomery, the state capital of Alabama, has more Civil Rights Trail sites than any other city. I find it remarkable that when King was hired as head pastor by Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1954, he was only 25. Tour director Dr Shirley Cherry tells the story so vividly that you can imagine King and his young family living in the home. Across the street, in the basement of the church, King helped organise and plan the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott that ended in the desegregation of the city’s buses in 1956.

Its highlight is undoubtedly the walk past rooms 306 and 307, the motel rooms where King and his entourage stayed. Without being instructed, we keep our voices low. It is a hushed space; the only sound is Mahalia Jackson’s inimitable voice singing Take My Hand, Precious Lord.

Martin Luther King with other civil rights leaders at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 3, 1968, a day before he was assassinated on the same balcony.

Half a mile away, the small but worthwhile Rosa Parks Museum is on the very site where she was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, an incident which brought the Civil Rights movement to international attention. I also learn the story of 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who was arrested nine months prior to Parks. We are all familiar with Parks’ quiet dignity and refusal to be intimidated, but the fearlessness of many young people is woven throughout these stories.

By the time I drive to Selma, Alabama, I am contemplating the courage of all these everyday unsung heroes. The road to Selma from Montgomery is the US-80, the route travelled by those marching for voting rights in 1965. Today the site of “Bloody Sunday”, Edmund Pettus Bridge, is busy with traffic, but tourists line its sidewalks taking pictures. I brace myself against the wind and walk up the bridge to join them.

I’m eager to get to Jackson to see the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum which opened last December. After a three-hour drive from Selma, I arrive at 9pm and check into a boutique hotel, the Old Capitol Inn. The next morning, I enjoy a perfect bowl of grits (corn porridge) from the hot breakfast buffet before walking across the street to the new museum, with its eight galleries. The website states that the museum focuses primarily on the years 1945-1976, but Selma to Montgomery Historic Route sign

The Montgomery Bus Boycott exhibit at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.

King had arrived in Memphis to show his support for a strike by sanitation workers, whose meeting place was the historic Clayborn Temple. After years of disrepair, the church is to undergo a renovation beginning this summer. For now it is open for tours. displays go back to the era of the transatlantic slave trade, and I am stirred by one of the most powerful lynching exhibits I have ever seen.

Another display is devoted to the late Medgar Evers, field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and I head next to his former home, at 2332 Margaret Walker Alexander Drive. Evers was shot in the driveway in June 1963, and there are still pale blood stains in the carport. A curator and archivist from nearby Tougaloo College, Minnie Watson, narrates the day of his murder and shows me where his frightened wife and children scrambled into the bathroom when they heard the gunshot. Some of Evers’s neighbours still live on the block, and a sense community spirit lives on.

My final stop is my hometown: Memphis, Tennessee, three hours north of Jackson on the Mississippi river where the south-west corner of Tennessee meets Arkansas and Mississippi. When I was a child, the fact that King had been murdered in Memphis was considered a stigma upon the city. City leaders began working in the 1980s to turn the site of his death – the Lorraine Motel – into a museum, and in 1991 the National Civil Rights Museum opened.

My final stop on this five-day tour is another church: Mason Temple, about a mile to the south, where King delivered his prophetic “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech on 3 April 1968. It was the last speech he would ever give.

At the end of the day, I park my car and walk down the hill to the river and gaze out over the rippling current. Though it has been a busy five days, I am not tired. On the contrary, I am rejuvenated. I feel a new sense of understanding of my own life’s purpose and the lives of those who died for this cause. I wonder where this trail will take me next.

• The trip was provided by Brand USA. To plan your trip visit the civilrightstrail.com which has interactive maps and details of all the key sites Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the author of two historical novels: Wench and Balm

© The Guardian

Matthew Henson:

the pioneering African-American

Arctic adventurer

By Marcel Theroux

This multi-skilled explorer may well have been first to the North Pole – in 1909. What’s not in doubt is his resourcefulness and love of the Inuit

Matthew Henson, right, at the White House in 1954 with his wife, and President Dwight Eisenhower.

Passport details Matthew Alexander Henson, perhaps the first person to the North Pole. Born Charles County, Maryland, US, 8 August 1866.

Claim to fame Matthew Henson, the descendant of slaves, has a plausible claim to being the first explorer to reach the North Pole. He grew up in Washington DC and Baltimore, was orphaned and left school at 12 to be a cabin boy. When he was 22, a chance encounter with naval engineer Robert Peary resulted in a lifelong working relationship, including 18 years of Arctic exploration. On 6 April 1909, Henson, Peary and four Inuit drove their dogsleds to the North Pole – or as near as makes no difference. Peary took the credit for being first, but a newspaper article on their return quoted Henson as saying he’d been part of a leading group that had overshot the pole by several miles: “We went back then and I could see my footprints were the first at the spot.”

Supporting documentation Henson’s engaging 1912 memoir, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, reads like a Boy’s Own Adventure. Henson’s dog-handling skills, fluent Inuit and all-round resourcefulness were key to the expedition’s success. “I have a

Matthew Henson in his Arctic gear in 1909.

steady job carpentering, also interpreting, barbering, tailoring, dog-training,” he writes.

The warmth of his response to the Inuit is striking: “I have come to love these people …

They are my friends and regard me as theirs.”

The memoir’s final page includes the names of 218 Inuit from Smith Sound, on Canada’s Ellesmere Island. Among them are Akatingwah, Henson’s Inuit lover, and Ahnaukaq, their son.

Distinguishing marks Henson lived a long life. Photographs show him on board ship and as a genial old codger, but the most arresting image was taken after that dash to the pole: he peers out of his fur parka, quietly challenging assumptions of what an Arctic explorer might look like to some.

Last sighted Henson lived the rest of his life in relative obscurity, working as a clerk for US Customs, and died in 1955. He married twice, and had no children apart from Ahnaukaq Henson, who, in 1987, at the age of 80, achieved his lifetime ambition of visiting the land of his father’s birth.

Intrepidness rating Obstacles he faced included ice floes, snowstorms, frostbite and racism: 9. © The Guardian

'This is all stolen land': Native Americans want more than California's apology

Assemblyman James Ramos of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, fifth from left, opens a meeting with tribal leaders from around the state, attended by Governor Gavin Newsom, fourth from left.

Indigenous people hope governor’s words to lead to action on land and water rights, education, justice and more

By Sarah Gilbert

C

alifornia’s governor made history this week when he formally apologized to Native Americans, acknowledging the brutal genocide and “war of extermination” declared by the state’s first governor in 1851.

While indigenous people across California welcomed the long overdue statement, many had a similar response: now what?

“An apology is great, but what does it look like in terms of moving into action?” said Morning Star Gali, a member of the Pit River tribe, in northern California. “We’re still here.

We’re still fighting for recognition. We’re fighting for the protection of our sacred places.

We’re fighting for visibility.”

Some Native American leaders and activists Morning Star Gali. are now pushing for Governor Gavin Newsom’s apology to lead to a serious discussion about reparations for indigenous people. Echoing the debate in Congress this week about reparations for black Americans, indigenous groups argue that government should compensate Native Americans for harms, some of which continue today. The state of California, indigenous leaders told the Guardian, should be looking at land and water rights, education, cultural revival, criminal justice and more.

Returning stolen land Violence against Native Americans in California took place much more recently than in older American states on the east coast. In 1850, the state passed a law to remove Native Americans from their lands, separate children from their families, strip people of their cultures and languages, and create a system of indentured servitude, Newsom said. In the following decade, California’s leaders organized and funded militia campaigns against indigenous people, creating what one historian recently called a “state-sponsored killing machine”.

Today, there are more than 100 federally recognized tribes in California – and many more that are unrecognized. More than 700,000 Native people live in the state. Restoring indigenous land rights would be one of the most direct and meaningful ways to right these wrongs, Native leaders said.

“This is all stolen land … We are landless Indians in our own territory,” said Corrina Gould, a spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan/Ohlone, a tribe that originated in the region that is now the San Francisco Bay Area and is not federally recognized.

“The only compensation for land is land,” Gould added, quoting the Native author Winona LaDuke.

Javier I Kinney, executive director of the Yurok tribe, along the Klamath river in northern California, said there were roughly 1m acres of Yurok ancestral territory outside of the tribe’s reservation land that the tribe would like to reacquire “so that we will be made whole”. “Tribes have really had the key to that knowledge of how to sustainably manage and be the stewards of lands,” he added.

Some said reparations should also mean supporting the tribes still fighting for water rights in southern California.

Some local governments have recently returned land to indigenous owners, Morning Star Gali said, arguing that those processes should be replicated in the wake of the apology.

In Sonoma County, known as California’s wine country, officials agreed in 2015 to transfer nearly 700 acres of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians’ ancestral lands back to the tribe.

“The day we took ownership was one of the most emotional experiences of my life,” said the tribe’s chairman, Reno Keoni Franklin, adding that California should now support similar efforts throughout the state. “Kashia created a blueprint to follow … a process that protects our sovereign rights and at the same time gives us back precious sites.”

Fixing education: ‘Tell the truth’ Tribal leaders also argued that school curricula should accurately depict California’s genocidal legacy – instead of glossing over the violence. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States and a California State University professor emerita, argued that land seizures from Native tribes should be central to the US history curriculum.“Make that a requirement,” she said.

Javier Kinney, executive director of the Yurok tribe.

Dallas Goldtooth, campaigner with the Indigenous Environmental Network, said Native people had long been “erased from the narrative of California”. “California economically and politically wouldn’t be where it is if it wasn’t for the massive amount of land that was stolen,” Goldtooth argued.

Others said the role of the Catholic missions in the violence against Native communities should be taught. Many argued there should be a systematic effort to take down statues and monuments honoring those responsible for genocide, and that towns and schools named after violent settlers should be renamed.

The state should instead resurrect monuments that make clear to residents and visitors that California was built on massacres – and that indigenous people continue to live on their lands here, they said.

“People come here from all parts of the world, not knowing Ohlone people still exist here,” said Gould. And California should “put their money where their mouth is”, added Vincent Medina, of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe, saying he would like to see funding and resources to help “revive our culture, which has been severely damaged from ongoing suppression by Americans”.

Seeking justice California should also address the mistreatment of Native people in the justice system, leaders said.

California has one of the highest numbers of cases of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls among US regions. Native Americans are disproportionately locked up in the state’s jails and prisons, and indigenous students are suspended at significantly higher rates than white students. In some parts of northern California, police continue to harass and mistreat Native people, Dunbar-Ortiz said.

“How do you make this right? How can we heal this situation?” asked Abby Abinanti, chief judge of the Yurok tribal court. “The wrongs are pretty complicated.”

The state should support indigenous communities’ separate systems of justice, which, in sharp contrast to the US model of long-term punishment by incarceration, focus on repairing harm, Native leaders said. “You’ve got a system set up, and many people think that’s the definition of justice,” said Judge Abinanti, whose court uses alternative processes. “It’s not. It’s a definition.”

Others said Newsom’s apology should translate to better mental health services for Native people and stronger supports for communities dealing with alcoholism, drug addiction and other struggles rooted in intergenerational trauma.

On Tuesday, Newsom told reporters that he hadn’t yet considered financial reparations or other specific measures, but he did announce the creation of a Truth and Healing Council to “provide Native Americans a platform to clarify the historical record and work collaboratively with the state to begin the healing process”.

Goldtooth said he hoped Newsom’s order would spark apologies and reckonings across the country – and a national conversation about reparations: “What that looks like ultimately should be defined and led by Native people.”

© The Guardian

From no deal to New Deal: How Boris Johnson could follow FDR and save the arts

Workers unite! … detail of a fresco at Coit Tower, San Francisco, painted in 1934 by Victor Arnautoff.

A

s America struggled with the Great Depression in 1933, 25 artists were hired to paint murals depicting aspects of Californian life on the walls of Coit Tower in San Francisco.

They were paid at least $25 a week – the equivalent of about £400 today. Tasked with beautifying public buildings, the artists seized the chance for some mischief. Bernard Zakheim’s mural depicts a worker in a library, screwing up a newspaper with one hand and reaching for Das Kapital on a shelf with the other.

Clifford Wight’s triptych depicts capitalism, the New Deal and communism, with the latter panel containing a hammer and sickle and the caption “Workers of the World Unite”. After a virulent press campaign, the hammer and sickle were removed a year later.

The Coit Tower murals were the pilot initiative of the Public Works Arts Project devised to give struggling artists work. Harry Hopkins, Franklin D Roosevelt’s commerce secretary and one of the architects of the New Deal, had said: “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people!” Thus began the first New Deal arts project, part of a decade-long bankrolling of artists that nurtured some of America’s greatest painters and photographers.

Ever since lockdown began in the UK, curators have been calling for similar funding for the arts here. They got an unexpected boostwhen cabinet minister Michael Gove recently argued that FDR’s New Deal managed to “save capitalism, restore faith in democracy, indeed extend its dominion, renovate the reputation of government, set his country on a course of increasing prosperity and equality of opportunity for decades.” Boris Johnson later told a radio interviewer it was a time for a “Rooseveltian approach to the economy”.

Saved … Jackson Pollock, front right, worked as an assistant to his future wife Lee Krasner on the art project.

Will the Johnson government’s rescue package, which pledges

£1.57bn to the arts, be as ambitious and far-reaching as FDR’s programme? In a few months, America’s Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) hired 3,749 artists and produced 15,663 paintings, murals, prints, crafts and sculptures for government buildings. This and successive projects gave the arts a massive financial boost – and revolutionised how artists engaged with the American people. One programme was the Federal Writers’ Project, which employed writers to interview the last living African Americans who had been enslaved, providing a vital oral history.

Musicians funded by the Federal Music Project did field music recordings of folk and jazz, and gave music lessons. The Federal Theatre Project introduced touring shows to places professional drama had hitherto not reached.

The Federal Art Project developed the skills of 10,000 artists including Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Alice Neel, Ad Reinhart and Mark Rothko, giving them paid work at a time of few private commissions. Krasner, who had worked as a waitress and artists’ model before being hired to work on often-unrealised murals (her sometime assistant was her husband, Jackson Pollock), once said that the initiative saved her life. It certainly gave her and other artists’ burgeoning careers a timely boost.

No less significant was the photography project of the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal agency set up to combat rural poverty. Gordon Parks, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were among photographers hired to document the plight of poor farmers. Lange’s famous image of Florence Owens with two children, entitled Migrant Mother, was one of hundreds of thousands of images taken.

Parks’s no-less iconic photograph of an African American government cleaner was made while documenting black lives in Washington DC in 1942. “I had experienced a kind of bigotry and discrimination here that I never expected,” he said. “At first, I

asked [Ella Watson] about her life, what it was like, and [it was] so disastrous that I felt I must photograph this woman in a way that would make me feel, or make the public feel, what Washington DC was in 1942. So I put her before the American flag with a broom in one hand and a mop in another.” Parks called it American Gothic, riffing satirically on Grant Wood’s 1930 painting of the same name.

It’s worth recalling how the New Deal for the arts ended up in conservatives’ crosshairs. The Federal Theatre Project was charged by the House Un-American Activities Committee with being infiltrated by communists and staging plays with socialist messages. In 1937, the Works Progress Administration shut down The Cradle Will Rock, a musical play written

by Marc Blitzstein and directed by Orson Welles as part of the Federal Theatre Project. The government was accused of censoring the Broadway production because it told a pro-union story about steelworkers struggling against their evil boss.

Some of the estimated 200,000 New Deal artworks - murals, paintings, sculptures, craft works, theatre set designs, posters and photographs - still exist. In the post office in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, for instance, there remains mural called Meal Time With the Early Coal Miners by Jared French. A group of buff, bare-chested miners in skin-tight trousers wash themselves and towel off. If you look to the right, there’s a naked man in a boat with a hat over his genitals.

“People go to the post office to buy their stamps,” Barbara Bernstein, founder of the New Deal Art Registry, drily told the New York Times, “and there’s a piece of homoerotic art on the wall.”

Bernstein sounds a little sceptical but surely this is precisely the kind of stimulus package we need post-lockdown.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, takes a more philosophical perspective in his call for the British government to fund the arts as America did. “In this time, it’s particularly important that art institutions think about how they can go beyond their walls and reach everyone.” He cites American philosopher John Dewey, who worried that “the growth of capitalism has been a powerful influence in the development of the museum as the proper home for works of art, and in the promotion of the idea that they are apart from the common life”.

If this is to happen, art must free itself from the idea that it consists of luxury products for collectors or inscrutable objects in museums – and reconnect with the people. Art for the millions, not the moneyed few. “Dewey wanted to recreate a continuity between the refined forms of experience he attributed to the work of art and to the everyday events that form our experience,” says Obrist. A New New Deal wouldn’t only help artists’ bank balances but enrich life. Obrist calls this possibility the Great Transition – into “a new era of social imagination”.

A British New Deal could level the playing field for artists who don’t come from affluent backgrounds. “We already have evidence for that,” says Sydney Thornbury, director of the Art House in Wakefield. “The only reason JK

Rowling was able to finish the first Harry Potter book was because she had been given a grant by the Scottish Arts Council which enabled her to focus on writing.”

There is some scepticism about how FDR’s New Deal is applicable to 2020.

Julia Jacobs recently wrote an article for the New York Times that was given the headline: “The virus won’t revive FDR’s arts jobs program. Here’s why.” Jacobs said that few “defenders of the arts are optimistic that a programme as sprawling and generous as the New Deal initiative could happen now”. Certainly there is little political will stateside: President Trump has in each of his budget proposals called for the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“Getting a scheme like this accepted by Americans is about visionary leadership,” says Thornbury. “ It was the same with FDR and the New Deal, Kennedy and the space programme and Johnson [Lyndon not Boris] and the Great Society. What America doesn’t have at the moment is visionary leadership.”

What might a British reboot mean practically? Curators Annabel Turpin and Gavin Barlow suggest a stimulus package administered through Arts Council England so that venues could employ freelance artists to work in schools, care homes and other institutions. Presumably they envisage similar schemes in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The package would also involve funding for apprenticeships in arts venues and an extension of theatre tax relief from 20% to 50%.

Though the fine print of the government’s stimulus package has yet to be pursued, artists have to be encouraged by culture secretary Oliver Dowden’s statement that “our arts and culture are the soul of our nation. They make our country great and are the lynchpin of our world-beating and fast growing creative industries.”

“The creative industries are worth £100bn and have grown at nearly twice the rate of the economy since 2010,” says Thornbury.

Given how economically vital the creative sector is to Britain, she believes, it should be considered too big to fail.

But the case for investing is not just economic, adds Thornbury. It would increase community cohesion, health and wellbeing, help combat racism, promote social mobility, and reduce isolation and loneliness. Thornbury goes so far as to imagine that such schemes might “make people feel the same kind of ownership and protectiveness over the arts as they do about the NHS”.

But would a government that has done such a botched job of controlling Covid-19 have both the nous and vision to improve how we live and how the arts are practised in its aftermath? The jury is out.

The poster for an exhibition of art produced under the Federal Art Project .

© NBC News © The Guardian

Racial violence and a pandemic: How the Red Summer of 1919 relates to 2020 The wave of violence a century ago against Black Americans echoes how today, "people feel they have little to lose, and so much at stake," one historian said.

R

acial strife flaring across the United States. Black Americans standing up to societal structures in unpredictable ways.

People enduring months of a deadly pandemic infecting millions worldwide, shuttering businesses and heightening fears of a lengthy economic downturn.

That was 1919, during what would later be coined the "Red Summer," when communities across America were reeling from white mobs inciting brutality against Black people and cities were still wrestling with a third wave of the so-called Spanish flu pandemic that emerged the previous year.

The story line parallels with today: violence against Black people, leading to mass demonstrations and calls to end systemic racism, converging with a months-long coronavirus pandemic. Such commonality is not lost on historians and scholars of African American history.

"These are moments of extreme precariousness, where people are suddenly uncertain about their fate, economic prospects and the social order," said Geoff Ward, a professor of African and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis who has mapped out historic incidents of racial violence.

"Mass mobilization may be more likely in such circumstances where people feel they have little to lose," he said, "and so much at stake."

By Erik Ortiz

But if history is any indication, the developments of barely a century ago, when civil rights groups were reinvigorated and Black journalists and activists asserted their voices, might also offer a glimpse into how 2020 — and beyond — could play out.

What happened during the Red Summer of 1919?

The general mob-led violence against Black people actually began before the summer in localized incidents.

In the book "Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America," author Cameron McWhirter described what led up to a deadly riot in Jenkins County, Georgia, in April, when Black churches were burned and Black men killed.

It was just the start: "In coming months, similar horrors would afflict cities and towns across America. The violence that April Sunday was only the beginning of what would become known as the Red Summer of 1919, when riots and lynchings spread throughout the country, causing havoc and harming thousands — yet also awakening millions of blacks to fight for rights guaranteed them, but so long denied."

James Weldon Johnson, an NAACP leader who organized peaceful protests that year, began using the term Red Summer to describe the bloodshed.

Crowd of men and armed National Guard in front of the Ogden Cafe during the 1919 race riots in Chicago

A mob runs with bricks during the race riots in Chicago in 1919.

It was during the summer months when the violent assaults began spiraling in major cities like Philadelphia, Washington, New York and Chicago, places where African Americans were migrating in large numbers for opportunities that didn't exist in the South. At the time, however, race relations only deteriorated under President Woodrow Wilson, who supported racist and segregationist policies in the federal government.

Ward said that white people were responding to the "ever-present white fear of a loss of social status and dominance" and were "resentful of this disruption of social, economic and political order."

In addition, the influx of African Americans into northern cities continued as the Spanish flu spread in 1918 before the pandemic subsided in the summer of 1919, and whites were blaming Black migrants for the spread of illness.

Historical accounts also described how white military members, who had returned to Washington after the end of World War I, seized on sensationalist rumors of Black men assaulting white women, which was amplified in D.C.'s newspapers. An estimated 40 people were killed that July in the nation's capital, with hundreds of federal troops deployed to stamp out the unrest.

Johnson documented what was happening: "I knew it to be true, but it was almost an impossibility for me to realize as a truth that men and women of my race were being mobbed, chased, dragged from street cars, beaten and killed within the shadow of the dome of the Capitol, at the very front door of the White House," he wrote in the NAACP's Crisis magazine.

A victim is stoned and bludgeoned under a corner of a house during the race riots in Chicago in 1919.

What does the Red Summer signify about the events of 2020?

As bloody as that summer was, it failed to result in any protections for African Americans, and if anything, Ward said, "that reign of racial terror, where again the exculpatory work of the white press, police, grand juries and others ensured that perpetrators were protected rather than punished, undoubtedly prolonged the period of American apartheid."

Saje Mathieu, a history professor at the University of Minnesota, added that some of the violence of 1919 was in many ways milder in comparison to the "absolute devastation and destruction" of the massacres in Tulsa, Oklahoma, two years later and in Rosewood, Florida, in 1923.

The fight for racial justice in 2020 follows a series of high-profile incidents of Black Americans being killed at the hands of police or former law enforcement and of Black Americans having to affirm their place and existence while doing ordinary things and often facing the threat of police being called on them.

Mathieu said the blatant racism of 1919 reverberates in other ways today, including by white women who are caught on viral videos questioning a Black person's agency and yet don't see themselves as exhibiting racism. Social media users label them as a "Karen."

"These current Karens believe that they are defending their families and their communities, that they're these moral vigilantes," Mathieu said. "And they get away with it much more quickly than white men with guns because we still ascribe a fragility to these white women that I'm not always sure they have earned. When you look at history, white women were foot soldiers in some of these riots and women 100 years ago were just starting to flex their muscle within the Klan."

In recounting those events, The Washington Post wrote that jobs were scarce at the time, and many whites felt slighted that a small number of Blacks could secure lowlevel government jobs.

"Unlike virtually all the disturbances that So far, the dramatic events of this year have preceded it — in which white-on-black spurred tens of thousands of Americans to A crowd around a house which was vandalized violence dominated — the Washington riot and looted during the race riots in Chicago in 1919. take to the streets, at times clashing violently of 1919 was distinguished by strong, with police and being met by National Guard organized and armed black resistance, foreshadowing the civil rights troops. It's unclear what this summer might hold and if the largestruggles later in the century," according to the Post. scale chaos that echoes the bloodshed of 1919 will materialize amid an ongoing racial reckoning.

Some of the worst multi-day violence occurred in Chicago, where about two dozen Black people and 15 white people were killed. The uprisings sparked after a Black teenager on a raft, Eugene Williams, drifted into a whites-only section of Lake Michigan and drowned after a white man began throwing rocks at him, the Chicago Tribune reported.

From April to November, some 30 riots broke out across the eastern U.S., with hundreds of accounts of beatings, lynchings and the burning of churches and buildings. As a result of the violence, the Ku Klux Klan also saw a resurgence.

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But Ward said the anti-racist movement of today coupled with the effects of COVID-19, which has disproportionately affected Black communities, only means the struggle continues for substantive civil rights and policing reform and the assurance of equality for all in their daily lives.

