Nat Turner's Rebellion
Nat Turner’s Rebellion On the night of August 21, 1831, Nat Turner led a small band of fellow slaves into the Southhampton, Virginia, home of Joseph Travis, his owner. The…
Peter Cooper's Steam Locomotive
On September 16, 1830, a crowd gathered in Baltimore, Maryland, to watch a most unusual race. A spirited gray horse was pitted against a tiny steam locomotive, the Tom Thumb.…
Paul Revere's Ride
Ride During 1775, the year the American Revolution began, tensions rose between the American colonist and the British army. The situation was most explosive in Massachusetts, where the Patriots were…
Shay's Rebellion
Shay’s Rebellion Daniel Shays was angry. The Massachusetts farmer had fought bravely in the Revolution. But five years after the war, he believed that he and his neighbors were being…
The Fourth of July
The Fourth of July On July 4, 1777, the night sky of Philadelphia shone with the blaze of bonfires below. Candles illuminated the windows of houses and public buildings. Church…
The Signing of the Mayflower Compact
The Signing of the Mayflower Compact After two long months at sea, the mood on the Mayflower was as foul as the weather. The ship had left Plymouth England, carrying…
Anne Hutchinson
Anne Hutchinson Freedom of religion is a constitutional right that many Americans take for granted. But in the early days of settlement, it was dangerous to disagree with the religious…
The other spaces of education – beyond the university. The student hostels of the Hungarian Royal Elisabeth University between 1923 and 1941
“Youth is eternal.” How true is this statement? Does student life actually change? Let us get a glimpse into it, and into an interesting education program, in 1930s Hungary. University…
Fors Clavigera', the Young Women of Whitelands College, and the Temptations of Social History
On the first of May each year from the 1880s onward the young women at Whitelands teacher training college in London celebrated by throwing to the wind the timetable that…
Summer Universities, within the international relationships of the Hungarian Royal Erzsébet University between 1920-1946
What kind of foreign educational opportunities did the Hungarian students have at an university, that was founded in Pozsony (Bratislava) in 1914, and quickly changed its seat twice between 1919…
Nikolay Neplyuev's Social and Pedagogical Experiment in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th century
Investigating the original historical pedagogical experience in the activity of the distinguished enthusiasts of the world education development in period of 19th – beginning of the 20th centuries is of…
The effects of the civil wars on grammar schools in 17th century England
Historians have, for obvious reasons, concentrated on the military aspects of the English Civil Wars, yet there can be no doubt that the civilian population was affected, some very dramatically.…
Researching Petty Schools of 17th Century England; Surely Somebody Has Been Here Before?
In researching the history of education in 17th century England, we might expect to find a number of books examining the subject in detail. To a degree this is true,…
Three 1950s youths in a medieval plague village
Kersey in 1957. Although Jack Merriott’s watercolor presents an idealized image of the village – it was commissioned for use in a railway advertising campaign – it does give an…
The king of hard currency
It was a typhoon, or so it’s said, that cast up David O’Keefe on Yap in 1871, and when he finally left the island 30 years later, it was another…
The last of the Cornish packmen
Before the coming of the railways, and the buses, and the motor car, when it was not uncommon for isolated farms to be a day’s walk from the nearest shops,…
“Tamám Shud”
Most murders aren’t that difficult to solve. The husband did it. The wife did it. The boyfriend did it, or the ex-boyfriend did. The crimes fit a pattern, the motives…
One man against tyranny: Georg Elser’s lone attempt to blow up Hitler
Maria Strobel could not believe it of her Führer. Adolf Hitler and his party—a group of senior Nazis that included Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich—had spent more than…
Inside the Great Pyramid
There is a story, regrettably apocryphal, about Napoleon and the Great Pyramid. When Bonaparte visited Giza during his Nile expedition of 1798 (it goes), he determined to spend a night…
Pablo Fanque’s fair
Anyone who has ever listened to The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band–and that’s a few hundred million people at the last estimate–will know the swirling melody and appealingly…