Notwithstanding the tribal hatred recently shown for each other by a handful of English and Turkish football fanatics, nobody who has travelled in Turkey or taken a holiday in that country can have failed to notice the courtesy and generosity with which visitors are invariably treated. Indeed, one of the...

The pattern of overseas trade is always in movement: new commodities are constantly appearing, old ones fading into unimportance, different trading partners coming to the fore-front. But between the latter end of the sixteenth and the second half of the eighteenth century, change took specially far reaching forms. In 1570...

In September 1683 in the Cape Verde Islands William Dampier lay 'obscured' among the scrubby vegetation to do some bird watching. He was excited for he had just caught his first sight of flamingos. The detail and delicacy of his description would gladden any modern ornithologist. They were, he wrote,...

This pamphlet addresses the relationship between Bristol and America, charting the rising and waning interest the city and its merchants had in discovering new lands and profiting from them, and the success or more often the failure of these voyages. It provides an interesting argument which may be seen to...

When the Spanish Conquistadores arrived in Mexico during the early sixteenth century there were many repercussions for the indigenous people. Their conversion to Christianity and the sacking of their temples are two of the most well known examples.  However, it is often forgotten that the Aztecs had only a pictorial...

The National Portrait Gallery in London is home to many thousands of portraits, photographs and sculptures of the great and the good, as well as those who travelled on the darker side of history. In 2007 it hosted a small exhibition in the Porter Gallery entitled Between Worlds: Voyagers to...

One of the gifts of the social sciences to history is the use of expository diagrams; but attention is rarely given to the history of diagrams. Maps - schematized representations of locations in spatial relation to one another - can be dated back to Babylonia in the late third millennium...

In 1660, the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa was established under the leadership of Charles II's brother James, the Duke of York. Founded as a slaving company, the Royal African Company, as it became known, also traded in gold. African gold was mined in the interior before being...

Sir Ferdinando Gorges (July 1565 - May 24, 1647), by some considered the "Father of English Colonization in North America", was an early English colonial entrepreneur and founder of the Province of Maine in 1622, although Gorges himself never set foot in the New World.  Sir Ferdinando Gorges was born...

Historian and author Martyn Whittock recently gave a lecture for the HA Virtual Branch on 'Mayflower Lives: building a New Jerusalem in the New World'. In 1620, 102 ill-prepared asylum seekers landed two months later than planned, in the wrong place on the eastern coast of North America. By the next summer, half of...

Professor Malcom Gaskill joined the HA Virtual Branch on Thursday 10th December 2022 to discuss the subject of his book, The Ruin of all Witches, Life and Death in the New World, which was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize in 2022. His research explores the attitudes, beliefs and treatment of people as...

George III has had no reason to complain of modern historians. He has been cleared of the 'taint' of madness (though I had never realised it was a taint) and instead suffered from porphyria, arsenic poisoning or both. Romney Sedgwick cleared him of the charge of being backward and Namier...

History Abridged: This feature seeks to take a person, event or period and abridge, or focus on, an important event or detail that can get lost in the big picture. Think Horrible Histories for grownups (without the songs and music). See all History Abridged articles Africa is a huge continent...

This classic pamphlet takes you through some of the key ideas on the shape, size and movements of the Earth as they changed over time from classical cosmology to the work of Galileo and Isaac Newton.

Joseph Priestley ended his days in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. This is one of the most delightful spots in the eastern United States. It is situated at the confluence of the North Western and North Eastern branches of the Susquehanna, one of the great rivers of North America, which winds its way...

In this Virtual Branch webinar we were joined in conversation with Dr Toby Green on his acclaimed book 'A Fistful of Shells'. Shortlisted for the 2020 Wolfson Prize and winner of the 2019 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, the book explores West Africa from the Rise of the...

Four years after the battle of Waterloo, Richard Whately publicised a philosophical essay in which he argued that there was no real proof of Napoleon's existence. The deeds attributed to him were either so wondrously good or so amazingly bad that they far outran the evidence available to support them:...

Madagascar is one of the world’s more intriguing destinations. If it is famous for anything – apart from sharing a name with a truly terrible film franchise – it is probably for its wildlife, much of which is found nowhere else. But whereas most people have at least an idea of...

No European ruler except Napoleon I has impressed both contemporise and later historians so profoundly as Peter I of Russia by the originality and the personal character of his achievements. Like Napoleon, Peter appeared to some observers, at least in his later years, as almost more than human. He seemed...

An HA Podcasted History of the early British Empire featuring Professor Trevor Burnard of the University of Warwick, Professor Stephen Conway of University College London, Dr Jon Wilson of King's College London, Professor Gad Heuman of the University of Warwick.