"I have no doubt that we will achieve meaningful, even transformative change. We are already seeing this in the broader understanding of and opposition to white supremacy," Ward said, adding that as the fight against racism builds as it has in the past, the threat of a "white supremacist redemption" is always a possibility.

"Just like 1919 did not 'end matters' once and for all, cementing white racial dominance as its protagonists intended," he said, "we should not expect this moment of upheaval to eradicate the white supremacist world system." Š NBC News

We bemoan statues but cling to heroes Real progress will only come when we give up the cult of the great man or woman

By Janan Ganesh

Š Financial Times

By Martha S Jones

Racism and sexism were bound together in the fight to vote – and Black women made it clear they would never cede the question of their voting rights to others Ida B Wells in Chicago circa 1893

appeared on that day to make plain that Black women would never cede the question of their voting rights to others.

In late winter 1913, suffragette Alice Paul and her committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) were at work planning a women’s parade that aimed to upstage Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration with a many-thousand-strong phalanx of women protesting for the right to vote. Paul was poised to pull off an unparalleled act of political theater on the nation’s biggest stage, Washington DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue. Her vision was clouded, however, as Paul contemplated what it would mean to have Black women among the marchers.

By 1913, racism was tightly stitched into the fabric of the movement for women’s votes. As far back as the 1860s, suffrage leaders had traded in antiBlack thinking. They had even linked arms with openly racist allies who, for example, in 1867 Kansas looked to trade the defeat of Black enfranchisement for the elevation of white women to the polls. The movement continued into the 20th century by way of a southern strategy that aimed to win support for a women’s suffrage amendment by remaining hands-off when it came to Jim Crow, assenting to the ongoing disenfranchisement of Black women in the south. Paul built her radical wing of the movement on this troubled foundation.

Initially, Paul had reached out to invite Black women in Washington DC – especially the members of Howard University’s Delta Sigma Theta sorority – to take part in the parade. Facing criticism and the threat that white southern women might pull out, Paul recalculated, and drew a line: the parade was to be “a purely suffrage demonstration entirely uncomplicated by any other problems such as racial ones”. Paul imagined she knew best: “Our winning suffrage will be the thing that will most raise the state of Negro women.”

Had she asked, Black suffragists would have advised Paul that there was nowhere for her committee to hide. Racism and sexism were bound together in the fight for women’s votes. When it came to suffrage politics, there was nothing pure about them.

On the morning of 3 March 1913, Black women rose early and joined the throng that assembled for the parade. Ida B Wells, the Chicago-based anti-lynching and women’s suffrage activist, was at the center of a true dust-up when on the eve of the parade she was advised to march with other Black women rather than with her Illinois state delegation. It was a painful rebuke, but Wells refused defeat and ultimately marched with her state’s representatives, flanked by white women allied with Chicago’s Alpha Suffrage Club.

Mary Church Terrell was a former head of the National Association of Colored Women and a Washington DC powerbroker who traveled home from New York to march. Terrell had always kept one foot in suffrage association politics and knew its shortcomings well. Neither Wells nor Terrell frequented Paul’s circles but they

Wells and Terrell were not alone. Most of the two dozen or so Black women marchers were local residents of Washington, including the sculptor May Howard Jackson; the director of the Washington Conservatory of Music, Harriet Gibbs Marshall; pharmacists and drugstore owners Dr Amanda Gray and Dr Eva Ross; and a contingent of so-called college women that included Oberlin College graduate and advocate for early childhood education Anna Evans Murray, M Street school French instructor Georgia Simpson and Smith College graduate Harriet Shadd. Howard University students joined the procession decked out in caps and gowns.

What had been Black women’s experience of the parade? Carrie Clifford, the poet and activist, boasted to readers of the NAACP’s magazine, the Crisis, that Black women should be “congratulated” for “taking part” and demonstrating the “courage of their convictions”. They had not been encouraged to participate but once there they received “courteous treatment on the part of the marshals” and “no worse treatment from bystanders than was accorded white women”.

In the same issue, editor WEB DuBois detailed the strife that had surrounded Black women’s attempts to join the parade as equals and, like Clifford, he concluded that ultimately they had marched “according to their state and occupation without let or hindrance”. Editors at the Chicago Defender were not so understanding and insisted that Paul and her committee owed Black women marchers a “public apology” for “drawing the color line”.

Perhaps the best measure of how the 1913 parade mattered was what Black women did next. In the months that followed, they did not look to collaborate with Paul’s NAWSA. Nor did they pursue their grievances. Instead, Black women returned to their ongoing work, commingling their commitment to the vote with concerns about racial justice. Carrie Clifford not only wrote for the Crisis, she raised funds to support the magazine, chairing a benefit along with suffragists Addie Hunton and Terrell. Terrell returned to the lecture circuit in Brooklyn, where she urged audiences to support anti-lynching legislation. Wells headed home to Chicago, where she continued to build the influence of the Alpha Suffrage Club.

They were busy that spring, women’s suffrage was on the agenda in Illinois’s capital. But so was a cluster of Jim Crow laws that proposed to segregate transportation, demote Black train workers, and bar interracial marriage.

Whatever disappointments Black women felt after the March 1913 parade, they quickly receded. There was too much work to do.

Martha S Jones is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (Basic Books)

© The Guardian

Suffrage review: epic retelling of US women's long battle for the vote

By Clara Bingham

Suffragette Rosalie Jones leads a crowd of protesters up Pennsylvania Avenue after a march from New York in 1913.

A century after the 19th amendment, Ellen Carol DuBois makes the familiar new and sheds light on a fight against injustice

I

t was a decidedly anticlimactic end to a life-changing campaign. The document was sent by train to Washington in the middle of the night. A government employee met the train and rushed it to the secretary of state, Bainbridge Colby, who signed the Proclamation of Ratification at dawn, three days after Tennessee became the 36th state to vote for women’s suffrage.

There were no photographers to record the moment, no suffragists to bear witness. It was 26 August 1920 and after a grueling 80-year battle, the 19th amendment to the US constitution, granting women the vote, was ratified.

In this centennial year, it seems a miracle the 19th amendment ever became law. The “longest revolution” began in earnest at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. It survived the civil war and the first world war and dozens of failed state votes. Suffragists were jailed, their protests mobbed, their arguments mocked in the press, on the floor of the House and Senate and in every state legislature. Decade after decade, suffrage remained a hopeless cause that consumed the lives of brave, persistent and often brilliant women.

Ellen Carol DuBois has written a comprehensive history that deftly tackles intricate political complexities and conflicts and still somehow reads with nailbiting suspense.

With the current feminist movement now in its fourth wave, how many American suffragettes are household names, besides perhaps Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Thanks to DuBois, a UCLA professor and noted suffrage scholar, many more now spring to life. Her colorful cast includes the more prominent leaders – Anthony, Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Ida B Wells, Carrie Chapman Catt, Victoria Woodhull, Alice Paul – but DuBois gives supporting roles to many members of the “petticoat brigade” heretofore largely lost to history.

We meet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a free-born poet and novelist from Maryland who helped inspire the founding of the Equal Rights Association, and Maude Wood Park and Helen Gardner, who tirelessly lobbied Congress.

Anita Pollitzer traveled Tennessee in 1920 convincing legislators to pass the suffrage amendment, which happened by just two votes.

Sisters Sarah J Garnet and Susan Smith-McKinney founded the Brooklyn Equal Suffrage League, the first such black women’s organization. Mary Kenny O’Sullivan and Clara Lemlich rallied working-class women. Kentucky had Madeline Breckinridge, California had Laura de Force Gordon and Clara Foltz, New Mexico had Adelina Otero-Warren.

Inez Milholland Boissevain, a pioneering war correspondent, traveled to 12 western states only to drop dead, exhausted, on 25 November 1916. She was 30. All of these women and many more deserve statues in capitol buildings.

Women’s suffrage grew out of the abolitionist movement but abolitionists jettisoned universal suffrage with the 14th and 15th amendments, which protected the vote only for male former slaves. Furious, Stanton, a close friend of Frederick Douglass, made the tragic decision to begin using antiblack and anti-immigrant rhetoric. One of her refrains: “Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung … making the laws” for educated white women. Over the next 50 years, the suffrage movement would tangle with a racist “southern strategy” as it tried to pass referendums state by state.

As the alliance between male abolitionists and female suffragists fractured, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a black abolitionist and suffragist, tried to mediate, eventually confessing in 1869 that “when it was a question of race, she let the lesser questions of sex go”. One hundred years later, the same “lesser question of sex” would put black women in a similar bind of loyalty between civil rights and the second-wave feminist movement. A split similar to that between mainstream suffragists (Anthony and Catt) and radicals (Woodhull and Paul) would visit the second-wave feminists, decades later.

DuBois reveals the root of the refusal to give women the vote: deep-seated misogyny whose grip on public mores surpassed even vicious racism. DuBois reminds us of this fundamental truth throughout her book. Each time it comes as a shock.

The day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in March 1913, Alice Paul planned an audacious and unprecedented parade from the Capitol, past the White House to the US Treasury. Inez Milholland led the demonstration astride her horse, followed by a flower-covered cart carrying a banner with the message: “Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Enfranchising the Women of the Country.”

Women converged by the thousands (including black delegations from Illinois and Howard University) and marched in ladylike fashion. A mob of men broke through deliberately passive police lines and seized the women, wrenching at their clothes and signs and harassing them “with all manner of smutty conversation”. The army had to be called in.

Paul took notes from the militant British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst (British women – some of them – gained the vote in February 1918) and started a White House picketing campaign in 1917 – the very first time activists had done so.

Women taunted Wilson with signs such as: “MR PRESIDENT WHAT WILL YOU DO FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE?” Picketers were attacked, arrested and imprisoned.

Dozens, including Paul, were tortured and force-fed. Suffragist defiance forced Wilson and Congress to relent.

Which brings us the real reason that the triumph of 26 August 1920 was anticlimactic. By 1970, second-wave feminists had barely begun to find traction in seeking equal financial, legal, medical and personal rights – none of which had significantly improved since 1920. As radical feminist Shulamith Firestone wrote in The Dialectic of Sex: “By the time the vote was granted, the long channeling of feminist energies into the limited goal of suffrage – seen initially as only one step to political power – had thoroughly depleted the Women’s Rights Movement. The monster Ballot had swallowed everything else.”

In her fascinating depiction of suffrage’s epic journey, DuBois proves Firestone right.

• Clara Bingham’s most recent book is Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found its Soul

© The Guardian

Columbus statues are coming down – why he is so offensive to Native Americans

By Sam Hitchmough Senior Lecturer in American Indian History, University of Bristol

Decapitated: a statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Park in June 2020

Over the past few weeks, statues of Christopher Columbus have been beheaded, covered with red paint, lassoed around the head and pulled down, set on fire and thrown into a lake. Many of these protests have been led by Native American activists. But other statues have been defended by people with guns.

California plans to remove a statue of Columbus from the state capitol building while others, including a famous statue in New York’s Columbus Circle are repeatedly debated.

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, America’s multiple, entangled histories of racism are being thoroughly trawled in a search for the roots of ongoing prejudice. Planted deep within America’s psyche, one such root connects with the origin story of the nation itself: Columbus.

These recent attacks on statues and other figures associated with colonisation are part of a wider history of indigenous protests against longstanding settler narratives.

Today’s activists continue a longer tradition by Native Americans who have confronted US monuments. They have done so in ways that offer a counternarrative that reveals hidden histories and gives voice to the silenced.

This Red Power activism by Native Americans has sought, often through symbolic acts, to achieve recognition of indigenous sovereignty and history, as well as decolonisation. At the height of Red Power movement protests in the 1960s-70s, activists occupied Mount Rushmore and protested on Thanksgiving Day at Plymouth Rock, seeking to contest these spaces of national memory and identity.

Protests against the Columbus Day holiday and parades, as well as commemorative statues, have continued to be regular occurrences – particularly since a programme of 500th anniversary events in 1992. The anniversary amplified Native American protests against what they perceived to be the celebration of genocide and conquest. Since then, anti-Columbus Day protests have gathered enough momentum for more than a dozen states including Hawaii, South Dakota and New Mexico to stop marking Columbus Day or else rename it Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Columbus has endured as a particularly sacred national symbol. Despite the fact that the Italian explorer never set foot in what was to become the United States, he is lauded for “discovering” America and has been welded to the very idea of its modern nation state. In a speech marking Independence Day on July 4, the US president, Donald Trump, suggested that the “American way of life” began in 1492 “when Columbus discovered America”.

A common feature of protests in recent years has been pouring red paint onto statues of Columbus to represent the blood lost over centuries. Meanwhile, posters and banners read “Columbus = genocide” or “Our history is truthless, Columbus was ruthless”. In a 2007 Denver anti-parade protest, body parts of dismembered children’s dolls, symbolising brutality and murder, were strewn in front of the oncoming floats that recreated Columbus’s ships.

Columbus Day, originally on October 12, became a national holiday in 1937, energetically embraced by Italian-American communities as a badge of whiteness and acceptance in a nation that had been hostile to many Italian immigrants. Statues sprang up across the country, often donated by organisations such as the Sons of Italy. Columbus Day parades, some even predating the official holiday, featuring replica ships became commonplace, and Columbus increasingly became a symbol of courage and initiative, of pushing frontiers.

Presidents have lined up to praise his legacy. In 1988, Ronald Reagan suggested Columbus was the “inventor” of the American Dream, and in 2019, Trump hailed him as a “great explorer, whose courage, skill, and drive for discovery are at the core of the American spirit”.

Many states are now voting to remove statues from state buildings and public parks, acknowledging the pain that celebrating Columbus causes for so many, and the way it privileges the settler narrative.

Statues of Columbus are markers of how societies choose to remember their history. It is a selective and often politicised process: who is chosen to be remembered and, equally, who is not. Physically pulling down a statue of Columbus does not erase him from history, it removes a symbol that publicly and officially celebrates a particular historical narrative. Many indigenous activists feel that bringing down the symbol of Columbus is an important challenge to a national narrative that continues to erase indigenous history as well as a way to forefront their own history.

Native American activists have long seen Columbus as a villain, an agent responsible for the invasion, conquest and subsequent occupation of the Americas. He represents the genesis of forces that embraced slavery and colonialism, because he was personally involved in enslavement, mass brutality and theft of indigenous land.

In 2007, after years of being involved in anti-parade protests, leading Native American activist Glenn Morris told me in a research interview that the rejection of the racist philosophy behind Columbus Day may be the most important issue facing Indian country today. It is clearly no longer acceptable to nationally honour a man who represents a celebratory settler narrative that continues to ignore indigenous histories.

© The Conversation

By Tom Zoellner, Professor of English, Chapman University Kamala Harris, a U.S. senator from California, endorsed Joe Biden for president in March.

Now she is his vice presidential nominee.

An illustration of a sugar plantation in Antigua.

A printed illustration of sugar cane in Jamaica in the 1800s.

U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, the American daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, is Joe Biden’s choice for vice president. If Biden wins in November, Harris would break three centuriesold barriers to become the nation’s first female vice president, first Black vice president and first Black female vice president.

Geraldine Ferraro was the first female vice-presidential candidate on a major party ticket, in 1984. In 2008, Alaska’s then-governor Sarah Palin was Republican John McCain’s running mate.

Before Harrisa was picked as Biden’s runninginmate, she Park was in hisJune competitor for the Democratic Decapitated: statue of Christopher Columbus Columbus 2020 presidential nomination. She is one of many Black American women who have aimed for the highest office in the land despite great odds.

African Americans have endured many hurdles to political power in the United States, among them slavery, Jim Crow and disenfranchisement.

Black women, in particular, have hit barrier upon barrier. Women didn’t gain the right to vote in the U.S. until 1920, and even then Black people – women among them – still couldn’t vote in most of the South. In the 1960s, Black women helped organize the civil rights movement but were kept out of leadership positions.

As a political science professor, I address issues like these in my Biden, himself a former vice president, government and minority politics understands the significance of the role. classes. But I also teach my students that Black women have a history of political ambition and achievement. As the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. said in 1984 about the progress Black voters made last century, “Hands that once picked cotton will now pick a president.”

Today, Black female mayors lead several of the United States’ biggest cities, including Atlanta, Chicago and San Francisco. Black women are police chiefs, gubernatorial candidates, and, in growing numbers, congresswomen.

Now, Black women, who once had no chance of even voting for president – much less being president – will see one of their own a step away from the Oval Office.

In 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected president, Cynthia McKinney, a former U.S. representative from Georgia, was a nominee of the Green Party. And in 2012, Peta Lindsay ran to unseat President Obama from the left, on the Party for Socialism and Liberation ticket.

Only one Black woman has ever pursued the Republican nomination: Angel Joy Charvis, a religious conservative from Florida, who wanted to use her 1999 candidacy to “to recruit a new breed of Republican.”

These Black female presidential candidates were little known. But as the first Black female member of Congress, Shirley Chisholm had years of experience in public office and a national reputation when she became the first Black American and the first woman to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. Chisholm’s campaign slogan: “Unbought and Unbossed.”

Chisholm, who mostly paid for her campaign on her credit card, focused on civil rights and Shirley Chisholm announces her entry for the Democratic nomination.

poverty.

Biden allies have reportedly suggested that he would only serve one term if elected because of his age – Biden would be 78 on Inauguration Day – but his campaign officially denies that possibility. Either way, his vice president would be in a powerful position for the 2024 campaign.

Harris is also of Indian descent, making her place on the ticket a meaningful first for two communities of color.

Kamala Harris is a registered Democrat who served as California’s attorney general and later one of the state’s U.S. senators. But, historically, most Black female presidential candidates have run as independents.

In 1968, 38-year-old Charlene Mitchell of Ohio became the first Black woman to run for president, as a communist. Like many other African Americans born in the 1930s, Mitchell joined the Communist Party because of its emphasis on racial and gender equality. Black female communists fought Jim Crow, lynchings and unfair labor practices for men and women of all races.

Mitchell’s presidential campaign, which focused on civil rights and poverty, was probably doomed from the start. In 1968, many states didn’t allow communists on the ballot. Media outlets from the Boston Globe to the Chicago Tribune also discussed Mitchell’s “unsuitability” as a candidate because she was both Black and female. Mitchell received just 1,075 votes.

Other independent Black female presidential candidates include community organizer Margaret Wright, who ran on the People’s Party ticket in 1976; Isabell Masters, a teacher who created her own third party, called Looking Back and ran in 1984, 1992 and 2004; and teacher Monica Moorehead of the Workers World Party ticket, who ran in 1996, 2000 and 2016.

Charlene Mitchell, America’s first Black female presidential candidate.

She became the target of vehement sexism. One New York Times article from June 1972 described her appearance as, “[Not] beautiful. Her face is bony and angular, her nose wide and flat, her eyes small almost to beadiness, her neck and limbs scrawny. Her protruding teeth probably account in part for her noticeable lisp.”

Chisholm received little support from either Black or female voters and won not a single primary.

The Black women who followed in Chisholm’s footsteps from Congress to the Democratic presidential primary, including Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun and Harris herself, have seen little more success. Harris was among the first 2020 Democratic primary candidates to drop out, in December 2019.

Why did these candidacies and those of other Black women who aimed for high office fail?

In most cases, my research finds, America’s Black female presidential candidates haven’t made the ballot. Those who did had trouble raising funds.

And because their candidacies weren’t taken seriously by the media, they had trouble getting their messages heard. Historically Black female presidential candidates have received no real support from any segment of American voters, including African Americans and women.

Generally, people – even those who might have been heartened by the idea that someone who looked like them could aspire to the White House – thought they couldn’t win.

As a vice president for two terms who had a major role in governing under Barack Obama, Joe Biden knows what the office entails. He has now selected a woman who he believes can not only help him win the election but also to govern if he is elected. It is a watershed moment for African Americans, Asian Americans and women who’ve so long been excluded from so many aspects of politics.

© The Conversation

5 Essential Black Figures In The Women’s Suffrage Movement This summer marks the 100th anniversary of the hard-fought passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave American women the right to vote. The decades-long fight was heavily impacted by racism, a fact illustrated in American Experience’s new film The Vote. When the movement for suffrage began in the mid-nineteenth century, the country was still fighting the Civil War. At that time, abolition and suffrage were closely intertwined causes.

Decapitated: a statuedisagreed of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Park 15th in JuneAmendment, 2020 Early suffragists over the approach to the which gave Black men the right to vote in 1869, leading the two movements to split. Of course, the 15th Amendment’s passage didn’t mean African Americans were fully enfranchised. In the decades to come, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and barriers like poll taxes would keep Black men from fully exercising their rights at the ballot box, and the same methods kept Black women disenfranchised for decades, even after the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Despite their victories, white suffragists were influenced by the prevalence of racism in America, and The Vote shows how Black women were sidelined in the movement for suffrage. Nevertheless, Black women persisted and played an essential role in the movement, viewing the right to vote as critical in the larger struggle for racial justice. Here are some key figures in that movement.

Sojourner Truth Sojourner Truth, consideredthefirst African-Americansuffragist, advocatednot just for abolition, but for temperance, women’srights, andcivil rightsduringthe19thcentury. BornaslaveinNew York, sheranaway asateenager andfoundfreedom. Shebecameapreacher andstarteddeliveringspeechesonbothabolitionandwomen’srights. Shesplit withabolitionist FrederickDouglass whenheadvocatedfor Blackmen’ssuffragebeforewomen; shethought therightscouldbeembracedat thesametime.

Truthiswell-knownfor her speechat awomen’srightsconferenceinAkron, Ohioin1851 titled“Ain’t I aWomen?” inwhichshecalledattentiontoher intersectingidentitiesasawomanandaBlack person, andchallengedthenotionthat women’ssuffragewouldautomatically elevateBlackwomenwithout alsofightingfor civil rights. In1854, shewasinvitedtotheWhiteHousetomeet with President AbrahamLincolnandcontinuedtoadvocatefor freedslavesafter theCivil War. FrederickDouglass FrederickDouglassdescribedhimself asa“woman’srightsman” andusedhisprominenceasafamousabolitionist toadvancethecauseof women’ssuffrage. Whentheabolitionist andsuffrage movementswereinalignment, FrederickDouglasswasacommittedadvocatefor thecause. Inhisautobiography LifeandTimesof FrederickDouglass, hewroteeloquently about hisbelief: “We shouldall seethefolly andmadnessof attemptingtoaccomplishwithapart what couldonly bedonewiththeunitedstrengthof thewhole. Thoughhisfolly may belessapparent, it isjust asreal whenone-half of themoral andintellectual power of theworldisexcludedfromany voiceor voteincivil government.” At thepivotal SenecaFallsConventionin1848, Douglasswastheonly AfricanAmericaninattendanceanddeliveredapassionatespeech. Despitehisunwaveringbelief, TheVoteshowshowthe15thAmendment causedarift betweenDouglassandtheleadersof the women’smovement. WhenSusanB. Anthony plannedasuffragemeetinginAtlantainthe1890s, sheaskedDouglasstostay away, over fear of alienatingwhitesuffragists. Heremainedcommitted towomen’ssuffrage, but ultimately advocatedfirst for Blackmen’sright tovote. “I believeinwomen’ssuffrage, I alwayswill,” wehear himsay inTheVote. “But theBlackmanneedsit first. My peoplearebeingkilled.”

FrancesEllenWatkinsHarper Harper wasactively involvedinorganizingAfricanAmericanwomenonkey issueslikeabolitionandsuffrage. Shelaunchedher career asalecturer whenshedeliveredanantislavery talk, “EducationandtheElevationof theColoredRace,” inNewBedford, Massachusettsin1854. Harper wasalsoasuccessful author, andwasthefirst AfricanAmericanwomantopublishashort story.

InMay 1866, Harper spokeat theNational Women’sRightsConventioninNewYork. Inher speech, “WeAreAll BoundUpTogether,” shecalledonattendeestoincorporateBlackwomenintothe movement for suffrage, explainingthat Blackwomenfacedadoubleburdenof racismandsexism. Whenthemovement split over the15thAmendment, shepointedout howwhitewomendidn’t prioritizeracial equality inthefight for suffrage: “Whenit wasaquestionof race, I let thelesser questionof sexgo,” wehear her say inTheVote. “But thewhitewomenall gofor sex, lettingrace occupy aminor position.”

IdaB. Wells Wecan’t talkabout women’ssuffragewithout talkingabout theimmensecontributionsof IdaB. Wells. Shewasbornintoslavery inMississippi andfreedwiththeEmanicapationProclamation. She becameajournalist anddedicatedher lifetofightingracial injusticeintheSouth. WhenBlackmengainedtheright tovote, shewitnessedtheviolent reactionby political elites, includingthe lynchingof aclosefriend. Sherecognizedthat theballot wouldbeanindispensableweaponof defenseinthefight for equality. “Withnosacrednessof theballot, therecanbenosacrednessof humanlifeitself,” shesaysinTheVote.

