Robert's European History Blog

November 5th is the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, an attempt by Catholic rebels to destroy the English Houses of Parliament with the king, his court and all the ... Read More

Peter Steinfels’ article from the New York Times presents a brief synthesis of the last decade of historical writing about witchcraft, presenting what will certainly be a new view to ... Read More

And now a change: someone who isn't Shakespeare. The National Portrait Gallery in London is examining six supposed portraits of Shakespeare in great depth to discover if they really are ... Read More

On October 22 Britain celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, when a British navy led by Admiral Nelson defeated a French force, creating a legend of naval ... Read More

Europe is currently wracked with bird-flu scare mongering and paranoia (in case you've not heard of bird-flu, read here), leading many newspapers to draw upon the great flu epidemic of ... Read More

A forthcoming book by Professor William Rubinstein and Brenda James claims that many of Shakespeare's plays were written by MP, Ambassador and nobleman Sir Henry Neville, who spent time in ... Read More

A car once belonging to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini has been auctioned in Toronto to raise money for a hospital for sick children: it raised $164,561 and drew bidders from ... Read More

Less a book review and more a eulogy about author Margaret MacMillan, this article nevertheless contains some refreshing ideas about the Treaty of Versailles, the 1919 agreement which some historians ... Read More

460 years after Henry VIII's flagship sank, and 23 after I watched the hull being carefully raised from the seabed on television in school, the vessel's anchor has also been ... Read More

Scientists in the United States have managed to recreate the 'Spanish' influenza virus, which killed up to fifty million people in the post-war world of 1918-1919, via a careful study ... Read More

In this piece from the Miami Herald, Giles Milton reviews James Reston's 'Dogs of God', am ambition work that attempts to culturally link the Christian destruction of Moslem Spain with ... Read More

This story from Chicago Tribune concerns a modern man who is suing his workplace, where he once worked and fought as a medieval knight. What, you may be asking, does ... Read More

I was fascinated by the first line of this article: "The life-sized marble statues of two ancient Greek goddesses have emerged during excavations of a 5,000-year-old town on the island ... Read More

According to this, a Russian Napoleonic-era Admiral has been made the saint of nuclear bombing...I suppose that's one way to keep history alive and relevant!

The perfectly preserved bodies of two babies that were discovered in Austria – reported here - might be 27,000 years old, dating them to an Ice Age culture. The presence ... Read More