On 16 May 1918, President Woodrow Wilson of the United States signed a piece of federal legislation into law. In fact, this ‘Sedition Act’ was an amendment to the Espionage Act passed by the US Congress 11 months earlier.
Despite years of efforts to maintain the country’s neutrality while World War I consumed Europe, America had finally entered the conflict in April 1917. Within weeks, any outlet that cast the US war effort in a negative light, and anything that undermined the government’s sale of ‘liberty bonds’ – debt securities used to fund the Allied cause – was criminalised.
The subsequent Sedition Act expressly persecuted “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” directed against the government, the national flag and mass conscription (the draft) during wartime. Throughout its enforcement, more than 2,000 Americans were arrested, with some fined upwards of $10,000 and others sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Wilson’s administration, conscious of the public appetite for keeping America out of the war, as well as political opposition from pacifists, anarchists and socialists, fast-tracked the legislation amid a climate of hysteria.
To rally the public behind the war effort, Wilson established the Committee on Public Information (CPI) and appointed a public relations guru, George Creel, to head it up. Finding the word ‘propaganda’ distasteful, Creel instead regarded his brief as akin to advertising – selling a positive angle on the conflict to Americans. Meanwhile, the government, in collaboration with legislators on Capitol Hill and the era’s leading newspaper magnates, mounted a concerted effort to get the Sedition Act passed by Congress.
As time went on, the president and his supporters resorted to increasingly extreme and crude ends. Wilson, for instance, openly railed against disloyalty in his speeches and even declared that those out of step with the war effort had “sacrificed their right to civil liberties”. Nevertheless, the congressional debate was fierce, with Republican senators putting up the most resistance. Many expressed concern that it undermined the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech. It was ultimately passed, however, with the Socialist representative from New York’s 12th District – Meyer London – being a notable dissenting voice.
The act was designed to suppress ‘disloyalty’ to the United States while it was engaged in war, imposing strict limits on speech and writing that were critical of the government, the constitution, the military or the US flag. Everything from labour strikes that might “cripple or hinder the United States in the prosecution of the war” to expressing support for enemy nations were also forbidden. In addition, it empowered the US postmaster general, Albert Sidney Burleson, to intercept mail believed to violate the act’s provisions.
Burleson gladly executed the act’s dictates. As a result, the circulation of suspect letters, pamphlets and radical periodicals like Mother Earth (edited by the anarchist activist Emma Goldman) were severely disrupted by the postal service’s new powers.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court – obliged to uphold the constitution – circumvented the First Amendment. In the landmark case Schenck v United States, Charles Schenck’s criminal prosecution for distributing leaflets that encouraged Americans to resist the draft was defended by the court on the basis that speech could be suppressed if it posed a “clear and present danger”.
Also chief among the act’s targets were members of the Industrial Workers of the World trade union – the so-called ‘Wobblies’ – with one of its founders, Eugene V Debs, falling foul of its provisions. Debs, an unrepentant critic of mass conscription to the armed forces, was found guilty of breaching the act and sentenced to spend 10 years in jail. His conviction was later commuted by Wilson’s successor, President Warren G Harding, and he was released in 1921.
The patriotic fervour whipped up by the act also had wider effects across US society, encouraging some citizens to adopt a mob mentality. People with German heritage were attacked in the street; vigilantes forced naysayers to kiss the US flag in public; and those who refused to buy liberty bonds sometimes woke up to discover their front doors had been smeared with paint. And nor were religious institutions safe: pacifist congregations sometimes had their churches set ablaze.
However, the Sedition Act came into force barely six months before World War I ended, and – being an amendment to the earlier Espionage Act – prosecutions were few and far between. Weeks before Armistice Day in November 1918, Thomas Watt Gregory, the US attorney general, ordered lawyers across America to seek his approval before proceeding with cases. Wilson unrolled a tentative amnesty in March 1919, releasing or reducing the sentences of about 200 convicts. With the cessation of hostilities in late 1918, the legislation became null and void and it was repealed on 13 December 1920.
The Sedition Act proved that everyday freedoms could be quickly sacrificed in the name of national security. Yet the prospect of a presidential election in 1920 persuaded a Democratic Party hopeful, A Mitchell Palmer, to outline plans for a peacetime repurposing of the act. Despite his claims that there was a radical conspiracy to provoke African-American communities into unrest, Palmer’s proposal was swiftly denounced by his opponents, with publications such as the Christian Science Monitor labelling it “an excess of suppression”.