WellsfoundedtheAlphaSuffrageClubfor African-Americanwomen, thefirst suffrageclubfor BlackwomeninIllinois, andthey set out tojoinAlicePaul’snational suffrageparadeinWashington DC. Under fear for howthewhitecommunity inDCwouldreceivethem, Paul didnot excludeWellsandher marchers, but alsodidnot welcomethem. TheBlackwomenwereaskedtomarchinthe backof theparade, but WellspersistedandmoveduptomarchalongsidethewhitewomenintheIllinoisdelegation.

Mary ChurchTerrell Mary ChurchTerrell, adaughter of former slaves, wasamember of theBlackmiddleclasswhousedtheir standinginsociety topushfor racial equality. Shewasoneof thefirst AfricanAmerican womentoearnacollegedegree, fromOberlin, whereshealsoreceivedamaster’sdegree. Shebecameateacher inWashington, DCandwent ontobethefirst AfricanAmericanwomanappointed totheschool boardof amajor city.

Astheco-founder of theNational Associationof ColoredWomen, Terrel’swords“Liftingasweclimb” becamethegroup’smotto. Shejoinedthewomen’ssuffragemovement, andworkedto persuadeBlackmentosupport thecauseafter Blackwomenweresidelinedby suffragistslikeAlicePaul. AsshesaysinTheVote, “Thesameargumentsusedtoprovethat theballot bewithheld fromwomenareadvancedtoprovethat coloredmenshouldnot beallowedtovote.”

© The Conversation

Matt Herron, chronicler of the US civil rights movement – in pictures The photographer, who covered protesters and volunteers across the south, has died at 89. His shot of a policeman assaulting a child won him a World Press Photo award.

Images courtesy of Take Stock/Topfoto

Marchers in Alabama cross the horizon on the march from Selma to Montgomery on 21 March 1963.

A reconnaissance plane of the Alabama National Guard, drafted in to protect the march, flies above them.

Young men and boys in their Sunday best outside a church in Valley View, Mississippi, in the summer of 1964.

A protester at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on 28 August 1963.

In summer 1964, a volunteer from the civil rights group the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) clasps hands with one of her students at a Freedom School created for African Americans in Valley View.

Bobby Simmons, who became known for this photo, takes part in the Selma to Montgomery march on 21 March 1965.

A Mississippi highway patrolman, Hughie Kohler, wrestles with five-year-old Anthony Quin on 17 June 1965, grabbing his small US flag before arresting him and his mother. They had wanted to protest against the election of congressmen from districts where black people were not allowed to vote.

Martin Luther King Jr leads singing marchers towards Montgomery, Alabama, on 21 March 1965. John Lewis, then the chairman of the SNCC, is on the right.

The 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed by white supremacists on 15 September 1963, killing four black girls.

The church is seen here two days later through the bomb-damaged windscreen of a car.

An undated picture of Herron fleeing a policeman.

A volunteer teacher with her students at a Freedom School in Mileston, a community of black farmers in the Mississippi delta, August 1964. Š The Guardian Š The Guardian

The Massacre That Emboldened White Supremacists The 1873 murders of dozens of former slaves in a flyspeck Louisiana town still reverberate.

A marker in Colfax, La

claimed victory in the governor’s race, candidates from both parties held inaugurations, and both candidates began making state and parish appointments. In February 1873, a federal judge settled the governor’s race by declaring the Republican candidate the winner.

The election mayhem spilled over into Colfax, seat of Grant Parish, where Republican candidates, sympathetic to Black freedmen, assumed their rightful offices in the parish courthouse. This provoked a homicidal revolt by supporters of the Democratic candidates. Several hundred heavily armed white supremacists from throughout Louisiana traveled to Colfax bent on taking control of the courthouse, prompting local freedmen to gather in the brick building and defend it from attack, even though they were vastly outgunned.

When the white mob advanced, the murderous frenzy of their assault prompted the Black men to raise a flag of surrender, but the berserk marauders ignored it. They set fire to the courthouse roof and slaughtered almost every freedman who emerged from the flaming building to surrender. Those who remained inside were burned alive. The exact number of victims was never determined.

A

n hour after sunset on Easter Sunday in 1873, a stern-wheel riverboat put ashore at Colfax, La., a ramshackle settlement surrounded by cotton plantations on the east bank of the Red River. Rain was falling. As passengers disembarked, they found themselves stumbling in the dark over what turned out to be the lifeless bodies of African-Americans who had been freed from slavery eight years earlier at the conclusion of the Civil War. Most of the dead were lying face down in the grass “and had been shot almost to pieces,” according to Charles Lane in his book “The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, The Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction.” Others had been bludgeoned or mutilated, and some had burned to death. Flames rose from the ruins of the parish courthouse. The stench of charred human flesh was inescapable.

As Americans debate the merit of tearing down monuments to founding fathers, a monument to the men who massacred Black Americans in Colfax 147 years ago stands unopposed and largely unnoticed. Two blocks off Main Street, a 12-foot marble obelisk is the focal point of the Colfax cemetery. An inscription carved into its base declares it was “erected to the memory of the heroes” who “fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for white supremacy.” On the north side of the present-day courthouse, a historical marker reads, “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain” and added that the episode “marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.”

These memorials to the perpetrators of mass murder are disturbing enough in their own right. But the impact of the Colfax massacre extended far beyond this flyspeck town. The damage is still felt acutely throughout our entire nation, and the tragedy must not be forgotten.

After the Civil War, Colfax became ensnared in a vicious political melee between abolitionist Republicans who supported Reconstruction and recalcitrant, pro-slavery Democrats determined to redeem the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. The 13th Amendment (ratified in 1865), the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment (ratified in 1868) promised to give Black Americans freedom, citizenship and the same protections and privileges afforded other citizens.

But those promises vanished as Southern states not only refused to enforce these laws, but also passed new laws such as the so-called Black Codes intended to derail Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1865, joined other white terrorist groups devoted to the “better preservation of the white race and to see that white blood was handed down unmixed with the offensive globule of African blood.”

Open season was declared on Blacks throughout the South. According to an investigation by Gen. Philip Sheridan in 1875, “2,141 Negroes had been killed by whites in Louisiana and 2,115 wounded” since the end of the Civil War, yet no one was punished for those crimes.

The 1872 elections in Louisiana were mockeries — rife with voter intimidation, ballot stuffing and violent obstruction of Black registration. Republicans and Democrats alike

The Colfax massacre was ghastly, and so was its aftermath. A young, white New York lawyer named J.R. Beckwith had recently been appointed U.S. attorney for Louisiana; he got the job of prosecuting the Colfax murders. Beckwith’s 150 pages of indictments listed 32 counts and named 98 defendants. After six months, with no help from the federal government he represented, Beckwith had managed to arrest only seven of the defendants. The first trial, in March of 1874 in New Orleans, featured an eloquent and capable Beckwith doing battle against an all-star team of white-supremacist trial attorneys. It resulted in a hung jury.

In the retrial a few months later, a federal jury found just three defendants guilty of conspiring to violate the civil rights of the victims. A U.S. Supreme Court justice, Joseph P. Bradley, who opposed the abolition of slavery and despised Reconstruction, had participated in the first days of the retrial as a second judge while riding circuit, as justices did in those days, then departed. But three weeks after the trial was over, he came back to New Orleans and overturned even the minimal conspiracy verdicts. The split decision sent the case, U.S. v. Cruikshank, to the Supreme Court.

In March 1876, Bradley and his fellow Supreme Court justices decreed that he was correct in rescinding the convictions of William Cruikshank and the other white defendants, ruling that although the 14th Amendment gave the federal government authority to act against violations of civil rights by state governments, it did not apply to acts of racist violence by private citizens against other citizens. Furthermore, the court ludicrously declared, the prosecution failed to show that crimes against the murdered Black men were committed “on account of their race or color.” All 98 defendants escaped accountability, emboldening white supremacists across the land.

The Cruikshank decision reinforced a grotesque judicial precedent that severely limited the power of the federal government to prosecute violent crimes against the formerly enslaved. Given free rein by the Supreme Court, white supremacists continued their coordinated campaign of terror against Black people, hastening the demise of Reconstruction. By 1877, every Southern state had been “redeemed,” and they would remain under the control of their white redeemers for decades.

By eviscerating crucial protections of the 14th Amendment, the Cruikshank ruling ensured that the most basic constitutional rights of Black citizens would be denied well into the 20th century. The crabbed, inhumane logic of Cruikshank provided legal cover that allowed systemic racism to flourish and denied civil rights to millions of Americans, perpetuating what John Lewis called a “soul-wrenching, existential struggle.”

A straight line can be drawn from Colfax and Cruikshank to the race riots in East St. Louis in 1917 and in Omaha, Chicago and other cities two years later; to the abhorrent crimes committed in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre; to the criminal brutality unleashed on African-Americans in Selma and Birmingham, Ala., in the 1960s; to the present-day instances of police and white nationalist violence in Ferguson, Mo., Charlottesville, Va., and now Kenosha, Wis.; to the shameful, plain-sight attempts to suppress the Black vote in the 2020 elections. Lest we forget that white supremacy and racial injustice are still endemic in America, we need to remember Colfax and the lasting harm it wrought. © The New York Times

When Woodrow Wilson was laid low by the Spanish flu in Paris in 1919, the White House played it down as a mere cold

A history of secrecy when it comes to presidential illness

The White House has historically played down the ill health of US leaders A deadly pandemic raged across the world. Millions had been infected.

And suddenly the US president himself was hit by the virus.

The year was 1919. Woodrow Wilson had been laid low by the Spanish flu in Paris, where he and other world leaders were negotiating the postfirst world war settlement in Europe.

In public, the White House played down the illness as a mere cold. In reality, Wilson was “violently sick” with influenza, his doctor wrote in private.

“His [infection] was pretty severe,” said David Petriello, a historian.

“That dramatically impacted him during the Versailles peace conference.”

A hundred years later, echoes of Wilson’s experience have returned as Donald Trump has become infected with coronavirus. His doctor said on Friday Mr Trump was “fatigued but in good spirits”. He would spend a few days at Walter Reed military medical centre “out of an abundance of caution”, the White House said.

amendment specified that the vice-president becomes the acting chief executive.

On the two occasions George W Bush had a colonoscopy while in office, he formally transferred power to his vice-president, Dick Cheney, for the time of the procedure. Both times the public was informed in advance.

The modern era of relative transparency about a president’s health has its origins with Dwight Eisenhower, who suffered a heart attack in 1955 while in office.

After the administration initially misled reporters about what happened, it reversed course with a torrent of information about his condition — including news of a successful bowel movement.

A decade or so earlier, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died in office of a cerebral haemorrhage shortly after being elected to a fourth term — he was the most recent president to die in office of natural causes.

Mr Trump is the latest in a long line of American presidents to suffer ill health in office. The history of illness in US presidents is largely one of intense secrecy, and occasionally flat-out lies.

Wilson would later in 1919 suffer a stroke that partially paralysed him and left him unable to perform the duties of president without the help of his second wife Edith.

“His wife was essentially running the White House,” said Mr Petriello, who chronicled the impact of disease on the presidency in A Pestilence on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The imperative for secrecy has included denying the truth even when revealed, most notably in 1893 when Grover Cleveland had surgery to remove a cancerous lump in his mouth while in office.

The procedure was carried out on a friend’s yacht off the coast of New York, without the vice-president’s knowledge. The cover story later spun was he had dental surgery for a toothache.

A journalist, EJ Edwards, published a story about what actually happened. “The White House flat-out denied it,” said Matthew Algeo, author of a book about Cleveland’s surgery called The President Is a Sick Man. Mr Algeo said that Cleveland at the time had a reputation for honesty, so Edwards was discredited and the president’s denial was widely believed. “He kind of cashed in all his honesty chips on this one big lie.”

Only years later, in 1917 years after Cleveland had died, would one of his doctors admit Edwards had got it right.

“It was a very successful example of a president covering up,” said Mr Algeo. “The president’s physician, he’s not obliged to tell me and you and the American public what’s going on. He’s obliged to respect the wishes of the patient.”

The question of who is in control of the US government if the president is stricken was not firmly resolved until the late 1960s, when the 25th

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, here with wife Eleanor, went to great lengths to disguise his use of a wheelchair in office

Roosevelt had needed the use of a wheelchair after contracting polio in his 30s, though he went to great lengths to avoid public awareness of his incapacity while campaigning for president and then in office.

“He did a lot to mask his illness from the public,” said Louis Picone, author of a history on presidential deaths called The President is Dead.

“He would have people standing right next to him propping him up.”

Roosevelt’s health would deteriorate dramatically as president as he suffered from heart disease. When he ran for re-election in 1944, a doctor who examined him recorded in a memo that Roosevelt would not see out his fourth term. The memo would not be published until the century was out. © FINANCIAL TIMES

Colourised images of the March on Washington and MLK's speeches breathe new life into America's most important civil rights events of the last 100 years

A snapshot, taken by the Seattle Police, shows a Congress of Racial Equality-sponsored demonstration outside a realtor office in May 4, 1964.

The protestors were calling for an end to racial discrimination and demanding the need for open housing

A collection of some of the most significant moments and figures of the Civil Rights movement have been brought to life in newlycolorized images.

British author and visual historian Jordan J. Lloyd has brought colour to more than a dozen black and white pictures which depict pivotal moments in the crucial movement.

The powerful images show the struggle black people went through during segregation and the many attempts they had to make to get equal rights to things such as pay, jobs and housing.

Some examples in the online gallery include the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, a young boy drinking from a separate water fountain and a black man having to use a different entrance to the white people at a movie theatre.

The collection also features head shots of some of the influential players in the movement, such as Malcolm X Angela Davis and Martin Luther King Jr - who delivered his iconic and empowering I Have a Dream' speech standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington.

Jordan has released the photos in high-resolution in full colour for and were free for the public on picture sharing site shared on

Men and woman of all generations took to the streets of Washington DC clutching placards demanding equal rights for including integrated schools and decent housing

Vocal spokesman for the Nation of Islam Malcolm X, a human rights activist, pictured waiting at the Martin Luther King press conference on March 26, 1964, before the pair met for the first and only time on Capitol Hill

The demonstrators, of all racial backgrounds and ages, which were involved in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom held thousands of signs calling for equal voting rights and jobs for all with decent pay

A black man is pictured entering the segreated entrance of the movie theatre on a Saturday afternoon in Belzoni, Mississippi Delta. Picture taken in October 1939

A young boy drinks from a fountain designated for 'coloreds' on the county courthouse lawn in Halifax, North Carolina, 1938

Leaders of the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, smiled, waved and cheered as the enormous crowds took to the streets demanding equal rights from all

Political activist Angela Davis pictured in 1974. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA. When studying in Frankfurt, the US-bored activist returned to her home country and became involved in number causes, including the second-wave feminist movement and the Black Panther party.

a woman leads speeches at the Poor People's March at Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on June 19, 1968.

The year long campaign, organised by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, calling for an end to economic injustice

One of the biggest figureheads of the Civil Rights Movement Martin Luther King pictured speaking at a press conference on August 26, 1963, two days before thousands of protesters descended on the of Washington DC for the March on Washington

African-American demonstrators gather outside the White House in Washington DC with signs stating 'We demand the right to vote everywhere' and 'Stop brutality in Alabama' in response to police brutality against activists in Selma on March 12, 1965

Thousands of protestors, including a priests and people from a variety of backgrounds and ages, lined the streets calling on the government to 'end the bias now'

American lawyer and civil rights activist Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American to hold the office of the United States Solicitor General, pictured on September 17, 1957. The lawyer founded the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

Civil rights leader John Lewis, who went on to serve in the United States House of Representatives until his death in July this year, speaking at a meeting of American Society Of Newspaper Editors, Statler Hilton Hotel, Washington DC on April 16, 1964

Even young women joined the protests, carrying signs with the thousands of people in the crowd at the March on Washington

A special bus service which was put on to ferry protesters into the capital for a day of campaigning and protesting for the March on Washing on August 28, 1963

During the protests, hundreds of demonstrators gathered around the reflecting pool and dipped their feet in the water, in front of the Lincoln Memorial where Martin Luther King Jr gave his iconic speech

Joe Louis and Neil Scott help Isaac Woodard up a set a stairs soon after a beating left him blind.

On the evening of February 12, 1946, Isaac Woodard, a 26-year-old black Army veteran, boarded a bus in Augusta, Georgia. Earlier that day, he’d been honorably discharged, and he was heading to Winnsboro, South Carolina to reunite with his wife.

The bus driver made a stop en route. When Woodard asked if he had time to use the bathroom, the driver cursed loudly at him. Woodard would later admit in a deposition that he cursed back.

Neither man said anything until the bus stopped in Batesburg, South Carolina.

There, the driver told the local police about Woodard’s impudence. Woodard was ordered off the bus. When Woodard tried to give his version of events, a police officer struck him with a night stick. Woodard was escorted to the jail, where, he later testified, he was repeatedly beaten by the police chief, Linwood Shull.

Woodard said that Shull pounded him in his eyes with the end of the night stick until he blacked out (charges Shull would deny).

Once Woodard regained consciousness, he couldn’t see.

Woodard was charged with disorderly conduct, with the police claiming he’d been intoxicated. Witnesses, however, said he hadn’t been drinking. After paying a fine, Woodard was driven to a veterans’ hospital in Columbia, where doctors told him he would be permanently blind.

The NAACP took on Woodard’s cause. A benefit concert for Woodward in New York City included such entertainers as Orson Welles, Woody Guthrie, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday and Milton Berle. Woodard’s fight for justice would reach the Oval Office, with its shadow even touching the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Over the years, Woodward’s beating receded behind more publicized stories like the lynching of Emmett Till. But with police brutality remaining a problem in many African-American communities today, it’s appropriate to highlight an important – and unappreciated – story of the civil rights movement.

Woodard was one of the estimated one million African-Americans who served in the U.S. military during World War II. They fought for their country on foreign soil and for racial equality on their own soil. Black soldiers served in segregated units on segregated bases. In return for fighting for their country, black veterans believed they deserved nothing less than the equality granted to every other citizen under the Constitution.

But in the postwar years, many feared that any attempt to topple Jim Crow laws would result in prolonged racial conflict. Richmond Times-Dispatch editor Virginius Dabney warned that overturning Jim Crow would leave “hundreds, if not thousands, killed and amicable race relations set back for decades.”

Blacks who challenged prevailing laws often found themselves jailed, beaten or worse. Some of that violence was directed against black soldiers, some of whom were murdered in their uniforms.

While Woodard lived to tell his story, his blindness left him unable to make a living.

Woodard knew if he stayed in the South, he had no chance for justice against Shull, so he moved to New York City to live with his parents.

Once Woodard settled in New York City, he contacted Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, who wrote a letter to Orson Welles, the writer, director and star of the movie Citizen Kane. Welles also wrote a syndicated newspaper column and broadcast a weekly political commentary on the radio.

“We have had many horrible cases pass through this office,” White wrote to Welles, “but never one worse than this.”

Welles delivered a series of radio commentaries on Woodard’s behalf in July and August 1946. On July 28, Welles demanded that those responsible for Woodard’s

The police beating that opened America’s eyes to Jim Crow’s brutality attack be prosecuted. Welles vowed to fight for Woodard because he had fought for his country.

“The blind soldier fought for me in this war, the least I can do is fight for him. I have eyes. He hasn’t. I have a voice on the radio. He hasn’t,” Welles said. “I was born a white man, and until a colored man is a full citizen, like me, I haven’t the leisure to enjoy the freedom that a colored man risked his life to maintain for me. Until somebody beats me and blinds me I am in his debt.”

On August 28, Welles appeared at a benefit concert for Woodard in New York City.

There, Woody Guthrie sang for the first time a song he had titled “The Blinding of Isaac Woodard.”

“I thought I fought on the islands to get rid of their kind,” the song concludes. “But I can see the fight lots plainer now that I am blind.”

When South Carolina authorities refused to prosecute Shull, the Truman administration, pressured by the NAACP, filed federal charges because Woodard had been wearing his military uniform. Much to the dismay of the Truman administration, an all-white jury quickly exonerated Shull.

Woodard “made an everlasting impression on Truman,” David McCullough wrote in his biography of the president, “moving him in a way no statistics ever would have.”

Truman may have held little sway over the South Carolina courts. But he was not without influence. He eventually created the Woody Guthrie President’s Committee on Civil Rights – the first national civil rights commission – which released its report, “To Secure These Rights,” in October 1947. And on July 26, 1948, Truman issued an executive order desegregating the U.S. armed forces.

The Shull trial also deeply moved the presiding judge, J. Waties Waring. An eighthgeneration Charlestonian, Waring had become more sympathetic on racial issues since marrying a social progressive from New York City. The Shull trial galvanized Waring.

Waring expressed derision toward both the prosecutor, who failed to make his case, and Shull’s defense attorney, who told the jury that if his client was convicted, white women and children would no longer be safe.

A year later, Waring ruled that that the state’s Democratic primary could no longer prohibit blacks. But his most significant decision came in his dissent in Briggs v.

Elliott (1951), when he called school segregation unconstitutional. Briggs v. Elliott was combined with four other cases and decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Waring’s words – “Segregation is per se inequality” – formed the legal basis for the court’s unanimous decision overturning school segregation.

But by 1954, Waring, disowned by his family and friends in Charleston, had moved to New York City. Meanwhile, Woodard faded into obscurity, dying in 1992 at the age of 73.

Orson Welles revived the Woodard story during a BBC television broadcast on May 7, 1955. Discussing how power and authority could potentially corrupt good police officers, Welles pivoted to Shull.

“That sort of policeman is the exception,” Welles said. “That sort of policeman is a criminal.” ©

1968

the year that set the world on fire Struggles for black justice, clashes between police and protestors, a Republican president running on a law and order ticket... a look at an extraordinary year that echoes in 2020 In the summer of 1968 I was 16 years old and, in retrospect, those months appear significant for me only because I had sat my O-level examinations, and was waiting apprehensively for the results. Consequently, the rest of the summer of 68 remains something of a blur, but it’s not surprising that my memories are vague: the 1960s are over half a century ago now – a fact that, I suppose, makes them genuinely historical.

And yet, just before that same summer, the US was aflame with the most widespread riots in its history, following the assassination of Martin Luther King in April. Nine weeks later, in June, Robert Kennedy was also assassinated, and the autumn began with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, in August, terminating the hopes of the Prague Spring with brutal efficiency.

Furthermore, 1968 had started with baleful auguries. In January, in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong launched the Tet offensive, almost overwhelming the might of the American and South Vietnam military. There were more than half a million US troops in Vietnam at the time. As spring ended, Parisian students and workers took to the capital’s streets, unleashing an eruption of civil strife that created a near revolution, effectively ending the era of Gaullism. And Germany was also convulsed with a social upheaval driven by students that shook society to its foundations, initiating the policy of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“Coming to terms with the past”) that still dominates German political debate and culture today. The list of significant sociopolitical traumas that occurred in that year is a long one. It is one of those years, like 1789 or 1848 or 1914 or 1933, where, with a little hindsight operating, one can see a paradigm shift in the affairs of the world and its peoples. Maybe that will prove true of 2020, as well.

As I began researching the precise time and location of my new novel, Trio (I had plumped, almost on a whim, for 1968) the serendipitous wisdom of my choice became apparent. Suddenly I had a fascinating context for my characters and their secret lives – all involved in different ways, in the making of a zany, swinging 60s movie – that had a strangely global relevance. The comedy and the absurdity of the situation, plus the intensely private and personal lives of the characters, were ideally counterposed with the darker geopolitical state of the world.

The cataclysms happening abroad had their effect on British society but, compared with the rest of the world, we were caught up in that complacent, hedonistic, freewheeling era. Despite malign rumblings in the Radical gesture ... Tommie Smith and John Carlos give the Black Power salute at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968

was the 1960s and its legacy – and the tippingpoint that was 1968 – can still be seen, albeit transformed, today. Martin Luther King’s assassination shifted the civil rights movement into something altogether more radicalised and militant. In 1968, Eldridge Cleaver published the seminal text Soul On Ice, placing the Black Power movement in the foreground of African American political engagement. In Memphis, striking black workers marched silently in protest with large placards slung around their necks proclaiming “I am a man” in foot-high letters. It’s not a big jump to Black Lives Matter.

Later, the vicious pitched battles between demonstrators and police in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention effectively Jean Shrimpton and Terence Stamp at a press conference demolished the hopes of Hubert Humphrey being at Essendon Airport, Melbourne, for Melbourne Cup week. elected president and allowed Richard Nixon to cruise to victory on a “law and order” ticket. Sound familiar? The same effect could be witnessed this coming November.

