University of Melbourne Archives
I’ve been leafing through Foy & Gibson catalogues from the first four decades of the 20th century to try to understand what attracted Australian customers to wearing wool.
Ahmad ibn Fadlan wrote the only eyewitness account of a viking funeral.
German Vizulis/Shutterstock (made using Canva)
A marketplace argument led to the emergence of a key eyewitness account of a Viking burial on the Volga river
A group of witches offering wax effigies to the Devil in a 17th-century woodcut.
Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
Only five witches were executed in Wales, while thousands were sentenced to death in Scotland and England.
Detail from a stone slab showing the Mesopotamian king Barrekub praying.
(Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin/Wikimedia Commons)
To protect their kings, ancient Mesopotamians discovered how to predict eclipses, which were associated with the deaths of rulers. This eventually led to the birth of astronomy.
TROVE
The grave of Andrew George Scott, famously known as Captain Moonlite, may not bear the significance attributed to it in a recent proposal by the Heritage Council of NSW.
Maya Angelou’s political journalism, written in the 1960s, was radical and anti-colonial.
Pictorial Press/Alamy Stock Photo
Angelou’s 1960s political journalism in Africa demonstrates her desire to link the struggle for civil rights in the US to global campaigns against racism.
Depiction of an eruption of Vesuvius seen from Portici, by Joseph Wright (c. 1774–6).
Huntington Library, Pasadena
The story of how a ‘new Pompeii’ was built is far less well known than that of the ancient city.
Shutterstock
Purple was highly valued and associated with royalty, power, and prestige in various ancient cultures, including the Roman and Byzantine Empires. So how did red creep its way in?
Portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort by Meynart Weywyck (circa 1510).
National Portrait Gallery
Beaufort’s presence at Collyweston formed part of a strategic plan, devised by mother and son, to exert royal influence both locally and nationally.
For love or money?
Kameleon007/iStock/Getty Images Plus
A growing number of Republicans say that you shouldn’t be able to divorce simply because you’ve fallen out of love. It’s an idea with a long history.
The SS Hartdale is lying at a depth of 80 metres, 12 miles off the coast of Northern Ireland.
Michael Roberts/Unpath’d Waters
The SS Hartdale was sunk by a German U-boat in 1915 and its final resting place had long been unknown.
British soldiers questioning suspected members of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army near Gilgil, Kenya, on Jan. 8, 1953.
(AP Photo)
Operation Legacy highlights the repercussions faced when people with power determine what information is available to interpret events of the past.
Chris Tefme/Shutterstock
Victorian eugenicists perpetuated the idea that only white men went bald because of their intelligence.
Wager’s Action off Cartagena, 28 May 1708 by Samuel Scott (1772), a painting showing the moment the San José was blown up.
National Maritime Museum
The boat was sunk while still laden with treasure including 11 million gold and silver coins, emeralds and other precious cargo.
Baron Cobham and family around the dinner table, 1567.
Master of the Countess of Warwick
During the Tudor period, religious beliefs shaped people’s attitudes towards food and food waste.
Eve – Lucas Cranach the Elder (c.1510)
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The story of human evolution is inextricable from the story of gynaecology.
The Vesuvius Challenge incentivizes technological development by inviting researchers to figure out how to ‘read’ ancient papyri excavated from volcanic ash of Mount Vesuvius in Italy. Columns of Greek text retrieved from a portion of a scroll.
(Vesuvius Challenge)
However exciting the technological developments may be, the task of reading and analyzing the Greek and Latin texts recovered from the papyri will fall to human beings.
Several campaigns have been waged against statues linked to Africa’s colonial past.
Rodger Bosch/Getty Images
The fate of several colonial statues in Africa continues to be a subject of controversy.
‘The Drunkenness of Noah’ by Giovanni Bellini.
Wikimedia
For nearly 500 years, priests and imams justified slavery on the basis of a misunderstood passage of the Bible.
A photograph of the 2017 total solar eclipse, taken at the Oregon State Fair Grounds, Salem, Ore.
(Dominic Hart/NASA)
Mentions of total solar eclipses in ancient history help researchers pinpoint precise dates of notable events.