Other parallels abound. The French riots of May 1968 found their echo in the confrontations in Paris by the gilets jaunes last year. The first demonstrations at the Miss America pageant in September by the Women’s Liberation Movement started a process that led to victory in many feminist battles, although the war is not won, yet. At the Mexico City Olympic Games in October, black American medal-winners raised their fists in Black Power salutes on the podium. Now they “take the knee”. Far-left protest groups began to emerge with more anarchic, utopian objectives. In the US, the Weather Underground briefly flourished. In Germany the leftwing student movement, the SDS, nurtured the seeds of the Red Army Faction. Urban terrorism was reborn – direct action, circumventing due legal process, became more popular. We see the same tendencies today in Extinction Rebellion, Pussy Riot, Femen and other radical human rights organisations.

Whatever they may have inculcated or initiated, the swinging 60s in Britain didn’t actually begin in 1960. The early 60s were remarkably like the 50s, but various crucial cultural signposts have been proposed as to when the party actually started. Was it in 1964, when the first Brook Clinic opened and unmarried women as young as 16 could be prescribed the contraceptive pill? Was it in July that year when the Rolling Stones had their first No 1 hit with “It’s All Over Now”? Or was it the day that the model Jean Shrimpton wore a dress with the hem cut five inches above the knee to the Melbourne Races in 1965 and sparked world-wide astonishment and condemnation – and the miniskirt was born?

Dominic Sandbrook, in his remarkable and compendious history of the era, White Heat, plausibly advances the key moment as something less ephemeral, occurring in January 1965 when Winston Churchill – who was born in 1874 – died. With Churchill’s death went the last symbol of British Victorian imperial hegemony, and all the national myths constructed around him, and by him, suddenly lost their objective correlative. We were just another mid-sized country slowly sliding down the road to relative powerlessness and moderate influence. It was time for a change and the change duly occurred, but not in the way the rest of the word experienced it. Sandbrook comments that, “Bearing in mind [Britain’s] self-conscious traditions of conservatism and pragmatism, the relatively comfortable conditions in the universities, the rather gloomy stability of its political life and the long continuity of its institutions, it is hardly surprising that Britain did not witness vast protests to compare with Paris in May 1968.”

It wasn’t all depressing however, there was fun to be had. Elvis Presley rebooted his career with massive weight loss and a Comeback Special; Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey was released; Hair opened on Broadway; the Beatles didn’t break up, their White Album indicating that the show was still on the road, sort of; and the Apollo 8 astronauts successfully orbited the moon in the days leading up to Christmas.

background – sectarian discrimination in Northern Ireland provoking unrest and confrontation; Harold Wilson’s Labour government’s singular inability to pacify or negotiate with the trade unions – the state of Britain in the second half of the 60s is usually starkly contrasted with what was going on in the rest of the world. Britain’s travails seemed small-scale and localised compared with the whirlwinds tearing through the US, France, Germany and Italy and elsewhere.

The counterculture in Britain was small and isolated – intellectual and well-to-do – there was nothing similar to the stridency and potency of the student movements elsewhere. However, the historical watershed that

So 1968 ended on something of an upbeat note – but the consensus was that many parts of the world had been through a particularly torrid, bleak and conflict-ridden period. In the editorial of its end-of-year issue, Time magazine summed up the preceding 12 months. “Seldom has the nation been confronted with such a congeries of doubts and discontents. While US prestige declined abroad, the nation’s self-confidence sank to a nadir at which it became a familiar litany that American society was afflicted with some profound malaise of spirit and will.” For the US, read the world. For 1968 read 2020. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

© The Guardian

How presidents have shaped the US Supreme Court – and why the choice of its next justice is so crucial After the death of the supreme court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, President Donald Trump finds himself with an opportunity to tip the US Supreme Court into a 6-3 conservative majority.

Appointing a third justice to the court could cement Trump’s political legacy, and that of his conservative supporters, for generations.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has opened up a battle for the vacant seat on the US Supreme Court.

Court: slow, incremental change that will eat away at the edges or underpinnings of key liberal rulings. The changes are no less fundamental but might be less easy to see, at least at first.

Less than 48 hours after the announcement of Ginsburg’s death, the battle over her successor began. The biggest question so far is whether or not a replacement should be appointed so close to the November election. Both parties are, once again, playing political football with the court, and that only damages its long-term institutional legitimacy.

The current moment is absolutely critical. American politics is deeply and bitterly divided and that has been reflected in the sharper divisions over court appointments in the past two decades. This fight will be no different. In fact, it’s likely to be even more bitter.

The loss of Ginsburg, the most consistent and vocal of the court’s liberals, and her potential replacement by a conservative in the vein of either Neil Gorsuch or Brett Kavanaugh – Trump’s two previous supreme court justice picks – would tip the balance of the court towards the conservatives more decisively than at any time since the early 1930s.

The legacy of the rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s now hangs in the balance. That possibility represents the culmination of a decades-long plan of action by conservatives who specifically and deliberately targeted the nation’s courts. A strategy more than four decades in the making now stands on the verge of complete success.

A word of warning about terminology here. For years, politicians, the media, and commentators have been using the terms “liberal” and “conservative” to describe the balance on the court. Too often that is interpreted as synonymous with Democrat and Republican. But this is far too simplistic and overlooks consistent denials from the justices that they make decisions based on party politics. Liberal and conservative should more precisely be regarded as justices’ approaches to reading, understanding and applying the law. Although, of course, this may overlap with their personal politics, it is not quite the same as making political decisions.

Number two: Donald Trump swears in Brett Kavanaugh as supreme court justice in 2018.

The Warren Court in 1953

Although Roe v Wade, which protected, within limits, a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, is the case most often considered as under threat from a court with a legal conservative majority, the threat is actually broader. Roe rested on a 1965 ruling, Griswold v Connecticut, which established a “right to privacy” in the constitution, an area of personal decision-making into which the state could not intrude except without very good reason.

Abortion rights are not the only issue built on the foundation of privacy: reproductive choice, sexual privacy and some legal rights for the LGBTQ+ community rest on the same foundation.

They too may be at risk from a more conservative court.

Affirmative action programmes, especially those which use race as part of university

Appointments and their consequences Appointing three or more justices is not historically unusual for a president. Of the 20 presidents elected since the turn of the 20th century, ten before Trump had the opportunity to appoint more than two justices, including Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) who appointed nine, Dwight Eisenhower five and Richard Nixon four. It’s only in recent years that the average number of supreme court appointments made by presidents has dropped to closer to two.

But the more justices a president can appoint, the greater the opportunity to shape the future direction of the nation’s highest court. FDR’s nine appointments saw the court shift from the late 1930s onwards from opposing most government regulation of the economy, to supporting it, to finally largely retreating from economic issues entirely. This represented the end of the court’s most conservative period of the 20th century and laid the foundation for its shift in the second half of the century towards an increasing focus on issues of civil rights and civil liberties.

Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren to the court, who served as chief justice while the court drove the massive expansion of individual civil liberties in the 1960s known as the rights revolution. But his successor as chief justice, Warren Burger, aided by four Nixon appointees, slowly chipped away at the legal underpinnings of key Warren court precedents, weakening their scope and protections.

Reagan’s nominations cemented a more conservative majority on the court in the 1980s. A conservative-leaning court with at least one centrist justice who might be persuaded to join the liberals is where the situation stood until Ginsburg’s death.

Abortion, guns and affirmative action If Trump is successful in appointing Ginsburg’s successor, it’s unlikely the court will lurch suddenly and dramatically to the right. More likely is a situation akin to that of the Burger

Who comes after RBG?

admissions, and which have been hanging by a thread in the past few years, are also likely to be targets for a new court majority.

Expect, too, new rulings on gun rights. Despite the 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v Heller which established a right to bear arms for self-defence, conservatives have become increasingly incensed at state and local laws governing gun ownership. These have been upheld by lower courts while the supreme court has remained largely silent. A more conservative court is likely to rejoin the debate.

And religious conservatives might well hope that a third Trump appointee will continue the recent trend of holding religious liberty as a crucial right, even if it conflicts with the rights of others. Those who continue to believe in the importance of the separation of church and state may find that the wall between them will crumble further and faster than it has to this point.

In 2016, Democrats fought against hard against Trump’s choice of Gorsuch less because of Gorsuch himself and more in anticipation of the fight they are now facing. Ginsburg is gone and in the White House is a Republican dedicated to appointing deeply legally conservative justices.

The battle will be bitter and bruising. And the result will have long lasting consequences for the nation and its citizens, whatever the outcome.

© THE CONVERSATION

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has generated an outpouring of grief around the globe.

Part of this grief reflects her unparalleled status as a feminist icon and pioneer for women in the legal profession and beyond.

There is already considerable interest in what her departure means for the future of the US Supreme Court, and indeed, the wider political landscape. But to understand that, we must reflect on her legacy.

In 1956, Ginsburg enrolled in Harvard Law School, one of only nine women in her year alongside about 500 men. Reflecting the prevailing mindset of the time, which regarded the study and practise of law as the proper domain of men, the Harvard dean, Erwin Griswold, asked each of the nine women how they could justify taking the place of a man.

Ginsburg’s answer, that she wanted to better understand her husband Marty’s career as a lawyer (he was the year ahead of her at Harvard), belies the reality of the enormous contribution she would make to public life in the subsequent six decades.

Professor Mari Matsuda — that there are times to “stand outside the courtroom” and there are times to “stand inside the courtroom”.

Ginsburg’s legacy in life and law reflects the latter approach. Her faith in the law is reflected in her approach to stand inside the courtroom (literally as a litigator and a judge) to transform existing legal categories. In this way, her approach was reconstructive rather than radical (which is not say that some of her thinking wasn’t radical for its time).

Ginsburg sought to reconstruct sex roles and emphasised men and women alike were diminished by stereotypes based on sex.

Importantly, Ginsburg did not simply pursue formal equality (the idea that equality will be achieved by treating everyone the same). Rather, she advocated for affirmative action as a principle of equality of opportunity.

The number nine would come to be significant in marking her success in a profession traditionally dominated by men. In 1993, she took her place on the nine-judge Supreme Court as the second woman appointed in its history.

In more recent years, in response to questions about when there will be “enough” women judges, Ginsburg replied there would enough when there were nine women on the Supreme Court. Acknowledging that people are shocked by this response, Ginsburg famously countered, “there’s been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”

This exchange points to just how ingrained the idea that judging is men’s work had become.

A formidable mind Long before President Bill Clinton resolved to nominate Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, Ginsburg had established a reputation as an academic (she was the second woman to teach law full-time at Rutgers University and the first woman to become a tenured professor at Columbia Law School). She was also known as a feminist litigator, leading the American Civil Liberties Union’s campaign for gender equality.

Ginsburg’s nomination to the Supreme Court was an uncontroversial appointment. She was regarded as a restrained moderate and was confirmed by the Senate 96 votes to three.

Although there were some concerns she was a “radical doctrinaire feminist”, her credentials were bolstered by her record on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (she was appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980).

Ginsburg had spent the 1970s pursuing a litigation strategy to secure woman’s equality — although she would describe her approach in broader terms as the constitutional principle of equal citizenship stature of men and women.

In a series of cases, she sought to establish “sex, like race, is a visible, immutable characteristic bearing no necessary relationship to ability.”

By extension, she argued, legal classifications on the basis of sex should be subject to the “strict scrutiny” required in cases where there were distinctions or classifications on the basis of race.

To put it more bluntly, pigeon-holing on the basis of sex should be unconstitutional. The nub of her argument, whether acting for men or women plaintiffs, was that treating men and women differently under the law helped to keep woman in her place, a place inferior to that occupied by men in our society.

Outside the court — and inside, too Feminist theorists have sometimes expressed reservations about the extent to which a legal system designed by men to the exclusion of women can ever be fully appropriated to achieve equality for women.

While some feminists have seen much promise in the possibility for law reform, others have been more circumspect. This tension is reflected in the two-pronged strategy proposed by

Mourners pay tribute to ‘RBG’ outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC.

She favoured incremental rather than radical change, reflecting a view that such an approach would minimise the potential for backlash. Her critique of the strategy adopted in the landmark 1973 case Roe v Wade (the case upon which US reproductive rights are based), and her departure from the feminist orthodoxy on this point, reflected her preference for incrementalism.

Legacy on the bench Ginsburg’s jurisprudential contributions on the Supreme Court continued the legacy she began in the 1970s.

One of her most significant majority opinions in 1996 required the Virginia Military Institute to admit women. Importantly, this was because it had not been able to provide “exceedingly persuasive justification” for making distinctions on the basis of sex. Although this standard fell short of the “strict scrutiny test” required in cases involving classifications on the basis of race, it nonetheless entrenched an important equality principle.

But it was perhaps her judicial dissents, sometimes delivered blisteringly in the years where she was the lone woman on the bench (prior to President Barack Obama’s appointment of Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010), that seem to have really captured the wider public imagination and catapulted her into the zeitgeist.

It was in the wake of her 2013 dissent in a case about the Voting Rights Act that she reached the status of a global feminist icon. A Tumblr account was established in her honour, giving her the nickname “Notorious RBG” (a title drawn from the rapper Biggie Smalls’ nickname Notorious B.I.G). A 2018 documentary RBG chronicled her legacy and status as a cultural icon, and a 2018 motion picture On the Basis of Sex depicted her early life and cases.

Ginsburg’s celebrity certainly expanded during her time on the court — but this is not to say to it has been without controversy or critique, even from more liberal or progressive sources.

She has been criticised for her decisions (for example, a particular decision about Native Americans and sovereignty), for her comments about race and national anthem protests, and for being too partisan — particularly in her criticism of President Donald Trump. (She called him a “faker” and later apologised.)

A great legacy Did Ginsburg’s feminism or celebrity undermine her legitimacy as a judge? Questions of judicial legacy and legitimacy are complex and inevitably shaped by institutional, political and legal norms. Importantly, her contributions as a lawyer and a judge have done much to demonstrate how legal rules and approaches previously regarded as neutral and objective in reality reflected a masculine view of the world.

Over 25 years ago, Ginsburg expressed her aspiration that women would be appointed to the Supreme Court with increased regularity: “Indeed, in my lifetime, I expect to see three, four, perhaps even more women on the High Court Bench, women not shaped from the same mold but of different complexions. Yes, there are miles in front, but what distance we have travelled from the day President Thomas Jefferson told his secretary of state: ‘The appointment of women to [public] office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared.”

That Ginsburg came to share the Supreme Court with two women, Kagan and Sotomayor, must have given her some hope that women’s access to places “where decisions are being made” was at least tentatively secure, even if hard-won feminist gains sometimes felt tenuous at best.

Ginsburg was a trailblazer in every aspect of her life and career. The women who follow her benefit from a legacy that powerfully re-imagined what it means to be a lawyer and a judge in a legal system that had been made in men’s image. © THE CONVERSATION

The British Battalion of the XV International Brigade in Spain during the civil war, circa 1937.

The contested legacy of the anti-fascist International Brigades In the 1930s, thousands of men and women around the world enlisted to fight fascism in Spain. Many survivors went on to play a key role in the fight against the Nazis – but, in some cases, later became powerful servants of brutal regimes. By Giles Tremlett irgilio Fernández del Real sent his last testament via WhatsApp on 28 November 2019. I opened the video to see him propped up in bed at his colonial-era haçienda in Guanajuato, Mexico. Bloodshot eyes peered out above a rampant white beard. A big red, gold and purple flag, representing Spain’s short-lived republican democracy from the 1930s, was spread out behind him. “My birthday is on 26 December, when I will be 101,” he wheezed in Spanish, though he clearly did not believe he would make it. “I still have the strength to say: ‘¡Viva la República Española!’”

Nine days before that birthday, his wife, Estela, sent another message: “Fifteen minutes ago, Virgilio went on his journey to the Father’s house, transcending into the infinite. He is no longer suffering.”

They had stayed in my Madrid apartment 18 months earlier, so that Virgilio could recover from a two-week hospital stay after having fallen ill during a visit to Spain. My kitchen became a shrine as visitors trooped through, anxious to thank Virgilio for serving in a volunteer army called the International Brigades. That unit of 35,000 foreigners from 80 of today’s nations had fought against fascism in the Spanish civil war and been disbanded in 1938, a year before the short-lived democratic republic was finally extinguished. More than 50 years later, their actions still resonated.

The republic is an emotional touchstone for leftwing Spaniards, but admirers of the volunteers are spread across A 1937 poster declaring the world. Groups devoted to their ‘All The People Of The World Are United With Spain’. memory exist in the US, Britain and half a dozen European countries.

Mention of them can provoke sudden displays of enthusiasm, as I discovered when I began researching the group: a Spanish journalist pulled down his shirt to reveal the Brigades’ triangular symbol tattooed on his shoulder; a German in California sang their songs; and a Scottish writer at a neoliberal magazine talked wistfully about an uncle from Glasgow who had volunteered. David Simon, creator of The Wire, is now planning a drama series about the International Brigades.

Elsewhere, opinion is dramatically opposed. In Poland, streets dedicated to the Dabrowski battalion of the International Brigades are being renamed by the Institute of National Remembrance, which oversees a controversial “decommunisation” law passed by

the ultraconservative Law and Justice party in 2017. The brigaders had “served Stalinism”, their Polish critics argued. They were not entirely wrong.

International Brigades veterans went on to serve as iron curtain prime ministers – or equivalent – in East Germany, Hungary and Albania. They provided dozens of ministers, generals, police chiefs and ambassadors across all Europe’s communist regimes – forming a potent elite, although they were mostly working-class. In East Germany, former International Brigades volunteers founded and ran the notorious Stasi. Suppressing freedom was part of their job.

Little surprise, then, that some countrymen now despise them.

History is neither neat nor clean, especially when it comes to past wars. The first casualty of war is said to be truth, but really it is nuance. War presents stark, binary choices. Kill or be killed. One side or the other. The truth is more complex than that, as the story of the International Brigades and their afterlife shows.

In early October 1936, a 21-year-old classics graduate from Cambridge, Bernard Knox, slipped an old pistol into his bag and passed through the border control at Dover on his way to Spain. The pistol belonged to a Cambridge professor of ancient Greek called Francis Cornford, who had last used it as an officer in the first world war. Cornford had given it to his son, John, a 20-year-old poet and friend of Knox’s who was travelling with him. Knox carried the gun because Cornford’s passport showed he had already been to Spain, and police were

Men and women in a Spanish militia in 1936.

suspicious of visitors to a country where, in July, Franco and his generals had started a civil war. Britain was promoting non-intervention – a sop to Hitler and Mussolini, whose troops were blatantly fighting for Franco. It did not want British volunteers taking part.

In the early days of the civil war, before returning to Britain to recruit volunteers, Cornford had joined one of the militias that emerged when, in response to the coup, a counter-revolution broke out inside the republic. Socialists, anarchists, communists and regionalists in Catalonia and elsewhere grabbed control of the streets. Militias abounded, with women also donning uniforms and carrying weapons. “The women are fine,” wrote Felicia Browne, a British artist who joined

A republican propaganda poster from 1937 declaring ‘United with the Spanish, we fight the Invader’.

a militia group.

They were heady days, with the streets of Barcelona daubed in revolutionary slogans described by another volunteer fighter, George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia as “startling and overwhelming”.

While recruiting, Cornford had depicted the conflict as a dusty, lazy revolutionary war – much as people imagined the Mexican revolution that ended in 1920 – rather than the sophisticated s c i e n t i f i c destruction it soon became. His group had no idea which unit they would join, but when they reached Spain, the International Brigades had just been formed. The Communist International, or Co mintern, the Moscow-based organisation advocating for world communism, did the arranging. The arrival of spontaneous volunteers such as these provided the impulse. Another recruit, Winston Churchill’s rebel nephew Esmond Romilly, had cycled across France fuelled by coffee and cognac before volunteering and declaring himself a member of “that very large class of unskilled labourers with a public-school accent”. He sailed on a boat from Marseille, with watch duty split in two-hour shifts between French, Germans, Poles, Italians, Yugoslavs, Belgians, Flemish and Russian-speakers.

Poorly armed and virtually untrained, the first volunteers found themselves defending Madrid against Franco’s experienced and ferocious colonial force, the Army of Africa, just a few weeks later. Cornford’s group operated a machine gun in the philosophy faculty of the brand-new University City campus. They built barricades out of thick tomes on early-19th-century German philosophy and Indian metaphysics. Enemy bullets gave up before reaching page 350, making them believe old tales of soldiers saved by Bibles in breast pockets. “I think I killed a fascist,” Cornford, a former pacifist, wrote excitedly to his girlfriend, Margot Heinemann, on 8 December. “Fifteen or 16 of them were running from a bombardment … If it is true, it’s a fluke.”

After Franco’s colonial army was airlifted from north Africa to Seville by German planes in an operation that Hitler personally named Operation Magic Fire (inspired by a section of Wagner’s opera Siegfried), it had swept easily towards Madrid. It was halted at the University City, and the International Brigades were hailed as heroes in Spain and elsewhere. Their discipline set an example to the chaotic republican army, even if some volunteers mistakenly thought idealism could replace training – and paid with their lives. The young and previously untried war photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro took their pictures, and they were lionised by Ernest Hemingway and the New York Times, among others.

War correspondents of almost all nationalities blessed their luck at being able to find frontline sources among the brigaders who spoke their language.

Fresh recruits arrived by their hundreds every week from as far away as China, Chile and Abyssinia, though most came from Europe or the Americas – and many Nurses from the British-based Spanish Medical Aid Committee.

were already political or economic exiles. At least one in 10 were Jews, rebelling against their position as fascism’s chosen victims. The American historian and veteran Albert Prago called the International Brigades “the vehicle through which Jews could offer the first organised armed resistance to European fascism.” In fact, almost all brigaders saw themselves fighting a global battle to stop fascism, in which Spain was just a part. With Hitler and Mussolini on the other side, that seemed obvious – if not to politicians in London, Paris or Washington.

Many of those first recruits had died, or been badly wounded, by the end of 1936.

Cornford was killed at Lopera, in Andalusia, the day after he turned 21. Knox had already been badly injured, falling to the ground with a fountain of blood spurting from his shoulder, convinced he was dying. “I was consumed with rage – furious, violent rage. Why me?” he recalled later. “I was just 21 and had barely begun living my life.” Volunteer British and American battalions – each of about 700 men – were not formed until the following year, and first fought at Jarama, about 20 miles from Madrid, that February. About 700 women also enlisted, but the republic sent militiawomen away from the frontline, and most served as doctors, nurses, translators or administrators.

The brigaders were shock troops who generally, but not always, fought courageously. Sometimes, they turned battles around. Other times they were routed. Those captured were mostly shot. Prisoners left alive were sent to a medieval monastery converted into a jail at San Pedro de Cardeña near Burgos and made to do fascist salutes. A German-trained military psychologist, Lt Col Antonio Vallejo-Najera, conducted tests designed to prove that Marxists (as he wrongly assumed they all were) were either psychopaths or congenitally dim.

He satisfied himself that this really was the case, but – in an academic paper – expressed surprise that, even in jail, “the immense majority remain firmly attached to their ideas”.

It was not all heroics. A considerable number of International Brigade volunteers deserted. Some were shot by their own commanders for doing so. After capturing the town of Quinto, their senior officers ordered them to shoot all the enemy officers, sergeants and corporals. The victims were “kids just like us”, recalled the Canadian volunteer Peter Frye after being assigned to a firing squad. Women were often treated by the brigade’s French commander (and senior Comintern official) André Marty or his security staff as suspected spies. In one case, Marion Merriman, the wife of a senior American officer, was raped by an unnamed Slav officer. She kept silent about it, in order to prevent the American Abraham Lincoln battalion rebelling in her defence. “This must be my secret burden. I cannot tell The American Lincoln battalion of the International Brigades in Spain circa 1937.

anyone – ever,” she remembers telling herself in a memoir dedicated to her husband, Robert Hale Merriman, who was killed.

By the time the last brigaders left Spain, 7,000 had died. They had lost their war.

Franco declared victory on 1 April 1939 (he would rule as dictator until 1975). By then, most brigaders had returned home or were locked up by France with the rest of the fleeing republican army in vast camps as it dealt with one of Europe’s biggest refugee crises since the first world war. Those not welcome in their own countries – Germans, Italians, Poles and others – or later deemed “dangerous”

by Vichy authorities spent several years in the French camps. Others who did return home were watched closely by police in their own countries. Britain’s MI5 held files on many, as did the Dutch police. Authorities painted them as dangerous, foolhardy or wrong. But that would not last.

Hitler invaded Poland exactly five months after Franco declared victory.

Suddenly, almost everyone agreed that fascism had to be fought with weapons.

On 21 August 1941, French International Brigade veteran Pierre Georges and two colleagues met at the Barbès-Rochechouart metro station in Paris. All three carried pistols. Pierre had joined the International Brigades aged 17, been wounded at 19, imprisoned in occupied France, escaped and now, at 22, was training young communists to assassinate Germans from Hitler’s occupying army.

Georges, better known as Colonel Fabien, jumped into a first-class carriage, shot a naval warrant officer called Alfons Moser and ran off before the train left. A few weeks later, an Italian veteran, Spartaco Guisco, helped kill Lt Col Karl Hotz, the military governor of Nantes. Hitler responded with mass executions – including of several brigaders, who had been locked up as a preventive measure.

Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Forces, was appalled. Fabien’s group had ignored his commands. “I order those in the occupied territory not to kill Germans,” he said, fearing the mass retaliations that soon came. But resistance

had shifted to a new level, and De Gaulle had to change his mind. Fabien died in an accident later in the war, and now has a Paris metro station named after him.

He was one of hundreds of brigade veterans, including women, to join the French Resistance. More than 100 were killed, but on 19 August 1944, it was another brigader, Henri Rol-Tanguy, who ordered the French force of the interior (FFI), to rise against German troops in Paris. A week later Gen Dietrich von Choltitz formally surrendered the city to Rol-Tanguy and Gen Philippe Leclerc.

When the second world war broke out, it had been natural for brigaders to enlist.

They had fought fascism for three years, but the task had not been completed.

In Britain and the US, they were initially viewed with mistrust, not least because of the Nazi Soviet non-aggression pact (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) of 1939, by which Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland. The former commander of the British battalion of the International Brigade, Tom Wintringham, approached the government with plans for a home guard. He was turned away, and instead founded a private academy of “ungentlemanly warfare” at the Osterley Park stately home, where brigade veterans and others taught people to make petrol bombs, ambush tanks and conduct guerilla warfare (the surrealist painter Roland Penrose taught camouflage).

Soon, however, it became clear that brigaders had extremely useful experience in warfare and formed a unique network throughout occupied Europe. Knox had emigrated to the US and was recruited by Gen “Wild” Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – the forerunner to the CIA, which ran guerrilla operations. Sent to liaise with Italian partisans, he bonded with the commander after realising that he was a former brigader and that they had fought together in Madrid. “From then on, relations with the partisans were no problem,” Knox said. In fact, several Italian partisan armies were led by brigaders, as were all four of Tito’s communist armies in Yugoslavia. The former brigader Aldo Lampredi was one of three partisans who executed Mussolini and his lover Claretta Petacci in 1945. Lampredi’s Beretta pistol delivered the final shots. A fellow brigader, Randolfo Pacciardi, became Italy’s postwar minister of defence. Even German brigaders fought against Hitler, with writers Erich Weinert and Willi Bredel shouting propaganda at snowbound Nazi troops from the ruins of Stalingrad.

Since their aim was the defeat of fascism, the brigaders could finally savour victory in 1945.

On 13 November 1989, Erich Mielke stood before the East German parliament to answer questions in his role as head of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the state security ministry, commonly known as the Stasi. Mielke was 82 years old, a veteran of the International Brigades, and had run the notorious secret police for three decades. He was known as the “master of fear”, after turning East Germany into what the writer Anna Funder, in her book Stasiland, called “the most perfected surveillance state of all time”. The Berlin Wall had come down four days earlier, and the assembly no longer considered its task to be rubberstamping everything. Mielke had not realised. Facing unusually tough questioning, he raised his arms and declared: “I love all humanity! I really do!” The assembly dissolved into laughter. Five days later he resigned. In 1993, he was jailed for the 1931 murders of two Weimar Republic policemen.

Brigaders played a remarkable role in East Germany after 1945, since they were among the few people the Soviets trusted. Heinrich Rau headed the German economic commission, its first de facto government. At one stage all three armed ministries – defence, interior and state security – were run by brigaders. Such figures also provided a narrative of heroic German opposition to Hitler, which East Germany also tried to claim for itself. Much the same happened wherever Soviets or communist partisans took control after the second world war. Ferenc Münnich became prime minister of Hungary and machine gunner Mehmet Shehu was his counterpart in Albania for 27 years. Karlo Lukanov became Bulgaria’s deputy prime minister. In fact, the list of ministers, politburo members, generals, police chiefs and ambassadors who had been brigaders runs well into three figures. Many had been senior communists before the Spanish civil war, where exiled parties went en masse, seeking meaning for their existence. “We needed Spain more than the republic needed us,” quipped one Italian exile.

Their specialities, as soldiers, were defence and security. In the paranoid world of Stalinism, that also meant repression. Orwell had already spotted this in Spain, after the Marxist militia unit he fought for was banned and Barcelona’s walls were suddenly covered with “posters screaming from the hoardings that I and everyone like me was a fascist spy”. That experience inspired Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet most communist brigaders knew nothing about the horrors of Stalinism, and saw themselves as soldiers in a broad anti-fascist

coalition. “Stalin was still a saint,” one explained later. Most eventually disabused themselves of that. Some, like Mielke, never did.

In fact, a good number were purged, precisely because they had fought in Spain and been in contact with the outside world. They featured in show trials from Prague to Budapest. “I was a treacherous enemy within the Communist party. I am justly an object of contempt and deserve the maximum and the hardest punishment,” Czech veteran Otto Šling intoned before he was hanged after the notorious Slánský trial. Hungary’s foreign minister László Rajk was executed in 1949 after a trial in which 16 of 97 defendants were Spanish veterans. A suspicious number of those purged were Jews. In Poland, many lost jobs – and went into exile – after a wave of socialist antisemitism followed Israel’s victory in the six-day war in 1967.

This persecution was mirrored, in a lesser way, in the US. The screenwriter and former brigader Alvah Bessie was one of the Hollywood Ten jailed in 1950 for refusing to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Communist witch-hunting was partially balanced out by Ernest Hemingway, a brigades devotee who made the fictional American brigader Robert Jordan the hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Mostly, however, the cold war narrative won, not least because the brigades also produced several prominent Soviet spies.

The most famous was Morris Cohen, who helped steal nuclear weapon blueprints from Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico.

When the cold war ended, history lurched into a new phase. Soviet communism was no longer a danger. Fascism was a distant memory. Leftwing domestic terrorism in western democracies – from the Red Army Faction in Germany or Italian anarchists in Italy – began to diminish, while rightwing terror grew.

On 18 July 2011, members of Norway’s Labour party’s Workers’ Youth League attending a summer camp on the island of Utøya unveiled a plaque to four young social democrats who had died in the International Brigades. The plaque bore poetry by Nordahl Grieg, a celebrated writer who had visited the brigades on the frontline. Four days after the unveiling, far-right gunman Anders Breivik reached the island, armed and posing as a policeman. He murdered 69 of those young people in the country’s worst massacre since the second world war, picking off teenagers as they tried to swim away. It was a tragic reminder that, even in the most advanced democracies, ideologies based on violence and tyranny refuse to go away.

For the families of brigade veterans, the fact that they fought one sort of tyranny, while some of them ended up serving another, complicates their memory. In Hungary, the niece of the writer, brigades commander Paul Lukács (AKA Béla Frankl and Máté Zalka), wanted to defend her adored uncle. When she and her daughter contacted me, they highlighted that, before being killed in action in Spain, Lukács suffered nightmares. The family destroyed his diary, which contained dangerously anti-Stalinist jottings.

Like several international brigades officers who were not of Russian origin, but had joined the Red Army and settled in Moscow, he might have returned only to be purged and shot. In Hungary, which experienced both fascist and communist rule, that conveniently puts him on the “right side of history” twice over.

Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance told me that it viewed brigaders as “instruments of Soviet Union’s imperialist politics” and that some “took part in forced and brutal introduction of communism in Poland”. For communists outside the Soviet bloc, the contradiction is less intense. In his video testament, Virgilio Fernández del Real (by then only one of three Brigaders still known to be alive) had proudly announced that “I have been a communist since I was 14”, before adding that “we are not ruffians”. For those brigaders who were not communists, or simply saw themselves as anti-fascists, it seemed even simpler. They had done their duty, even if others looked down on them for associating with communists.

After an illustrious behind-the-lines career during the second world war, for which he won France’s Croix de Guerre medal, Bernard Knox applied to study for a classics doctorate at Yale (he later directed the Center of Hellenic Studies at Harvard). At the interview, he was told by a professor that his time in Spain made him a “premature anti-fascist”. Knox was dumbfounded.

“How, I wondered, could anyone be a premature anti-fascist?” he recalled asking himself. “Could there be anything such as a premature antidote to a poison? A premature antiseptic? A premature antitoxin? A premature anti-racist? If you were not premature, what sort of anti-fascist were you supposed to be?”

An officer of the International Brigades lays twigs on the mass grave of soldiers who died fighting in the civil war, circa 1937.

An International Brigades banner at an International Workers Memorial Day rally in Manchester in 2018.

© The Guardian

The Dead Are Arising by Les Payne and Tamara Payne review – the real Malcolm X Malcolm X at a rally in New York in 1963; he was assassinated two years later.

How black America’s anti-hero remains underestimated, even when he speaks to our times. he Autobiography of Malcolm X has sold millions of copies since it was published in the aftermath of its author’s assassination. The memoir has shaped how we view the fiery black revolutionary – his path from street criminal to statesman – not least because it formed the basis of Spike Lee’s 1992 film biopic.

split from the cult-like Nation of Islam as inevitable, given the organisation’s reactionary political stances. In the end, it was his suspension from the NOI for calling the assassination of John F Kennedy “chickens coming home to roost”, and the sex scandal surrounding the leader Elijah Muhammad – he fathered multiple children with his secretaries – that led to his exit. But the Paynes make clear that Malcolm was always going to leave: it was just a question of when and how explosive his departure would be.

The Dead Are Arising sets out to provide a much fuller picture of the life and death of Malcolm X, drawing on interviews with his friends and This split ultimately led to his death. The final two chapters of The Dead family to assess his contribution in the context of the times. The book Are Arising are dedicated to an in-depth account of Malcolm’s is based on decades of painstaking research by Les Payne, who died assassination at the hands of the Nation of Islam. (Both the FBI and the NYPD apparently had informants with intelligence of the assassination before it was completed, and his daughter Tamara.

It is as much a history of US race relations as it is a biography of the and at the very least, did not intervene.) Not only are the killers named, black revolutionary. The opening chapters focus on the world and family but Louis Farrakhan, current leader of the NOI, admits that he may have “been complicit” and acknowledged that he “created the atmosphere Malcolm X was born into, exploring the that ultimately led to MX’s assassination”. emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and the By the end it is as clear as it should always climate of racial terrorism that have been that you cannot be pro-Malcolm prevailed after the US civil war.

X and in favour of Farrakhan and the NOI. Malcolm’s mother and father, Louise and Earl Little, met in the Universal Yet The Dead Are Arising also falls into old Negro Improvement Association and traps. Little new is added to the tale of were high up enough in this, one of the Malcolm’s life of crime, and the book oddly most important black organisations of takes its title from the idea that black the 20th century, that its leader Marcus Americans were dead until they converted Garvey would spend time working at and rose into the NOI. True, Malcolm’s their home. As a child, Malcolm would political solutions, in particular the creation listen to his father preaching the of the Organisation of Afro-American Unity Garveyite tenets of black pride, in 1964, are discussed, but only briefly. And independence and repatriation to Denzel Washington (left) as Malcolm X with there is too little on the deep and decadesDelroy Lindo in Spike Lee’s 1992 biopic.

Africa. The Paynes make clear that his long international dimension to his activism. parents’ influence was at the core of The focus on his assassination is unfortunate the Malcolm who became famous. As activist Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) once explained, Malcolm never really changed: his because it covers familiar ground (especially as it follows this year’s Netflix documentary series, Who Killed Malcolm X?). The least “basic philosophy was Garveyism” from childhood to the grave. interesting part of Malcolm’s life was his death. He remains largely The Paynes avoid the mistakes of the last attempt at a comprehensive misrepresented as a tragic figure, who transformed his life, became a biography, the late Manning Marable’s A Life of Reinvention (2011). beacon of hope but had no real plan for where he was headed.

Marable’s epic engages in tabloid conjecture about Malcom’s life as well What this generation needs is not an extended version of the flawed as trying to paint him as a kind of reformed fanatic, who ended up narrative we already have. Malcolm X developed one of the most committed to finding peace in the US. It won the Pulitzer prize, but sophisticated understandings of racism and also a practical, global, remains controversial: a collection of respected scholars contributed radical programme in response. He saw through the false promises of to a book-length rebuttal in an effort to set the record straight. There reform, arguing that “this system can no more provide freedom, justice and equality than a chicken can lay a duck egg”, and that we therefore is no comparable sensationalism in the Paynes’ book.

One surprise in The Dead Are Arising relates to the death of Earl Little: need to look for radical solutions. The recent spate of protests have Malcolm always insisted his father was murdered by white racists. It reminded us that we need the lessons of Malcolm now perhaps more turns out that he was accidentally run over by a tram car, although than ever. But for those lessons, it is best to go directly to the man Malcolm was never convinced because of the numerous threats made himself and to his collection of speeches. “The Ballot or the Bullet”, against his life. We also learn more about Malcolm’s meeting, and the though published nearly 60 years ago, is one of the best pieces of social Nation of Islam’s collaboration, with both the KKK and the US Nazi commentary on the current tattered state of race relations. It seems party. (These unlikely, and unholy, alliances were based on the common especially powerful as the US election looms. rejection of “race mixing”.) The Dead Are Arising rightly sees Malcolm’s

© The Guardian

'The black man remains a prisoner' Leonard Freed's iconic civil rights photos - in pictures The Brooklyn photographer’s striking black and white images showed an America divided. Over 50 years on from their original publication – and now featuring previously unseen photos – the work seems prescient

Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York City 1963 One of many civil rights demonstrations in the North and South for jobs, equality, housing, schools and civil rights.

The law stated that demonstrators obstructing traffic would be jailed

Washington, D.C. August 28, 1963.

The March on Washington On his return to the States in 1963 Freed photographed the March on Washington and began a journey across the United States to document black communities in the North and South

Harlem. NY. 1963. Harlem Fashion Show Black in White America 1963-1965 is the definitive collection of Leonard Freed’s seminal civil rights photo essay, first published in 1968. On the eve of another US election, in which voting rights are under attack, it still feels sadly relevant today. It is published by Reel Art Press

West Berlin, 1961. American soldiers stand guard as Communist East Berlin puts up the wall In 1961, white photojournalist Leonard Freed was on assignment in Berlin. He photographed an AfricanAmerican soldier standing in front of the wall.

The irony of this soldier defending the USA on foreign soil while African-Americans at home were fighting for their civil rights resonated with Freed

Washington, D.C. 1963. African-Americans vote for the first time From 1963 to 1965, Freed captured the plight of African Americans; the great struggle for racial equality within a deeply segregated, racist society

Washington, DC. August 28, 1963. The March on Washington The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was held to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans.

It was the scene of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s I Have a Dream speech

New York. 1963. Summer camp for the poor children of cities in New York State Leonard Freed (1929-2006) was an acclaimed American documentary photojournalist and member of Magnum Photos.

Born in Brooklyn, to working-class Jewish parents, he had originally hoped to become a painter

Baltimore. MD. October 31, 1964. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. being greeted on his return to the US after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize Martin Luther King, Jr greets an eager crowd in an open-topped car.

USA. New York City. 1963.

Freed once said: ‘Ultimately, photography is about who you are.

It’s the seeking of truth in relation to yourself. And seeking truth becomes a habit’

New Orleans, Louisiana. 1963. City prison ‘A white prisoner lives in hope and concerns himself with getting out but … the Southern black man remains a prisoner, a man living in fear with little hope’

New York City. Brooklyn. 1963.

A woman kneels in front of police at a civil rights protest The photographs in this newly designed edition have been reproduced from the original negatives, using vintage prints created by Freed’s master printer and widow, Brigitte Freed, as reference.

Working closely with the archive, Freed’s Black in White America series has never been published in such quality and detail before, and many images are also being published for the first time. The photographs in this large format edition are accompanied by text from Freed’s original diaries from the time

New York City. NY. 1963.

A young boy plays “tough” in the streets of Harlem Throughout the 1960s, Harlem witnessed racial unrest, protest and rioting after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr

commitments to the anti-slavery cause, forced labor and related forms of compulsion reached unprecedented dimensions in Africa in the first half of the twentieth century.

Uncomfortable silences: antislavery, colonialism and imperialism The history of anti-slavery is replete with lessons, but those commonly cited by the new abolitionists are not the right ones.

Take up the White Man's burden, Send forth the best ye breed Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wildYour new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

—Rudyard Kipling, 1899 In a major address to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2003, President George W Bush described the fight against contemporary slavery and human trafficking in the following terms: We must show new energy in fighting back an old evil. Nearly two centuries after the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and more than a century after slavery was officially ended in its last strongholds, the trade in human beings for any purpose must not be allowed to thrive in our time.

Few people noticed it at the time, but this statement contained a basic historical error. It has not been "more than a century" since slavery officially ended. While legal slavery in the Americas ended in the nineteenth century, in many parts of the globe legal abolition took place during the first half of the twentieth century. In the case of sub-Saharan Africa, which is my main focus here, slavery remained legal in Sudan until 1900, Kenya until 1907, Sierra Leone until 1928 and Ethiopia until 1942. This more recent history is important, because it leads to a series of uncomfortable and difficult questions about the motivations behind—and practical effects of—the antislavery cause, with the elephant in the room being the close relationship between anti-slavery, imperialism, and European colonialism.

This theme is familiar to most historians of slavery, but has been almost entirely overlooked by modern activists. Whenever "modernday abolitionists" look backwards into the past, they tend to selectively focus upon the history of anti-slavery activism in Britain and the United States. Within this context, the history of abolition has been chiefly approached as a source of instruction and inspiration. When it comes to instruction, the main focus has been the tactics and techniques used by mostly white Anglo-Saxon pioneers, such as petitions, novels, publications, networks, boycotts, lawsuits, meetings, and artistic icons. When it comes to inspiration, the early history of anti-slavery has been celebrated as a key illustration of the power of ethical leadership, collective action, and personal commitment. These themes are often found together, most notably in relation to the often uncritical celebration of the personal virtues of "great emancipators", such as William Wilberforce, whose name has recently been linked to anti-trafficking legislation, antislavery awards, documentaries, and television specials.

This selective approach to history suffers from any number of flaws.

One notable problem has been a widespread tendency to focus upon the history of abolition, rather than the history of slavery. As

A 19th-century engraving of African captives yoked and walking to the coast for sale.

numerous scholars of slavery have demonstrated, the forced migration and forced labor of enslaved Africans played an fundamental role in both building the Americas and enriching Europe. The severe hardships and systemic abuses that millions of slaves both endured and resisted over the centuries have too often been lightly passed over. In addition, the legacies of historical slave systems remain with us to this day, yet this is once again an issue that "modern-day abolitionists" rarely have time for. There are now thousands of anti-slavery and anti-trafficking organizations in Europe and the United States. Very few of these have included the legacies of slavery amongst their activities or advocacy.

While much more could be said on this topic, my main focus in this piece is the uncomfortable relationship between anti-slavery, imperialism and colonial conquest. As is well known, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were defined by an unprecedented period of colonial conquest. By 1914, Europeans are said to have occupied as much as 85% of the globe as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions, and commonwealths. It was also during this period that racism was at its most "scientific", with European and American intellectuals offering "proofs" of their own innate "superiority", ranging from social Darwinism to the measurement of head size. In addition to this self-serving pseudoscience, European pretensions to superiority were said to contain a "moral dimension", which was most famously encapsulated by the idea of the "white man's burden".

It is within this context that the anti-slavery cause frequently played a key ideological and political role in justifying colonial conquest and other imperial interventions directed against "lesser races". This theme was especially important in much of Africa, where the continued existence of slavery within Africa—which had often expanded in part thanks to centuries of previous demand from European and American slave traders prior to the 1860s—played a key role in the development of a popular and political script that cast both Europeans governments and European peoples in the role of "civilized saviors," and Africans in the role of "uncivilized savages" in need of paternalistic protection.

The status of slavery was central to this binary between "civilized" and "uncivilized." Rather than being motivated by a commitment to human or racial equality, the anti-slavery cause was instead primarily understood in terms of the moral obligation of 'superior' Europeans to protect "inferior" Africans. This racist formula reduced Africans to a "child-like" status (with adult men routinely being described as "boys" into old age), who were said to be fundamentally incapable of looking after themselves. Colonial conquest and colonial rule were a logical outgrowth of this self-appointed "civilizing mission." Seeking justification and legitimation for their colonial ambitions, Europeans repeatedly turned to the cause of ending slavery and slave trading across Africa to marshal support for numerous colonial projects.

The most notorious example of this larger historical trend concerns the Congo Free State, where King Leopold of Belgium both sought and received European and American endorsement of his conquest of most of the Congo River Basin primarily on anti-slavery grounds.

The King even hosted a high profile international anti-slavery

conference in Brussels in 1889-1890, which saw a caucus of predominantly European signatories declare their intent "to put an end to the Negro Slave Trade by land as well as by sea, and to improve the moral and material conditions of existence of the native races." Leopold's anti-slavery rhetoric impressed many of his contemporaries, but it sadly had no connection to actual practices.

The Congo Free State proved to be tragedy of the first order, with a multinational contingent of European criminals destroying millions of African lives in the pursuit of tremendous rubber profits.

At the time, European critics of the Congo Free State mostly regarded this catastrophe as one of a small number of deviant exceptions, which were held to be in no way representative of colonial rule more generally. Instead of questioning whether the "white man's burden" was legitimate, they instead treated cases of abuse as isolated failures to uphold the "civilized" standards expected of colonial rulers. It is now clear, however, that the Congo was more representative then deviant. Rubber profits also inspired the French to use similar policies and practices in some of their territories in Equatorial Africa. The Portuguese ostensibly abolished slavery in their colonial territories in the late nineteenth century. They then, however, disingenuously substituted forms of indentured servitude and forced labor that former slaves are reported to have regarded as little different—or perhaps worse—than the slavery that the Portuguese congratulated themselves on legally abolishing. The British periodically criticized the Portuguese, most notable via a short popular campaign focusing upon Cadbury chocolate. But the British government was reluctant to push too hard, thanks to their own widespread use of indentured, forced and migrant labor schemes, which sometimes involved laborers from Portuguese territories.

There were many occasions when anti-slavery was little more than empty rhetoric, but even in cases where it involved more significant political commitments it still remained relatively limited in scope.

Even the most committed European abolitionists were still products of their time, and therefore tended to accept certain assumptions about the inherent limitations of the "natives" they ruled. They therefore usually accepted that forced labor was legitimate, at least in some circumstances, owing to the "fact" that Africans were "lazy" and "unwilling to work." In many cases, forced labor was even justified as a positive good, since it was said to have an "educative" and "civilizing" effect. In theory, colonial labor regimes were substantially different to slavery.

In practice, the differences were not so obvious. Colonial settlers and administrators in need of porters, laborers, and even soldiers used violence and the threat of violence to compel Africans into their service on highly unfavorable terms, which frequently involved people being worked to death. Given the poor terms on offer, most Africans were understandably reluctant to volunteer, but rather than improving the terms and conditions on offer Europeans blamed "laziness," and resorted to further measures in order to force Africans to work on their terms. These measures included the wholesale appropriation of land, the manipulation of "vagrancy" laws, controls on mobility and property ownership, forcing farmers to grow specific crops, and the introduction of taxation and labor requirements designed to compel Africans to work for Europeans. Despite official

This history has far-reaching ramifications for thinking about both slavery and anti-slavery in our own times. As we have seen, modern activists and public officials have frequently reduced the history of anti-slavery to a hollowed out "feel good story", whose chief role is to help legitimate their pre-existing personal beliefs, policies and approaches. The types of historical "lessons" generated from these highly selective historical excursions tend to be fairly generic, as they most commonly relate to either personal virtues (perseverance, faith, etc.) or familiar political strategies that have already been further improved and expanded by later generations of activists (petitions, boycotts etc.). These generic "lessons" rarely teach people anything that they don't already know or believe (or at least can't find out by consulting existing works on social movements and political activism). If we are serious about looking to history for insight and instruction, we need to engage in a process of critical reflection that results in pathways that end up being different to an already preexisting set of plans.

It is here, I would argue, that this uncomfortable relationship between anti-slavery and imperialism needs to become part of the conversation. The history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is replete with lessons about what not to do. Rather than taking the "humanitarian" credentials of anti-slavery supporters at face value, we instead need to interrogate and reflect upon how, why and where anti-slavery rhetoric aligns with other ideological, economic and political agendas, and what consequences can follow from these alignments. Rather than taking anti-slavery legislation at face value, we instead need to reflect on how and why states that are ostensibly committed to the anti-slavery cause continue to favor legal regimes and policy responses that promote forms of systemic abuse, vulnerability, discrimination and exploitation. Rather than treating slavery as a singular and exceptional category, we instead need to approach slavery as but one manifestation of much larger patterns of exploitation and exclusion. Rather than assuming that "freedom" is always sharply differentiated from slavery, we instead take into account the ideological and political effects associated with declaring a person to be "free", and the types of constraints that "freedom" can gloss over.

I began this piece with a speech from George Bush in 2003, where he called for more action against human trafficking. This was not the only topic that the president covered in this speech. Before talking about trafficking, President Bush spent most of his time seeking to justify his then recent invasion of Iraq. To help defend his actions, he rhetorically divided the peoples of the globe into opposing camps: those who seek order, and those who spread chaos … those who work for peaceful change, and those who adopt the methods of gangsters … those who honor the rights of man, and those who deliberately take the lives of men and women and children without mercy or shame.

These self-serving binaries echo the ideological division between "civilized" and "savage" that was so popular in the late nineteenth century. While colonial rule no longer enjoys public legitimacy, it should be evident that the underlying thinking behind the colonial and imperial project continues to have considerable ideological and political currency. As far as President Bush was concerned, the military coalition that invaded Iraq stood on the side of "order," "peaceful change," and "honor[ing] the rights of man." Once again, this rhetoric sadly had little or no connection to actual practices.

Once again, the people of Iraq were reduced to helpless supplicants in need of salvation and paternalistic protection from a benevolent United States. Once again, the numerous problems with US policy can be regarded as being representative of larger patterns, rather than as isolated or exceptional cases.

While opponents of the invasion of the Iraq may feel comfortable distancing themselves from this specific disaster, it is essential to recognize that these underlying binaries between "civilized" and "backward" have all kinds of applications. Ideological and political divisions between Western saviors and non-Western supplicants have played a key role in shaping recent and ongoing anti-slavery and anti-trafficking efforts. This "white savior industrial complex" is particularly evident in terms of the politics of rescue, but also finds expression in the construction of slavery and trafficking as "exceptional" problems on the "irregular" margins of the global economy and "civilized" society.

The global history of slavery and abolition has much to teach us about the challenges and prospects of our own times, but these historical lessons should not necessarily be easy or straightforward ones.

Chilling find shows how Henry VIII planned every detail of Boleyn beheading Archives discovery shows the calculated nature of the execution and reinforces the image of the king as a ‘pathological monster’ It is a Tudor warrant book, one of many in the National Archives, filled with bureaucratic minutiae relating to 16th-century crimes. But this one has an extraordinary passage, overlooked until now, which bears instructions from Henry VIII explaining precisely how he wanted his second wife, Anne Boleyn, to be executed.In this document, the king stipulated that, although his queen had been “adjudged to death… by burning of fire… or decapitation”, he had been “moved by pity” to spare her the more painful death of being “burned by fire”. But he continued: “We, however, command that… the head of the same Anne shall be… cut off.”

Tracy Borman, a leading Tudor historian, described the warrant book as an astonishing discovery, reinforcing the image of Henry VIII as a “pathological monster”. She told the Observer: “As a previously unknown document about one of the most famous events in history, it really is golddust, one of the most exciting finds in recent years. What it shows is Henry’s premeditated, calculating manner. He knows exactly how and where he wants it to happen.” The instructions laid out by Henry are for Sir William Kingston, constable of the Tower, detailing how the king would rid himself of the “late queen of England, lately our wife, lately attainted and convicted of high treason”.

Boleyn was incarcerated in the Tower of London on 2 May 1536 for adultery. At her trial, she was

depicted as unable to control her “carnal lusts”. She denied the charges but was found guilty of treason and condemned to be burned or beheaded at “the King’s pleasure”. Most historians agree the charges were bogus – her only crime had been her failure to give Henry a son. The most famous king in English history married six times in his relentless quest for a male heir.

He divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, to marry Boleyn – the marriage led him to break with the Catholic church and brought about the English Reformation. Boleyn did bear him a daughter, who became Elizabeth I.

The execution of Anne Boleyn, on 19 May, 1536, was conducted by a French swordsman to limit her pain

blue cloth that stretched the length of the abbey…

Now she must shift over the rough ground… with her body hollow and light and just as many hands around her, ready to retrieve her from any stumble and deliver her safely to death.”

The warrant book reveals that Henry worked out details such as the exact spot for the execution (“upon the Green within our Tower of London”), making clear Kingston should “omit nothing” from his orders.

Borman is joint chief curator for Historic Royal Palaces, the charity that manages the Tower of London, among other sites.

She will include the discovery in her forthcoming Channel 5 series, The Fall of Anne Boleyn, which begins in December.

In recent years, the story of Boleyn’s life and death have reached a new audience thanks to Hilary Mantel’s bestselling She had visited the National saga tracing the life of Thomas Anne’s real ‘crime’ was her failure Archives to study the Anne Cromwell, a blacksmith’s son to produce a male heir.

Boleyn trial papers when who became one of Henry VIII’s archivist Sean Cunningham, a Tudor expert, drew most trusted advisers. In the Booker-prize-winning her attention to a passage he had discovered in a Bring Up the Bodies, she explored the destruction warrant book. Most of these warrants are “just the of Boleyn, writing of her execution: “Three years ago when she went to be crowned, she walked on a minutiae of Tudor government”, she said. “They’re pretty dull. The Tudors were great bureaucrats, and

there are an awful lot of these warrant books and account books within the National Archives… It’s thanks to Sean’s eye for detail that it was uncovered.”Borman argues that, despite the coldness of the instructions, the fact Henry spared Boleyn from being burned – a slow, agonising death – was a real kindness by the standards of the day. A beheading with an axe could also involve several blows, and Henry had specified that Boleyn’s head should be “cut off’, which meant by sword, a more reliable form of execution, but not used in England, which is why he had Cromwell send to Calais for a swordsman.

Henry’s instructions were not followed to the letter, though, partly due to a series of blunders, Borman said. “The execution didn’t take place on Tower Green, which is actually where we still mark it at the Tower today. More recent research has proved that… it was moved to opposite what is today the Waterloo Block, home of the crown jewels.” She added: “Because we know the story so well, we forget how deeply shocking it was to execute a queen. They could well have got the collywobbles and thought we’re not going to do this. So this is Henry making really sure of it. For years, his trusty adviser Thomas Cromwell has got the blame. But this shows, actually, it’s Henry pulling the strings.”

The Nevill cricket ground pavilion in Tunbridge Wells after the blaze.

How suffragette pavilion fire outraged Tunbridge Wells… and Conan Doyle Arson sparked fury, including from the cricketloving writer, but he soon switched from opponent to champion of equality

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hortly before 4am on the morning of 11 April 1913 the fire brigade was called to the Nevill Athletic Ground in Tunbridge Wells, where the cricket pavilion was ablaze.

“The fire was discovered by the groundsman in charge of the ground, who lives near, and who had lately been instructed to be vigilant in watching the place,” reported the Kent & Sussex Courier. Firefighters could not save the building, which had been used to store a large quantity of tarred netting, basically an extensive collection of conjoined candle wicks.

Nearby, they found a photograph of Emmeline Pankhurst and according to some accounts several copies of the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women. Within hours papers were reporting a “suffragist outrage”.

It was not an isolated incident. In the same year railway stations, golf clubhouses, boat and tennis clubs, newspaper offices, the homes of uncooperative MPs and even the tea house at Kew Gardens were targeted.

Often publicity material for the suffragettes’ cause was left at the scene – when Croxley Green station was targeted that March investigators initially had no evidence that suffragettes were to blame, until the following day, when the station master received one of their newspapers along with a short note: “Afraid copy left got burnt.”

After the fire the mayor of Tunbridge Wells declared his town to be “a hotbed of militants”. The local branch of the suffragettes had been formed (at what is now a Wetherspoon’s) seven years earlier, including the noted activist and campaigner Amelia Scott among its members, and their ire had been stoked by the imprisonment of Pankhurst in

February 1913 and by the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act, better known as the Cat and Mouse Act – designed to stop authorities having to forcefeed hunger-striking suffragettes – which was making its way through parliament as the Tunbridge Wells arsonists lit their match and destroyed one of the town’s bastions of male privilege.

According to legend an unnamed Kent official was once asked whether it was true that women were banned from the club’s pavilion. “Of course not,” he said. “Who do you think makes the teas?” It is a great quote, but I have not been able to find the original source, and have also seen it attributed to a member of a golf club in Surrey. Still, the fact that it is even regarded as feasible is, I suppose, telling.

In Tunbridge Wells many residents were furious about the destruction of a local landmark. “The indignation is deep and strong,” said JG Silcock, the mayor. “Bats, nets, bows and arrows have been sacrificed – shamelessly sacrificed. Can one wonder at the high feeling that has arisen? The whole business is as ill-considered as it is criminal and revolting. The pavilion, which is now a ruin, is referred to with justifiable pride in local guidebooks, and the perpetrators of the crime have won for themselves the anger and detestation of all classes of the community.”

Two public meetings were held in the aftermath of the incident, starting with Evelyn Sharp speaking at a small meeting of suffragists. “She asked whether, if the burning of a cricket pavilion helped them towards making a beginning to redress the injustices

and social evils under which many women lived, it was not worthwhile to make such a beginning,” reported the Courier. “Asked why the Suffragists attacked the property of innocent people, she replied that no one was innocent so long as they allowed the government to refuse women votes.”

The second meeting was convened by the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage, and packed out the town’s Great Hall. The star speaker, having made the nine-mile journey from his home in Windlesham Manor (now a care home), was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author and incurable sports nut, who had mounted in the hall at home the mud-flecked cricket bat with which he had once made a century at Lord’s (he made 10 first-class appearances for the MCC and took one first-class wicket: WG Grace).

His principal argument against universal suffrage, he explained, was that: “If Unionist women were going to have votes then certainly Liberal women were, and if Liberal women were then Labour women were, and the Socialists were going to get it in time,” eventually “deluging England with this new electorate which, in my opinion, is against not only the constitution but the very laws of nature.” He concluded that acts such as the Nevill Ground arson had guaranteed that women would not get the vote for a generation, and seconded the motion debated that evening, which stated that “any extension of the franchise would be against the best interests of women themselves and of the empire as a whole” and was carried with only two votes against.

Enough money was raised for a contract to rebuild the pavilion, with several improvements, to be signed

the following month, and the building was completed in a little over nine weeks, in time for Kent to play two matches there in Tunbridge Wells week in July (both rain-affected, one won and one abandoned; Kent won the County Championship that year, for the fourth time in eight seasons and the last until 1970).

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Three years later Conan Doyle visited a munitions factory near Gretna in Scotland, codenamed Moorside. He declared it “perhaps the most remarkable place in the world”, an enormous hangar several miles long that, when fully staffed, would house 12,000 munition workers (actually at its peak there were more than twice as many), mainly women. It was there that his objections to universal suffrage were blown away. “Hats off to the women of Britain!” he wrote.

“Even all the exertions of the militants shall not in future prevent me from being an advocate for their vote, for those who have helped to save the state should be allowed to help to guide it.” The Representation of the People Act was passed two in 1918, and Kent still play at the Nevill Ground in Tunbridge Wells week. © The Guardian

The Nevill cricket ground pavilion in Tunbridge Wells after the blaze.

'They created a false image': how the Reagans fooled America A new docuseries studies the damaging reign of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and the insidious myth-making that still surrounds their legacy

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ver since Richard Nixon’s sweaty upper lip during a debate with John F Kennedy cost him the election in 1960, television has been the most crucial proving ground for any presidential hopeful. Granting the gift of sight to the general public changed the game, as campaigners and office-holders have been forced to school themselves in careful image management and conscious branding. In American politics, a well-crafted position on foreign policy won’t get a person nearly as far as the easy telegenic charm that makes voters feel comfortable grabbing a pint, a dissonance that’s allowed some dubious characters access to the highest stations of authority.

The Reagans, a new four-part documentary airing on Showtime, pinpoints this flair for PR as the genesis of Ronald Reagan’s swift rise in government and the secret to his administration’s sweeping popularity within the Republican party. The 40th commander-inchief and his first lady, Nancy Reagan, exercised a then-unprecedented degree of control over how they were seen, and for it, they were anointed as the new saviors of the rightwing way of life during their stint in the White House during the ‘80s. “More than any modern president, the myth-making around Ronald and Nancy Reagan has been extensive and effective,” series director Matt Tyrnauer tells the Guardian from his home in Los Angeles. “They created a false image that doesn’t conform with reality, one that is only now being fully examined.”

As a longtime Vanity Fair correspondent turned documentarian, Tyrnauer has inspected the corridors of influence for the better part of his working life, and there’s no case study more revealing than Reagan’s. He first delved into the complicated persona while editing essays for Gore Vidal, a professional role model and eventual friend. “Gore wrote a pretty powerful essay called Ronnie and Nancy: A Life in Pictures,” Tyrnauer says. “That was, in many ways, my departure point. That stripped the bark off of the Reagan myth for me. My other key figure was Gary Wills, who wrote what I consider the best book about Reagan, called Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home.

It’s by no means a scorched-earth biography, but it’s the most clear-eyed assessment of who this man was, what he was up to, and the levels of self-delusion and magical thinking that shaped his worldview and methods of governing.”

The overarching project of Tyrnauer’s new documentary is to trace the line connecting

Reagan’s background in Hollywood to his second act in Washington, where his lessons learned from showbiz would be put into practice. As a novice politico in California, he rose fast due to a well-honed charm that could seemingly sell any bill or talking point, no matter how “hard rightwing kook”, as Tyrnauer puts it. Ads placed him on horseback in a cowboy hat, a vital rough-riding rebuke to namby-pamby liberalism.

“Media, and how the Reagans manipulated it, forms the central part of this story,” Tyrnauer explains. “As the academic Jason Johnson says in the series, Reagan gave the press the televised presidency they had been waiting for.

That’s irrefutably true, and there are other aspects of the Reagan legacy more attuned to the American psyche. Voters vote on perception and feeling, which the Reagans knew how to tap into.”

The Reagan administration’s insistence on documenting its every move supplied Tyrnauer with a treasure trove of archival footage, some of it rather damning. In one scene, we hear Reagan, then a sitting governor on a private call with Nixon, refer to African UN delegates as “monkeys”. As he conducted his research, the director was surprised by how open the uglier sides of Reagan’s personality were permitted to be. “It was very informative about how the press covered Reagan that all the archival materials – even the unflattering ones – were on the record and quite available,” Tyrnauer says. “It shows you how selectively he’s been cemented in the public’s memory, that what he said on hot microphones would be shocking today.”

The documentary gains a more intimately exposing vantage point on Reagan through commentary from his son, Ronald Jr, who sat for an eight-hour interview in which he paints a picture of his mother as the power behind the throne. When the cameras stopped rolling, she advised her husband on the nonexistent response to the Aids crisis, a punitive “war on drugs”, and the deregulatory bonanza known as Reaganomics. A brazen West Wing redecorator at steep taxpayer cost, she supported her husband’s preoccupation with appearance over all else. “I really do think Nancy had a greater sway than keepers of the

flame would like us to think,” Tyrnauer says. “It’s also interesting to look back at her through a post-Hillary Clinton lens, which hasn’t really been done. They both wielded enormous influence as first lady, but Nancy was determined to hide that.”

A dutiful cataloguing of the harm the two Reagans did in the black and LGBTQ+ communities segues into an illustration of how the damage he did has trickled down into present-day politics. Though no one utters the name of Donald Trump in any of the four parts, his presence looms over the Reagans’ speeches and rallies, the separate generations joined by their shared Make America Great Again catchphrase. “Reagan opened the door for Trump,” Tyrnauer says. “He used dogwhistle racism to gain political power.”

Tyrnauer continues: “Trump and Reagan do a lot of the same things, only with different performance styles. Reagan is playing a president. He gives his version of a president, no different from Michael Douglas or Kevin Kline or Martin Sheen. This isn’t to take away from Reagan being a diligent student of political philosophy, even if he used those

ideas in an uninformed way. But he’s performing.”

Both presidents created their own insular ideological universe and promised fabulous rewards to all those willing to join them there.

The most lasting, deleterious lesson of the Reagan tenure was that it doesn’t matter if something is true or not, so long as enough people believe that it is. As daily life continued to worsen for every American not lucky enough to be on Wall Street or run a business, Reagan’s own words assured his constituency that they were actually enjoying the greatest surge in prosperity that the nation had ever seen. In conversation, Tyrnauer speaks more candidly about Reagan’s failures than the professional decorum of his work can allow.

“He knew what he knew,” Tyrnauer says. “He wasn’t intellectually curious. He wasn’t a deep thinker. He was, at heart, a reactionary. He was given the nuclear codes and the Oval Office

and the greatest bully pulpit in the world, and what did he do with it? He tried to short-circuit the federal government in really detrimental ways. He implemented policies that hurt African Americans and economically disadvantaged minorities. He believed things that weren’t true and repeated them publicly.

He was into science denial, he was a seeming believer in creation theory over evolution, he ignored and denied the Aids pandemic. He said trees cause pollution, which reminds us now of Trump saying wind turbines cause pollution.”

The actor who became the most powerful man on earth remains a potent Republican fable, in part for how it suggests that a lack of experience can be a strength rather than a weakness. The inexplicable ascendancy of Trump re-established that a total absence of political bona fides will pose no impediment to success, instead plowing through criticisms and obstacles a more knowledgeable candidate would be expected to address. A noisy, ultraconservative, often racist razzle dazzle proves more than sufficient to get the job (of hoarding and exploiting clout, not

safeguarding American citizens) done.

“As Reagan himself admitted near the end of his last term, he said, ‘Sometimes, I wonder how you could do this job if you hadn’t been an actor,’” Tyrnauer says. “I don’t think this is a bad thing, necessarily, Franklin Roosevelt, who I consider our greatest president, mastered the prevailing medium of his time, which was radio.

Presentation and the ability to work through the media is an important part of being a capable leader. It gets more problematic and interesting when we think of him in the role of presenter and frontman, which Reagan was throughout his acting career, often playing a master of ceremonies part in movies. He was a radio emcee and a hybrid corporate shill-slashTV host in his job with General Electric. He came by this role so naturally because he’d been type cast into it for three decades. It was easy to cast him again.”

© The Guardian

The Remarkable and Complex Legacy of Native American Military Service

Why do they serve? The answer is grounded in honor and love for their homeland

On his last day of service in Vietnam in 1963, Harvey Pratt (Cheyenne and Arapaho) poses in Da Nang carrying his rappelling rope that he used to descend from helicopters to clear landing fields. Pratt is the designer of the National Native Americans Veterans Memorial.

Apsáalooke (Crow) was also known as Curly or Shi-Shia and was one of six Crow scouts assigned to Lt.Col. George A. Custer’s command of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry

What has compelled so many thousands of American Indians, Alaskan Natives and Native Hawaiians to serve in the U.S. military? It’s a question the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian aims to answer with a new book and exhibition devoted to the subject, launching today, November 11, Veteran’s Day. Much of what they document in Why We Serve, Native Americans in the United States Armed Forces—a 240page book that synthesizes established and novel scholarship—may come as a surprise to non-Natives.

“The history of Native American service has always been viewed in a reductionist way by the military and by non-Native American society,” write authors Alexandra Harris and Mark Hirsch, senior editor and historian, respectively, at the museum. Natives Americans are ‘great warriors.’ And yet, “not every tribe had a so-called warrior tradition,” they write, “many have had distinctly pacific practices, and most balanced warfare with traditions of diplomacy and peace.”

Native service presents a paradox to non-Natives. Why would they fight for America, which has a long history of colonizing, massacring and breaking treaty promises?

It is a fraught history, Hirsch says. “Given that history, why is it that we have this remarkable legacy of Native American military service,” he adds.

The museum’s director Kevin Gover (Pawnee) says that Natives seem to spend little time contemplating this paradox. But in retrospect, they will say “this land is still ours.”

“They are acknowledging the mistreatment their tribes have suffered at the hands of the United States, yet they still imagine a different and better tribal life in the future,” says Gover. They are optimistic that the U.S. will honor sovereignty, which may be why so many cultural celebrations incorporate the American flag, he says.

“This is a deep patriotism, a belief that, despite all that has happened, the United States can be better, and we want to be part of that,” says Gover.It has been a long-held view that Native Americans have served at a higher rate in proportion to their population than any other racial or ethnic group. Harris says that can’t be proven true or false, in part because the U.S. military itself does not keep accurate tallies. “Demographic data about the ethnicity of American servicemen and women has historically been imprecise, and the number of Native

Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Northern Cheyenne) shares a laugh with a young South Korean man during his service in the U.S. Air Force in the Korean War. Campbell later served in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

John William Gear, also known as Chief Push-ma-ta-ha., (Choctaw) and his warriors joined forces under the command of Gen. Andrew Jackson to defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans.

Seaman Carlton H. West (Wampanoag) served in the Coast Guard during World War I and II.

William Pollock (Pawnee) was one of Theodore Roosevelt’s most respected Rough Riders.

Americans who served in the military are, for the most part, estimates,” according to Harris.

Yet Native Americans—a group that includes American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians—have served in U.S. conflicts since colonial times. Tales of individual soldiers and units have long been known to historians, the military and families. Harris says “ethnicity in the military has always been muddy.” Native people in the South were often lumped in with “colored” units.

And, when the Selective Service Act was passed in 1917, which led to the draft, it was unclear to the military how to handle enlistment of American Indians who were not U.S. citizens—about a third of the Indian population at the time.

During the Vietnam War, for example, the military did not use the ethnic category “American Indian.” Recruiters often used other descriptions, including “Mongolian,” “Negro,” “Latin” or “Spanish,” with some Native Americans also being described as “Caucasian.” But Harris and Hirsch, who worked to tease out historical ethnic data from the U.S. Defense Department and other sources, estimate that 1.4 percent of all troops in Vietnam were American Indians, at a time when they represented 0.6 percent of the U.S. Population.

The scholars estimate that up to a quarter of adult American Indian men served in World War I. During World War II, 44,000 served, with another 800 American Indian women working in various capacities. Some 10,000 served in Korea and approximately 42,000 in Vietnam.

Currently, American Indian and Alaska Natives are lumped into a single choice for military personnel who choose to identify an ethnicity. If they choose more than one, they are counted as “other” or “multi-racial.” As hard as the military makes it to determine who is serving, it still appears that at least 20,000 American Indians and Alaska Natives are serving, according to the latest data, and that Pacific Islanders serve at the highest rate, around three percent of their population.

The lack of solid numbers should not “obscure the bigger picture that Native Americans have demonstrated—and continue to demonstrate—an abiding devotion to military service,” writes Harris.

As in other communities, military service is viewed as an honorable tradition by many Native families and tribes.

And Native people join for the same reasons as anyone else, say Harris and Hirsch, “to learn a trade, get an education, experience the thrill of piloting a jet, explore new life horizons, strike a blow for gender equality.” It’s also a way out of desperate poverty.

The history of service for many Indigenous people is tied to their love of homeland—which, after all, was theirs long before colonists ever appeared. Some Natives also believe it is their duty to defend America as a manifestation of fulfilling treaty obligations.

For Native Hawaiians, military service fits into the traditional concept of aloha—which includes mutual support and mutual cooperation, Staff Sergeant Thomas Kaulukukui told Harris. His father and 11 siblings served during World War II, and he was drafted to fight in Vietnam. “We must serve when needed,” Kaulukukui says.

A Vietnam veteran said that even though the U.S. had broken its treaty promises, “we are more honorable than that. [We] honor our commitments, always have and always will.”

And while warrior traditions play a role, it is not, for many Indigenous peoples, the primary reason for military service.

“Native people as a whole have been stereotyped throughout history,” Harris says. They are typically viewed as having innate warrior skills. “It seems on the surface that this would be a positive stereotype,”— something that wouldn’t necessarily be harmful, she says.

“But the idea that Native people have some inborn talent at tracking, scouting, martial skills emerges as the military placing them in the most dangerous roles,” she says.

That has included having them act as point—making them the first people to engage with the enemy.

Some tribes—such as the Kiowa and other Great Plains tribes—have a warrior tradition. But “not all tribes do,” says Harris. “Some tribes have pacifist traditions that they still adhere to today,” she says. Traditions most often are about a balance between war and peace.

“Even for those tribes that had warrior traditions there were these countervailing, very, very strong traditions of peace and diplomacy,” says Hirsch.

Why We Serve seeks to challenge stereotypes and highlight the unique traditions that Indigenous people bring to their military service, such as protection and

Nurse Charlotte Edith Anderson Monture (Six Nations of the Grand River) volunteered for the U.S. Medical Corps and served in a hospital in France during World War I, treating soldiers who had been gassed or shot.

Sergeants Sam Stitt (Choctaw) and Chuck Boers (Lipan Apache) pose next to their artwork in An Najaf, Iraq

Photographer Horace Poolaw (Kiowa) documented the Kiowa community through three wars - World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Poolaw is seen here with side gunner Gus Palmer (Kiowa) inside a B-17 Flying Fortress at MacDill Field in Tampa, Florida, ca. 1944.

A military officer swears in four Alaska Territorial Guardsmen for assignment in Barrow, Alaska, on the shore of the Arctic Ocean.

Poolaw (above with Gus Palmer, Sr.) photographed service members and veterans performing many traditional ceremonies from homecomings to funerals, parades and dances. His archive Documents how the Kiowa continued to honour their culture.

An honor dance welcomes home Pascal Cleatus Poolaw, Sr. (Holding the flag and seen with the Kiowa War Mothers) after his service during the Korean War. With 42 medals and citations from three wars, Poolaw remains the most decorated American Indian soldier in history.

healing ceremonies, and cleansing after a return from battle.

Reservation held the first Sun Dance in 52 years, to pray for the destruction of German and Japanese soldiers and the safe return of 2,000 of their soldiers.

Still, for some Native Americans, joining the U.S. military gave them an opportunity to continue a warrior tradition, especially during the Civil War and the late 19th century, when the U.S. government was bent on assimilating or exterminating American Indians.

Research suggests that Native Vietnam veterans may have better coped with anger, depression and posttraumatic stress thanks to “tribal rituals connected with warfare and/or ceremonies of healing.”

Going away and coming home ceremonies are still practiced, including honoring ceremonies and victory dances, say Harris and Hirsch. For Native Hawaiians traditions that can include hula, surfing, art and songs to commemorate various battles can help with healing and restoration.

Powwow celebrations, social dances and other veterans’ events—held year-round in Indian Country and in cities and towns across the nation—broaden the support. But, as minorities, Indigenous peoples have unique struggles.

“We wear the badge of our service proudly, and our veterans suffer the burdens of war with disproportionate rates of homelessness, behavioral health struggles and lack of access to health services,” writes New Mexico congresswoman Deb A. Haaland, an enrolled member of Laguna Pueblo, in the book. Her father was in the Marines in and her mother was in the Navy.

The National Native American Veterans Memorial, located on the grounds of the American Indian Museum and opening on November 11, also aims to be a place where Native peoples can honor their traditions and come to pray and heal.

A Book and Exhibition Share Powerful Stories The book Why We Serve, along with its companion exhibition, is primarily about stories, says Hirsch.

Native Americans were enlisted—and given military pay—as scouts to help find tribes that were doing their best to defend themselves against encroaching settlers.

The U.S. Army believed that having scouts from the same or related tribe would destroy morale and facilitate surrender.

Sometimes Indians worked as a type of hired contractor.

“They were eager to wage war against a common enemy,” say Hirsch and Harris. Whites were powerful allies. In 1876, Crow and Shoshone men went to battle with U.S. General George Crook against the Sioux—a traditional enemy. Osage led U.S. military expeditions against the Comanche and Kiowa.

Thus, serving as a scout was a means for continuing a way of life when the U.S. government was trying to stamp out their traditions, says Hirsch. But some may also have viewed their service as a tactic for preventing the Army from wiping out their people.

Two scouts may have convinced Geronimo, their fellow Chiricahua Apache, to surrender in 1886. These scouts believed that if Geronimo stayed on the run, periodically raiding, that it would lead to the end of their people, says Hirsch. “I don’t think they were trying to sell out their own people—I think they were trying to save them,” he says.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, after the surrender, the U.S. government forcibly removed the Chiricahua to internment camps in Florida and Alabama.

The federal government outlawed Native American traditions as part of its assimilationist push. But military service afforded Indigenous people a way to covertly or even overtly get back to some of those practices.

The large number of Native people serving during World War II lead to a resurgence of tribal practices—such as protection ceremonies, prayer vigils and carrying of tribal medicine into battle. The Lakota from the Standing Rock

Master Sergeant Woodrow Wilson Keeble (Dakota Sioux), who served in both World War II—notably at Guadalcanal in the South Pacific—and Korea, was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, and in 2008, 26 years after he died, the Medal of Honor. In Korea, Keeble launched a one-man assault against a line of Chinese-held bunkers manned by machine gunners. Armed with an automatic rifle and a bunch of hand grenades, Keeble destroyed all the bunkers on his own, paving the way for his unit to seize the hill. Keeble later became disabled by his war wounds—including from 83 grenade fragments that had

to be removed after that assault. But he was still active in veterans’ events and causes.

The Alaska Territorial Guard (ATG), a band of some 6,300 Natives, ranging in age from 12 to 80, served as the military’s eyes and ears along the 6,640 miles of the territory’s coastline during World War II. Alaska was highly segregated at the time and Natives were paid less than half of what whites made for the same work. That led to concerns that they might not be the most reliable allies. “As it turned out, there was nothing to worry about; Alaska Natives were eager to serve,” writes Paul Ongtooguk (Iñupiaq), director of Alaska Native studies at the University of Alaska, whose father and grandfather served in the Guard. The ATG shot down Japanese balloon bombs that were traveling on the jet stream— that role and those weapons were classified until long after the war. The existence of the Guard also laid the groundwork for racial equality, says Ongtooguk.

Why We Serve is chock full of profiles—from the story of William Pollock, a Pawnee who enlisted and became a vaunted member of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba during the Spanish American War to Lori Ann Piestewa, a Hopi citizen who was ambushed and taken prisoner in Iraq in 2003 and died in an Iraqi hospital. Since her death, a signature mountain in Arizona close to her hometown of Tuba City was renamed Piestewa Peak. The U.S. Army has named its Fort Benning, Georgia Directorate of Training Sustainment headquarters Piestewa Hall.

“Those personal stories are some of the most important that we can tell,” says Harris, noting that “there’s no way one book can represent all Native American experience in the U.S. military.”

Hirsch says he hopes the book inspires further dives into Native veteran service and reflection by those who have served. “Not a lot of people have thought about why they did this,” he says. “I’d like to know if the book encourages those veterans to think about their own service as individuals, but also for others to think more deeply about the service of Native American people over the past 243 years of American history.”

© Smithsonian MAGAZINE

Civil war massacre 'cover-up' exposed by historian A "frenzied" massacre, which may have included women and children, was the subject of a cover-up, a historian has claimed.

About 160 died when Parliamentary troops stormed the Royalist stronghold of Shelford, Nottinghamshire, in 1645.

Dr David Appleby believes the presence of "European Catholics" among the dead and unease over the bloodshed led to the battle later being hushed up.

He said: "Shelford was covered up by both sides."

The war began in 1642 between supporters of King Charles I's absolute rule and those who believed Parliament should run England.

In the aftermath of Charles's decisive defeat at Naseby in June 1645, Parliamentary forces looked to mop up areas of resistance.

"Some of Charles' battered army were billeted at Shelford, namely the Queen's Regiment who were mainly "The Parliamentarians wanted to forget European Catholics with a very bad the savagery, the Royalists, the use of reputation among fellow Royalists, as unpopular foreign troops," he added. well as the xenophobic and antiDr Appleby, from the University of Catholic parliamentarian press," said Dr Nottingham's history department, said Appleby. he was prompted to research Shelford Dr Appleby said the attackers were "in as it did not appear in histories of the a state of frenzy". war, but he noticed it mentioned in "Records of the Royalist casualties are contemporary documents asking for vague, but it's estimated [the financial aid. defending commander] died with the Shelford was a moated manor bulk of his garrison," he said. between Nottingham and the Royalist "Their bodies were perhaps mutilated fortress of Newark. after death and buried together in

hastily-dug pits somewhere near the battle site.

"There is also a claim in a petition... that several women and children in the garrison had also been murdered."

He believed while some women were soldiers' wives, others joined the Army on the road.

"They worked as nurses, cooks, companions, and it has to be said that prostitution was very common," he said.

Despite the blood-letting, the battle quickly disappeared from the written record.

Dr Appleby said: "It is... perhaps a reflection of both sides' shame and embarrassment at the bloodshed and viciousness of the supposedly 'civil' Civil Wars."

Savage fights over fortified houses were a feature of the Civil War

What was the English Civil War? ● The conflict was a series of civil wars which began in 1642 and ended in 1651. Although usually called the English Civil War, it was a much wider conflict also involving Scotland, Ireland and Wales It is believed the nearby church was used as a lookout post

● The first and second wars involved King Charles I, while the third saw fighting between supporters of King Charles II and supporters of Parliament ● The war ended in defeat for the Royalists on 3 September 1651, after which the younger Charles fled the country. © BBC

Belgium’s reckoning with a brutal history in Congo Antiracism protests have renewed attention on a violent legacy - and activists want companies to face up to it too The cleaners who came for King Leopold II in Brussels this July knew what to do. Many times over the past few years, they have used chemicals to dissolve words such as “assassin”, “racist” and “murderer” scrawled across the statue on the Place du Trône. As before, they removed the blood-red paint protesters had dumped on his hands. But this time they missed a spot: the fingertips and palm of his curled right hand were still crimson.

As protests following the killing of George Floyd in the US reverberated around the world this summer, Belgium, like many other countries, experienced its own reckoning: with a brutal colonial past, with the systemic racism that inhibits its black citizens today and with the question of what exactly it owes to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which it exploited for 75 years.

With thousands taking to the streets to protest police brutality, racial profiling and racism, Belgium’s leaders came under pressure to respond. In a June 30 letter to DRC President Felix Tshisekedi on the 60th anniversary of the country’s independence, King Philippe for the first time expressed his “deepest regrets” for the “acts of violence and cruelty” committed by Belgium and linked that period to racism today. If not quite an apology, it was a big step for an institution that was still celebrating bringing its civilising mission to Congo not long ago. That same month, Belgium’s parliament launched a truth, reconciliation and — crucially — reparations commission to examine its plunder of Congo under Leopold II and the following half-century of colonialism.

Still the demonstrators rallied, tearing down statues of the bearded, barbarous former king. But the one next to the royal palace remains standing. When the penniless Leopold enlisted the imperialist explorer Henry Morton Stanley to conquer a swath of central Africa 80 times the size of his kingdom in 1885, he did so to extract rubber and ivory. Cast in 1926, the equestrian statue is a monument to a reign that killed millions of Congolese even as it brought Belgium great wealth — and an emblem of the wilful national amnesia that overtook the country in the ensuing decades, which some are now trying to address.

It is also literally a piece of Congo. A faded green plaque at the back of the base speaks of another kind of reckoning, which Belgium, and most of the west, is yet to have. “The copper and tin of this statue come from the Belgian Congo,” it reads in curved French script, stamped in warm, aged copper patina. “They were donated by the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga.”

The Union Minière runs like a copper seam through Belgian colonialism and the country’s contemporary relationship with that period. In 1906, Leopold II created L’Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK) along with a diamond-mining business and railway company to exploit Congo’s mineral resources. Those minerals helped to build the Belgian economy and its cities, to accelerate its industrialisation and to enrich its royal family. They also became, as with the statue on Place du Trône, the very means through which Belgium celebrated itself, in scores of bronze-and-tin tributes to its mission civilisatrice.

In 1912, Union Minière began ripping high-grade copper out of the Kalukuluku mine. The company, which was part owned by a British group, was the world’s largest copper producer by 1929, the largest producer of cobalt by the 1960s. By then, UMHK generated half of Congo’s revenues and 70 per cent of its exports. When America’s atomic bombs fell on Japan, they were fuelled by Congolese uranium extracted by Union Minière.

The company became so powerful it was known as “a state within a state”. By 1961, its dominion spread over 7,000 square miles. It was in charge of its employees’

lives from birth to death, schooling their children, who then became workers themselves. Up to a quarter of a million men were forcibly “pressed into its service” during the first 30 years of UMHK’s existence, according to historian John Higginson. The forced rural exodus transformed Congo’s agricultural production for ever.

“Belgium, and Belgian people, have to admit that if they are rich now . . . it’s because they took the money [from] somewhere — and it’s not just that they took the money, they really colonised the whole population, a whole territory, with violence,” says Anne Wetsi Mpoma, an activist and art curator who has been asked to advise the new parliamentary commission as a member of the Congolese diaspora.

Belgium was already a major industrial power by the late 19th century but its economy was immeasurably improved by the capture of Congo, says Pierre Kompany, Belgium’s most prominent politician of Congolese descent. The port of Antwerp grew to become the world’s second busiest after Liverpool, first because of Congolese rubber and ivory shipments and then because of the UMHK minerals. According to a 2007 survey, nine of the 23 richest Belgian families could trace their fortunes to colonial Congo.

Meanwhile, Leopold II spent so much on public works, including Brussels’ grand Arcade du Cinquantenaire, that he earned the nickname the “builder king”.

Kompany advocates for closer, equitable ties rather than reparations, but he too is clear that Belgium must fully acknowledge its legacy. “Everyone should know from where he got his money,” he says. “If Belgium didn’t meet Congo, Belgium wouldn’t be what it is today.”

UMHK itself was the biggest part of the conglomerate Société Générale de Belgique, which at one point controlled 70 per cent of Congo’s economy. Pieces of SGB have subsequently found their way into BNP Paribas Fortis bank and the French energy giant Engie.

Lufthansa’s Brussels Airlines started as the state-owned carrier servicing Belgian interests in central Africa. The mounted statue of Leopold in the centre of Brussels faces the glass-and-steel offices of ING Belgium, originally the king’s personal banker, Banque Lambert.

The British-Dutch Unilever’s roots stretch back to Huileries du Congo Belge, where, as at UMHK, forced labourers were whipped with the chicotte — made from dried, twisted hippo hide — and had their wives and children kidnapped if they refused to work. The corporate timeline on the company’s website includes no mention of this.

Such debts are hard to quantify. But as the global conversation around racism has turned toward colonialism, the issue of recompense is foremost for many activists and politicians. Days after the Belgian king’s letter, Congolese human rights minister Andre Lite told local media his government would continue to push for reparations. “The regrets of certain Belgian officials will never be enough in the face of their obligation to grant reparations to the victims of colonisation and their relatives,” he said.

It is clear the repercussions of colonialism impact the lives of people of African descent in the west as well.

A 2017 study of the 110,000 Belgo-Congolese, Rwandans and -Burundians found that more than 60 per cent said they experienced discrimination — in housing, education and employment — while 86 per cent said they believed they were “perceived” as foreigners. That partly comes down to education in schools. “It needs to be mandatory to have a full lesson to talk about colonialism,” says Tracy Bibo-Tansia, a Belgian activist of Congolese descent. “We have to change the dialogue. The statues are symbolic . . . but the structural racism is the thing that we need to tackle.”

This process won’t be easy. In a recent University of Antwerp survey, half said Belgium had done more good than bad in Congo. A UN human rights panel put it bluntly, urging Belgium to recognise the true scope of the violence and injustice of its colonial past in order to tackle the root causes of present-day racism faced by people of African descent. “Closing the dark chapter in history, and reconciliation and healing, requires that Belgians should finally confront, and acknowledge, King Leopold II’s and Belgium’s role in colonisation and its long-term impact on Belgium and Africa,” it said.

Few companies have ever atoned for their colonial pasts, let alone paid reparations. By contrast, in the late 1990s, Swiss banks and German companies including Siemens and BMW did both for their involvement in the Holocaust. “That’s fairly typical in the low degree of interest in what went down in business in Africa,” says Geoffrey Jones, a professor at Harvard Business School. But “European and western companies have to understand that African problems are largely the result of historical western interference.”

This summer, I visited an old paper warehouse near central Brussels where UMHK’s papers are stored in one of the state archives’ depots. I requested boxes that contained letters cited in the Belgian parliament’s 2000-01 commission on the assassination of Congo’s first prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961. I also dug out a master’s thesis written by Jeroen Laporte, now a UN Development Programme analyst, who spent two years poring over the company’s papers.

The correspondence shows how UMHK’s management was, like most of the Belgian elite, firmly against Congo’s independence. In 1957, its longtime Africa director Jules Cousin wrote fearfully of the asset seizures in the Russian and Chinese revolutions and a recent string of independences in north Africa. “All we can hope for is to delay [independence] for 20 or 25 years and I doubt we can hope for more, as the Russians will intervene more and more to ‘liberate’ the African people.”

UMHK spent millions funding political parties, newspapers, intelligence agencies and propaganda to slow the march of independence and of communism.

But executives also discussed turning copper-rich Katanga, which they effectively controlled, into a South Africa-style apartheid state. In the months leading up to independence on June 30 1960, Lumumba constantly cropped up in the managers’ correspondence. He was a “communist” puppet who would nationalise Union Minière; he was, per one unsigned confidential letter from January 1960, “Ho Chi Minh . . . and will give us a hard time in the months to come”. In a September 1960 telegram, UMHK’s Louis Wallef wrote to a colleague about the need for “someone” — clearly Lumumba — to “disappear”.

But it was actually Lumumba’s name that disappeared from the correspondence. Ten weeks after independence, he was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup; three months later, he was handed over to the UMHK-backed secessionists who, on January 17 1961, killed him, in the presence of Belgian officials. Laporte says: “[UMHK executives] sent a lot — a lot — of correspondence, which was amazingly open, the way they discussed politics . . . And the thing about Lumumba is they did mention him a lot, especially by the end of the 1950s. But in the letters they were writing in January 1961, when Lumumba was assassinated, there’s nothing there and also afterwards I can’t find any comment on the death of a very important political leader, which seemed strange to me.”

The day after Katanga declared independence on July 11 with UMHK backing, Union Minière management announced that they would advance BFr1.25bn in taxes owed to Congo to the breakaway province instead. The move starved the newly independent Congo of revenue.

In a December 1963 letter to UN secretary-general U Thant, Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah was blunt: “Lumumba was not killed because he was thought to be a communist, but because he was a nationalist leader threatening the monopolies of the Union Minière.” The Lumumba commission’s report dedicates an entire section to the company’s role as “the essential economic actor” in the events surrounding the assassination, which destabilised Congo for years. “However, we have not uncovered any documentary evidence directly or indirectly implicating Union Minière in the actual assassination of Lumumba on January 17.”

That commission was sparked by Ludo de Witte’s 1999 book The Assassination of Lumumba. In it, he details the political machinations in Washington, the UN, Brussels and Congo that led to Lumumba’s grisly murder and a cover-up that saw his body hacked into pieces by Belgian officers before being dissolved in a 200-litre barrel of sulphuric acid that, he writes, “came from the Union Minière”. One of the officers kept a tooth as a trophy. In September, spurred by the post-Floyd reckoning, a Belgian court cleared the way for the tooth to be returned to Lumumba’s family in DRC. The addition of reparations to the latest parliamentary commission, originally a truth and reconciliation commission, was also the influence of black Belgian activists. “The king has recognised that colonisation had a negative impact on the Congolese people . . . He has to apologise because we know where his money came from,” says Bibo-Tansia, who is an advising expert to the commission. “And then you have reparations . . . it’s important, for Congolese in Congo, to see which area of society didn’t move forward because of colonisation.”

Belgium has resisted the idea of reparations at the highest levels. In an interview with broadcaster VRT this summer, Alexander De Croo, who last month became prime minister, said: “My experience is that you cannot bring a country out of extreme poverty with a bag of money.” (Belgium has a GDP of €530bn. It spent €1.95bn on foreign aid last year, of which €86.2m went to DRC.) But Wouter de Vriendt, the Green party member chairing the forthcoming parliamentary commission, told me it would explore “the role of certain firms in the exploitation and the abuse of Congo and also to investigate which persons, firms or maybe institutions benefited from those financial flows”.

“I’ve been to the mines,” says Bibo-Tansia, who has worked for an NGO in eastern DRC. “I hope the commission will interview all of these big companies.”

De Croo’s coalition government expressed support for the Congo commission's work and "keep[ing] the past alive" in the 84-page policy document that accompanied its formation on September 30. Karl Lagatie, a spokesman for the foreign ministry, says the government takes "this reckoning ... very, very seriously" and "awaits the recommendations of the Congo commission", which has begun its work.

“Dealing with the past...is a long and complex process, so it requires nuance and depth," he says. “It must be something collective, so for this it’s important that it's a transparent dialogue where all voices are heard and of course the ultimate goal is to give this colonial past an appropriate place in our society, obviously for what happened in the past, but also it is the belief of the government that facing the past will make it possible to build a common future with mutual respect.”

Belgium’s departure from Congo was as extractive as the preceding 75 years. One of the last decisions taken

by Belgian Congo’s white-ruled parliament was to allow Congo-registered companies to become Belgian virtually overnight, ensuring their assets and equity were domiciled far from the independent state. Congo became liable for billions of francs in debts accrued by the colonial government.

The directors of Union Minière orchestrated a deal in which the majority of its shares would remain in Belgian (and British) hands, thereby depriving the Congolese government of control of the country’s most important assets. Profit margins for Belgian Congo companies ranged from 15 to 40 per cent, according to a study by University of Antwerp Professor Frans Buelens, which found that they were among the most profitable companies in the world.

The Congo crisis had crippled the country. But UMHK’s profits and production soared. The nationalisation it had feared from Lumumba finally came in 1967 from the dictator who had deposed him, Mobutu Sese Seko, but Belgium and UMHK again proved reluctant to loosen their grip, organising an international boycott of Congolese copper that effectively shut down the country’s exports.

About a mile from Brussels’ Palais Royal, the headquarters of Umicore, an €8.4bn global chemicals, materials and recycling conglomerate, are marked only by a flag bearing the company’s name. Umicore’s slogan is “Materials for a better life”. It recycles rechargeable batteries, refines cobalt that ends up in Teslas and produces something called germanium wafers that go in solar panels. Little about the building or the company’s website — which features diverse people holding beakers up to the light and a short entry on its “African heritage” — suggests that Umicore had, in part, begun its life as L’Union Minière du Haut-Katanga.

In 2006, Umicore published what it called a “frank and full account of its history”. In his foreword, chairman Thomas Leysen notes that while the company’s history is full of “periods of great success”, it also reveals “certain behaviours and attitudes of the past [which] no longer fit with our current values”. The book covers those behaviours — forced labour, selling uranium to the Nazis, supporting Katanga’s secession — but it is largely a story of triumph.

Eventually, a compromise was reached: Congo would own the mines but UMHK would manage and operate them via a new entity. In his book La Belgique et Le Congo 1885-1980, historian Guy Vanthemsche quotes an internal UMHK document, which calls the commission the company would receive for selling Congo’s copper “an exorbitant price for the execution of a simple management agreement”.

“The whole operation of the nationalisation of the Union Minière was... like puppet play,” Vanthemsche tells me.

“And, in fact, the Union Minière didn’t suffer financial loss through the nationalisation. On the contrary, they made quite a good deal out of it.”

When I speak to Leysen on a video call, he first explains how the Union Minière that emerged years after nationalisation and became Umicore was legally a newly founded company, albeit with the same name and managing some of the same assets. “But clearly there’s affiliation, there’s a history and so we consider it as indeed part of the history,” he says. Citing the Lumumba commission, he says: “We have always tried to co-operate with historians.”

I ask him whether, like Belgium, Umicore has plans to more directly address its colonial history. “Well, we did that quite some time ago,” he says, pointing to how the

Demonstrators stand on a statue of King Leopold II in Brussels in June this year.

It was under Leopold’s rule (1865-1909) that Belgium began its exploitation of Congo’s people and rich mineral reserves

Belgium’s economy was immeasurably improved by the capture of Congo, says Pierre Kompany, Belgium’s most prominent politician of Congolese descent

Patrice Lumumba (left) became Congo’s first prime minister after it gained independence in June 1960

Crimson paint stains the hands of the defaced statue of King Leopold II in Brussels. In June, current monarch Philippe expressed ‘deepest regrets’ and linked colonialism to racism today

Lumumba is captured in December 1960.

Union Minière was described as an ‘essential economic actor’ in the events surrounding his assassination

company had donated its archives to the Belgian state.

“I think we have seen [it] always as . . . proper that we were open to historical study, that we acknowledge the fact that we have that affiliation with the old Union Minière and that therefore the materials that we have in our possession are open to historical research.”

Some activists argue that, legalities aside, companies such as Umicore would not be what they are without their exploitation of Congo. Assets may be sold or stripped, companies may be merged or divested, but if this dark chapter forms part of a company’s foundation, it must be accounted for pecuniarily.

Leysen wouldn’t be drawn. “Our company today is not the company that was active in the Congo. So, we are a different company that has taken over some of these assets, but not the complete assets because they were nationalised before the new Union Minière was founded.

So in our case, I think that does not apply.”

I ask what he thinks about reparations. “It’s a difficult concept from a legal and from a moral point of view, especially for things that are 60 years in the past,” he says. “In our case, there is in any case the fact that we are not the direct descendant of the company that operated in the Congo . . . so I think what we try to do is take our responsibility today seriously and be open about the aspects of the past as we discussed.”

Like other Belgians I spoke to, Leysen says he didn’t learn much about his country’s exploitation of Congo when he was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. “I think there wasn’t a totally shared narrative in this country or totally shared understanding of this past,” he says.

“The issue is getting more and more attention, and I think we will all emerge wiser for it — I hope so at least.”

Umicore has not made a statement about its past in light of the current moment Belgium finds itself in and has no plans to. When I ask, Leysen points again to the 2006 book. Joëlle Sambi Nzeba, spokeswoman for the Belgian Network for Black Lives, says that this kind of silence inhibits Belgium’s ability to truly atone. “There’s no way we can talk about reconciling, forgiving, if we don’t talk about where the money went, who actually benefited from the colonisation of the Congo,” she tells me. “The reason you have a loud silence from the company is that it’s very sensitive, when you start talking about money — it’s like, ‘These people not only want to be recognised as victims of colonialism but they also want us to pay for it.’”

Harvard’s Jones says reparations are a complicated issue but that an important first step would be companies publicly acknowledging their past sins. “It wasn’t the directors or shareholders at the present company that were responsible — but they’re the inheritors of a past company which was,” he says. “And they have a kind of responsibility to recognise it and to come out publicly and talk about it . . . because it’s important to do better in the future.”

That means training new employees with this dirty history in mind. A spokeswoman for Umicore says a short version of its history is used in new employee training. Much like the Belgian education system, she says, “the approach may differ a bit from site to site”.

The Union Minière that existed in Congo after nationalisation in 1967 became the state-owned miner Gécamines. It has been the subject of corruption allegations, involving deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars with the likes of US-sanctioned Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler and Swiss mining giant Glencore, which all parties deny. Last May, Umicore also struck a deal with Glencore to buy sustainable cobalt mined in Katanga.

“I think history is an extremely dangerous thing,” says Jones. “Airbrushing bad things away is not a way to have a better future. We keep repeating the same old stuff, and Africa is full of that.”

Union Minière is a microcosm for what the writer Adam Hochschild called, in his 1998 book King Leopold’s Ghost, Belgium’s “great forgetting”. Hochschild recently wrote in The Atlantic magazine how, for more than a century after it opened in 1910 as the Musée du Congo Belge, the Royal Museum for Central Africa outside Brussels glorified Belgium’s good deeds in Congo: “It was as if a museum of Jewish life in Berlin made no reference to the Holocaust.” Originally conceived for the 1897 World’s Fair, its first exhibit was 267 Congolese shipped in to live in a human zoo.

In 2013, the museum announced what would become a €66.5m renovation. The results were impressive, but the elephant in the room — colonialism — is mostly confined to one large hall. Anne Wetsi Mpoma, who was one of six members of the African diaspora asked to advise on the decolonisation aspects of the renovation, tells me the consultations encapsulated much of the

push-pull surrounding Belgium’s tentative reckoning with its past: “The whole process was such a mess.”

Umicore is one of the sponsors of the museum. Leysen told me that like others — including American Express and KBC Bank (which also operated in Congo) — the company had no say in its content. Still, I was curious how the most important company in a colony run purely for profit would be treated in the revamped museum. Walking through the galleries, I didn’t see much of UMHK. The “mineral cabinet” was an almost purely scientific room featuring an array of quartz, iron, gold, uranium, cobalt and — most prominently — copper, minerals UMHK had virtual monopolies on.

In the colonial hall, which does not flinch from the sadism of Belgian rule, spiked handcuffs, chicotte and all, I found a single reference to UMHK in a foursentence paragraph on the Société Générale de Belgique. I went back through the resource room and found a display case I’d missed on my first lap. There sat a small art deco box — its faded brass plate read: “Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, Elizabethville Juillet 1928”. The opposite case held a period map of Union Minière’s concessions and a small statue of an African man in a smith’s apron. Like much of Belgium’s recognition of its colonial past, it felt rather inadequate.

Later I ask Wetsi Mpoma if, given her experience at the museum, she has any expectations for the Congo commission she has been asked to join. “I hope this violence and the profits that Belgium made in the Congo will also be recognised because I think it will allow us to open the door to the reparations process,” she says. “You have to understand what it is like growing up a Congolese person here in Belgium . . . with all these white Belgian people living these really comfortable lives, and then realising that these comfortable lives come from the money their families made in the Congo.”

Should those companies that benefited pay reparations? “Of course. Though maybe that is for a researcher or the commission to say . . . But we cannot let it go like it’s OK . . . We have to face the truth with real facts and numbers. At some point those terrible questions have to be addressed.

“I want to walk in the streets as a respected citizen of this country and of this world,” she says. “I want that — it has to happen.”

Neil Munshi is the FT’s West Africa bureau chief

© FINANCIAL TIMES A Union Minière copper and cobalt mine in 1953.

The company, which was part owned by a British group, was the world’s largest copper producer by 1929, the largest producer of cobalt by the 1960s

A Black Lives Matter protest in Brussels on June 23.

Activist Tracy Bibo-Tansia says, ‘The statues are symbolic . . .

But the structural racism is the thing that we need to tackle’

Anne Wetsi Mpoma, activist and art curator, has been asked to advise the new parliamentary commission.

‘We have to face the truth with real facts and numbers.

At some point those terrible questions have tobe addressed,’ she says

Sculpture by Congolese artist Freddy Tsimba, outside the Royal Museum of Central Africa

A large piece of malachite (a copper carbonate hydroxide mineral) in Brussels’ Royal Museum of Central Africa

Interior of the recently renovated Royal Museum for Central Africa

Electrophone: the Victorian-era gadget that was a precursor to live-streaming As the battle against COVID-19 continues to rage, the plight of Britain’s theatres, which have suffered catastrophic financial strain thanks to lockdown, continues to rumble through the arts world. Theatres were forced to close at the end of March and, with few exceptions, have remained closed since.

These venues must decide whether reopening when the latest lockdown eases will be viable, thanks to the very real prospect of continuing social distancing measures which make live performance almost impossible.

Even after the UK came all too briefly out of lockdown in the summer, ticket sales were limited and profits down.

Now, with a second lockdown in force and Christmas shows threatened, the future of British theatre remains highly questionable.

One source of hope has been livestreaming shows – and a number of theatre companies, including National Theatre Live had had some success with this format. And, interestingly, the idea of streaming live theatre into people’s homes goes back to the Victorian era.

From 1893 to 1925 the London Electrophone Company streamed the sound of live theatre into the home using a telephone device known as an Electrophone.

Inventors of the time, including Alexander Graham Bell, had looked at the telephone and seen something that could be used to reach large groups of people – they understood that telephones cables could be used to deliver information from one person to many, and not just for one-to-one conversations.

Music concerts, scientific lectures, church services and theatre shows were “streamed” into the homes of those that could afford it across the country. For those with a smaller budget, listening salons were created. For the first time, you could experience a show without being in the theatre. This was, of course, well before the first live radio broadcast in 1920.

Made possible thanks to the work of Frenchman Ernest Mercadier (who first patented headphones), the Electrophone used primitive headsets, copied from the French Théâtrophone (although, unlike the Théâtrophone, the Electrophone did not use stereo technology). “Circular telephones”, as they were known, were being trialled across Europe in the late 19th century (the Telefon Hirmondo in Hungary was still used as late as 1945).

The Electrophone was most similar to the French version because it streamed audio from theatre and music venues, while both the Hungarian and Italian versions were slightly different because they also broadcast their own news service to subscribers.

Shock of the new The Electrophone worked by sending information through telephone wires into a central receiver in the home where one or more headsets could be installed (each additional headset came with an extra cost). The sound listeners heard would be from small microphones secreted behind the footlights at the front of the stage. In church services the microphones were hidden in fake wooden bibles.

Each Electrophone performance was a genuine live show taking place

somewhere in the country – most commonly the big London theatres, such as the Adelphi Theatre or Covent Garden Opera. In 1896, the Musical Standard reported users from the time saying they could hear audience members in the theatre “rustling like leaves” during the performance, which was broadcast live as it happened.

Streaming genuine live shows meant that the listener at home experienced the start, end and interval of a show just as if they were there. If someone slipped up or forgot a line, this would be just as obvious to audience members listening on headphones as it was to those inside the theatre. And Electrophone listeners could enjoy the experience of finding out “whodunit” at the same time as audience members sitting in the stalls.

The Electrophone cost £5 a year when it was first available for subscription in the 1890s – equivalent to around £120 today – and the unobtrusive nature of the technology involved meant that there was no need to reduce the size of the theatre audience. The London Electrophone Company paid for the technology to be installed in the theatre, the National Telephone Company (later the Post Office) would pay for the upkeep of the telephone lines and the theatre would receive a share of the Electrophone Company’s profits – exact records of how profits were shared are yet to be uncovered.

Subscribers could pay an additional fee to be connected to a theatre for the season, such as the Covent Garden winter season. The high cost of the Electrophone (much more than a Netflix subscription today) almost certainly meant it was mainly used by the

wealthy, but sets installed in hotels, public gardens and exhibitions were operated by the use of coin slots and, for a smaller fee, people could listen to snippets of live theatre and musical broadcast.

People unable to attend the theatre, for whatever reason, could listen at home – just as French novelist Marcel Proust did in the early 20th century when he was too sick to make it out of his house.

Grand tradition Since COVID-19 hit the UK, theatres have had to reduce audiences numbers to enable social distancing. It has meant less income for theatres and all those involved in productions. But some companies have successfully combined the live experience with the live stream, as Victorian theatres did with the Electrophone.

The London Electrophone Company closed its doors in 1925 because it simply did not have enough customers to survive. The idea of sitting still for an extended period and listening through headphones was bizarre for most people at that time. But these days a generation has grown up with streaming technology, so the challenge the Electrophone faced in selling its product has been less of a concern.

With the prospect of months of restrictions, we’re likely to see more live-streaming, especially once theatres and live performers work out how to put on socially distanced productions.

But, when settling down at home to watch a screening of your favourite stage show, bear in mind that you are revisiting a tradition set by theatre lovers some 150 years ago.

Promotional image used in the 1890s to market the Electrophone.

Electrophone listening salon in the London headquarters, Pelicon House on Gerrard Street (approximately 1903)

Two customers using Electrophone apparatus with assistance from a more experienced attendant, probably in the Electrophone salon in Gerrard Street.

Photographer unknown, c.1900 courtesy of BT Archive

A French advertisement for ‘Le Théâtrophone’ (1896)

Electrophone listening salon in the London headquarters, Pelicon House on Gerrard Street (approximately 1903)

© THE CONVERSATION

'The slate will never be clean': lessons from the Nuremberg trials 75 years on

Three Holocaust survivors reflect on a milestone in international justice and their struggle to come to terms with the past Steven Frank with his granddaughters Maggie and Trixie Fleet.

Joan Salter with her husband Martin and her daughter Shelley.

Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop and other Nazi leaders on the opening day of the trial on 20 November 1945

At 10am, the men were led into the courtroom and ushered into a specially adapted dock, flanked by American military police.

It took the whole day to read out the 24,000word indictment, which included conspiracy to wage war, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Seventy-five years ago on 20 November, the first of the Nuremberg trials opened in the Bavarian city which had been the scene of huge Nazi rallies in the years leading up to the second world war.

The British president of the international military tribunal, Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence, opened the proceedings, calling the trial “unique in the history of the jurisprudence of the world and of supreme importance to millions of people all over the globe”.

The first trial lasted more than 10 months, presided over by judges from the four prosecuting nations: Britain, the US, France and the Soviet Union.

Among the 24 defendants were Hermann Göring, Hitler’s chosen successor, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Albert Speer. At the end, 12 were sentenced to death, seven received prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life, three were acquitted, and in two cases there was no decision.

The Nuremberg trials were a milestone in international criminal law, under which individuals and organisations are held accountable for some of the worst crimes imaginable. They paved the way to the establishment of a permanent international court, which has dealt with later instances of genocide and war crimes.

But there is still debate about whether justice was served at Nuremberg. Here, three Holocaust survivors reflect on the trial and its lessons.

Ivor Perl was born Yitzchak Perlmutter in Hungary in 1932. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family with eight siblings. Of the family of 11, only he and one brother survived the Holocaust.

The family was forced into a ghetto, then his father and eldest brother were taken away for forced labour. The rest were crammed on to a train to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where his mother and six of his siblings were gassed.

In January 1945, with Russian troops advancing on Auschwitz, Ivor and his surviving brother were sent by train to a concentration camp in Germany, and then later marched to Dachau. After liberation, the brothers eventually reached England. Now 88, Perl was 13 years old when the first Nuremberg trial opened.

“The trial didn’t mean much to me at the time.

I was more interested in getting on with my life. I feel the trial took place too soon after the end of the war. Most of Europe was in terrible shock and most people were just trying to put their lives back together. If the trial had been 10 years later, the impact might have been greater.

“We knew what the outcome would be. What was important was that the world heard about what happened in the camps. It was obviously right to put the Nazis on trial but the enormity of the horrors meant that you couldn’t draw a line in the sand. Justice is too strong a word. It implies a clean slate, that something is over.

“A few years ago, I was asked to give evidence in the trial of Oskar Gröning [a former SS guard known as the Bookkeeper of Auschwitz] in Germany. I said no, I don’t want to set foot in Germany. But my daughter said I must go, so I went.

“I was absolutely horrified. An old man [Gröning was 96 at the time of his trial] was wheeled into court with a nurse on either side of him. I wanted to hate him but I just saw an old man. I could feel something draining away from me. I can’t describe what I felt, but it wasn’t hatred.

“I was 12 years and two months old when I got to Auschwitz. I told the court what had happened to me. Gröning was found guilty [of accessory to the murder of 300,000 Jews], but what punishment could be given that would make me feel satisfied?

“I don’t want revenge. I want people to learn from history.”

Joan Salter was a baby, then called Fanny Zimmetbaum, when the Nazis invaded Belgium, where her Polish Jewish parents had fled. Her family made their way across France, aided by the resistance, heading for Spain before being captured in the Pyrenees and imprisoned.

At the age of three she was rescued by the US committee for the care of European children and adopted by an American couple.

Several years after the war, her adoptive family discovered her birth parents had survived, and she spent the rest of her childhood shuttling between the US and the UK, where they then lived. Now 80, she was five years old when the first Nuremberg trial opened.

“The tribunal’s narrative was very black and white – the Nazis were the bad guys, the Allies were the good guys. The prosecuting nations were seeking justice on behalf of victims of the Nazis – but how could justice be delivered when it was in the interests of the four nations to avoid anything that would expose their own culpabilities?

“The Nazis’ crimes were beyond any level of depravity and inhumanity. But I question whether the prosecuting nations could claim the high moral ground. The US and the UK had both shut their doors to Jewish refugees at a time when the central aim of the Holocaust could have been stopped. Both countries had strict quotas against [Jewish] immigration, and refused to relax them in the run-up to the war.

“France was portrayed as a victim of Nazi Germany, but the Vichy government did not just collaborate but was proactive in deporting thousands of Jews. As for the Soviets, antisemitism was entrenched in that part of the world. There was a distorted narrative.

There was no honest accounting. Hitler could have been stopped if they had acted sooner.”

Steven Frank’s family were secular Jews in Amsterdam. His father, a well-known Dutch lawyer, joined the Dutch resistance at the start of the conflict, helping people escape to Switzerland and finding hiding places for Jews. In 1942 he was betrayed and

imprisoned, tortured and sent to AuschwitzBirkenau, where he was gassed in January 1943.

In 1944 the young Steven, his mother and two brothers were sent to Terezín (Theresienstadt) in Czechoslovakia, now in the Czech Republic. The family survived and were liberated by the Red Army on 9 May 1945, and made a new home in the UK. Now aged 85, Frank was 10 years old when the first Nuremberg trial opened.

“The publicity was huge. All the world’s press was there. I can remember it being reported in the papers. What had happened was industrialised state killing, a highly organised way of removing those – not just Jews – the Nazis didn’t want.

It was evil, and it was so important they were brought to trial. It was the bigwigs in the first trial, but in later trials people further down the line, like the camp guards, were also brought to justice.

I give no weight to the argument that they were only following orders. The things they did, like taking babies from their mothers’ arms and smashing their heads against a wall, were unspeakable. These people had their own minds.

“Even recently there have been trials of former guards in their 90s. It’s still important they are brought to book, held accountable for the actions they took.

“And the Nuremberg trials led to the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and later the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

“I was only nine years old by the end of the war, but in those early years of my life I learned how to hate. You have to get that hatred out of your system in order to be at peace with yourself.

“Now, to a certain extent, I’ve forgiven. But I haven’t forgotten.”

© The Guardian

Rats’ nests and recusant history at Oxburgh Hall

(after 1661), unknown artist.

View of the gatehouse and west front of Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk

Oxburgh is a moated brick-built hall in a remote fenland setting in Norfolk, home to the 18th generation of the Bedingfeld family. It was built with permission from King Edward IV in 1482 (the royal grant and seal can be seen by visitors) and is a remarkable survival: threatened with demolition in the early 1950s, the hall was saved by Sybil, Lady Bedingfeld (1883–1985), who gave it to the National Trust in 1952.

On a recent visit on a wet October day, I was greeted by the 17th-century votive picture that currently hangs at the foot of Oxburgh’s north staircase, and illustrates the Bedingfeld family’s devout Catholicism over the centuries and throughout penal times. In the painting, Sir Henry Bedingfeld, 1st Baronet (1614–85) and his wife Margaret Paston pray to the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven, who also shelters their three sons and five daughters beneath her cloak. Beyond, Sir Henry, loyal to Charles I, is shown fleeing the battlefield of Marston Moor in 1644 to escape by sea to Europe. Despite being ostracised and fined as recusants many times, the family had – sometime in the 1560s or ’70s, it is thought – created a priest hole in the gatehouse where they could shelter persecuted Catholic priests if the need arose.

Domestic laundry was placed over nearby hedges as a signal for when Mass was to be celebrated in the private family chapel. Today, the family still practise their faith and their eldest son Richard is a Catholic priest.

The present Sir Henry, former Norroy and Ulster King of Arms, has lent documents and other objects from the family archive for display at Oxburgh. A letter from the Catholic queen Mary I confirms the first Sir Henry Bedingfeld’s appointment as Lieutenant of the Tower of London in October 1555 (he was also

A tiny fragment of 16th-century handwritten music, found at Oxburgh Hall.

jailer to the future Elizabeth I during her time at Woodstock). He was briefly succeeded by his son Edmund in 1583; the inventory of the contents of Oxburgh compiled on Edmund’s death just two years later provides evidence for daily family life. Spanning the years 1699 to 1703, the diary of Thomas Marwood, guardian to the future 3rd Baronet, Sir Henry Arundell Bedingfeld, describes the education of his young charge in France and the family’s Catholic network in Europe (the diary is the subject of a recent PhD thesis by Daniel Cheely).

Other artefacts on view include the silver-gilt Bedingfeld chalice and paten, made in London in 1518–19: a rare surviving example of a preReformation mass plate, acquired by the V&A in 1947 after generations of sacramental use at Oxburgh. A remarkable late 17th-century requiem chasuble with matching altar cloth records the dates of death of the parents of Sir Henry Bedingfeld (of the votive picture): Elizabeth Hoghton, who died in 1662, and her husband (also Henry Bedingfeld), who died six years earlier. The portrait of Elizabeth Hoghton in widow’s mourning remains at Oxburgh.

There are future plans to conserve and display selected Catholic memorabilia, including rosaries, sacred pendants, embroidered bourses (used as altar covers for chalices or holy texts) and personalised prayer books. But my visit was motivated by curiosity to see some exciting recent finds announced in the national news in August.

After the collapse of one of the attic dormer windows into the inner courtyard back in 2016, a major two-year restoration at Oxburgh commenced in 2019. This project provided the perfect opportunity to excavate the attics.

A fragment of a 15th-century illuminated manuscript found at Oxburgh Hall.

Finds made by builders and the archaeologist Matt Champion, all while working through the first national lockdown, include an ‘almost intact’ copy of the Kynges Psalmes from the transcript by St John Fisher, dated to 1569, and a fragment of a late 15th-century illuminated manuscript, which was deliberately hidden for use during Catholic masses. Pieces of silk, velvet, satin and leather were extracted from a rat’s nest. Of particular interest to David Skinner, fellow and director of music at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge are the tiny fragments of music notation in the same hand as a 16th-century manuscript in the British Library. The National Trust curator Anna Forrest, who has been responsible for Oxburgh for 14 years, explains that inches of dust and a layer of lime plaster had absorbed moisture so that many of the finds were perfectly preserved. Forrest is spearheading the research into the finds and will be sharing work in progress at a seminar on 26 November for London’s Warburg Institute. She comments, ‘The value of underfloor archaeology to our understanding of Oxburgh’s social history is enormous.’

The Bedingfeld family are equally enthused by these new discoveries and gratified that Oxburgh is regarded as one of the National Trust’s fifty ‘Treasure Houses’. These recent developments have inspired Thomas, Sir Henry’s younger son, to write and illustrate a children’s book about the generations of rats who cohabited with the Bedingfelds. In building their nests, the rats salvaged evidence of the family’s faith and have taken on a surprising new role as guardians of its history.

The restoration of Oxburgh Hall is supported by the National Heritage Lottery Fund, Culture Recovery Fund for Heritage from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Wolfson Foundation and National Trust supporters.

© APOLLO

Congress had very few women members back in 1960, and just one woman of color: Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii.

Mink in her office, about 1967

Clad in suffragette white, Kamala Harris used her first speech as the United States’ first female vice president-elect to commemorate women’s political achievements. Her victory comes one century after the 19th Amendment, which gave American women the right to vote.

Many commentators quickly linked Harris’ achievement to activist Susan B. Anthony.

Anthony did advocate for the 19th Amendment. But she wanted only some women to vote.

In testimony before the Senate in 1902, Anthony suggested that white women would be more qualified voters than “ignorant and unlettered” Hawaiian and Puerto Rican men, “who know nothing about our institutions.”

Anthony’s racist and xenophobic feminism runs counter to Harris’ own political and family genealogy as the child of immigrants and of racial justice movements.

As many news articles have pointed out, Harris’ truer political forerunners are Black presidential candidates like Shirley Chisholm. But another politician who blazed a path for Harris is often overlooked: Patsy Takemoto Mink, Congress’ first woman of color and a 1972 presidential aspirant.

Hawaii trailblazer Mink was a third-generation Japanese American from Hawaii. With her daughter, political scientist Gwendolyn Mink, I am writing a book about Patsy Mink’s life.

In Congress, where she served for 24 years, Mink spearheaded lawmaking from a feminist perspective that considered the diverse needs of diverse women.

During her first terms as a House Democrat, from 1965 to 1977, Mink co-sponsored Title IX, a law mandating gender equity for schools that receive federal funding. It expanded women’s previously limited access to higher education, scholarships, housing, jobs and sports.

Mink didn’t just work to empower women.

Coming from Hawaii, the 50th state and a

Mink at a 1990 press conference on civil rights, far right, with Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer (speaking), among others.

Rep. Mink speaking before a House committee in 2001

former colonial territory, she understood that the ongoing violence of the U.S. empire required government oversight.

Mink sought an end to nuclear testing and military training in the Pacific. A 1973 lawsuit she organized to obtain information about nuclear testing in the Bering Strait, Mink v. EPA, strengthened the Freedom of Information Act, and was later cited to justify releasing President Richard Nixon’s secret Watergate tapes.

Mink also was an early opponent of the Vietnam War, running for president in 1972 as an antiwar candidate. Ultimately she decided to campaign in only one state, Oregon. Shirley Chisholm also ran that year, and the two discussed how to avoid competing with each other.

In Congress Mink worked with Chisholm – whose parents came from the Caribbean – to recognize empire and immigration as part of American society. They ensured the U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Trust Territories and the Virgin Islands had representation at the 1977 National Women’s Conference, the only federally funded gathering authorized to create a national agenda on women’s issues.

Mink served in Congress again from 1990 until her death in 2002, fighting in the final years of her life for improved, rather than restricted, government assistance to poor women and children.

Lost legacy Mink demanded rights for all women, including and particularly those on the margins.

Yet she was notably absent from a recent miniseries, “Mrs. America,” which featured the arch-conservative Phyllis Schlafly and the 1960s-era activism of Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug.

Mink collaborated with these feminist all-stars on Title IX, the National Women’s Conference, federally funded child care and much more.

Just as U.S. history puts white men at its center, the history of feminism – and of anti-feminism – tends to spotlight white women.

Black women like Stacey Abrams and Shirley Chisholm who served as the vanguard of democracy are starting to get their due. When Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016, Chisholm was recognized as her forerunner.

Mink was not.

In popular culture, Asian Americans are more often portrayed as forever foreigners or disease carriers, model minorities or sexualized geishas – supporting actors who buttress whiteness, not boundary-breaking leaders.

That the United States’ next vice president is a mixed-race woman with ancestral ties to Jamaica and India could help to expand these deep-rooted conceptions of what U.S. citizens look like and who can be a political leader.

The imprint of empire shaped the migration, educational aspirations and politics of Harris’ family, just as it did Mink’s.

Strong women In 2018, Hawaii erected a statue to honor Mink.

The site, in Honolulu, features quotes from this homegrown political hero.

“It is easy enough to vote right and be consistently with the majority,” Mink said in a 1976 speech, “but it is more often more important to be ahead of the majority and this means being willing to cut the first furrow in the ground and stand alone for a while if necessary.”

Shortly after Mink died, Title IX was renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act. Representative Maxine Waters, paying tribute to her friend at a 2002 congressional memorial, reflected on a WNBA game the two women had recently attended.

“As I looked at all of those strong, tall women out there playing,” Waters said, “I thought it was a short, little woman that caused this tall, big woman to be able to realize her dreams.”

© THE CONVERSATION