Despite the repeal of the Sedition Act, the original Espionage Act remained on the US statute book. Decades later, in 1964, the Supreme Court ruled that criticism of public officials by the press was protected under the First Amendment providing it was based on fact.
Today, the crime of seditious conspiracy remains a serious offence in the US and is defined as the conspiracy by two or more individuals to “overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force” the government of the United States.
This article was first published in the May 2023 issue of BBC History Revealed
]]>The king’s rash attempt to seize dissenting MPs precipitates the end of his reign and the outbreak of the Civil War
By the end of 1641, relations between Charles I and his parliament were close to collapse. After 11 years of personal rule, Charles had recalled parliament to try to levy new taxes to fund his wars against the Scottish Covenanters. Months of bickering reached a climax on 22 November, when the Commons passed a Grand Remonstrance attacking the king’s supposed fealty to ‘foreign princes’. At the turn of the year, Charles decided to seize the initiative. He was convinced that the MPs later known as the ‘Five Members’ – John Hampden, Arthur Haselrig, Denzil Holles, John Pym and William Strode – had led the campaign against him, encouraging the Scottish rebels and stirring up the London mob. The last straw was a rumour that they were planning to move against his Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria.
On 4 January, Charles acted. In violation of convention, he led a troop of armed men into the Commons and took the seat of the Speaker, William Lenthall. But as he looked around, the Five Members were nowhere to be seen. “I see the birds have flown,” Charles said drily, and asked Lenthall where they were. Lenthall fell to his knees. “May it please your majesty,” he said, “I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this house is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here.”
Charles strode out in high dudgeon, the five MPs still in hiding. Six days later he left London and began raising an army. | Written by Dominic Sandbrook
Whitehall Palace in London burns to the ground after some linen left by a maidservant to dry in front of a fire catches alight. Only the Banqueting House and the Whitehall and Holbein Gates are left standing.
Death of botanist, chemist and inventor Stephen Hales. A researcher into plant and animal physiology, as well as the nature of air, Hales is also credited with the invention of surgical forceps.
Louis Braille is born in Ile-de-France. After losing his sight following an accident he will attend the National Institute for Blind Children in Paris. Here he will develop his system of written communication for visually impaired people.
Why did warfare play such a pivotal role in Aztec society? How could claiming captives benefit a warrior in life and death? And what was ‘Flower War’? Speaking to Emily Briffett, Caroline Dodds Pennock takes a look at the warriors and weaponry of the Aztecs to consider how warfare played a prominent part in everyday life, from the cradle to the grave – and beyond.
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Marvin Stone patents the paper drinking straw.
Scholar and author John Ronald Reuel Tolkein was born in Bloemfontein, Orange Free State. At the age of three he came to England with his mother and brother and remained there after the death of his father.
The first radio broadcast of a weather forecast. The transmission was made by station 9XM from the university of Wisconsin in the uSA; the station had been broadcasting Morse code weather bulletins since 1917.
Orcadian poet, novelist and academic Edwin Muir dies aged 71. His argument that Scottish literature had a better chance of international recognition if it were to be written in English had led him into conflict with other Scottish writers, notably Hugh MacDiarmid.
Few events in the long span of Roman history were as bold or as shocking as the murder of Julius Caesar. On 15 March 44 Dc, in the consecrated space of Pompey’s theatre, the life of the man who had come to utterly dominate Rome’s political landscape in the middle decades of the first century BC was brought to an end in a flurry of assassins’ blades. The repercussions for Rome and its expanding empire were immense.
Historians have been fascinated with the killing ever since – not just because of its audacity, but also because of what it meant for the future of Rome. When Marcus Junius Brutus and his fellow conspirators attacked Caesar on the Ides of March, Rome had been organised around a system of government called the ‘republic’ for almost five centuries.
Within 15 years of Caesar’s death, that republic had been transformed by a tidal wave of recriminations and civil war – to be replaced by the age of the emperors.
It is this very reason that Caesar’s death has been seen as a decisive break in Rome’s history: when one period came to an end and another – dominated by men such as Augustus, Nero and Hadrian – began.
Yet to ascribe the fall of the republic solely to the upheaval that followed the events of 44 BC would be a mistake. The republic was a system of government already under immense structural pressure from a range of forces, and those forces had begun pulling at the system’s fabric long before the rise of Caesar.
Patricians: members of Rome’s aristocratic families.
Plebs: non-aristocratic citizens.
Consul: one of two annually elected chief magistrates who jointly ruled the republic.
Praetor: a magistrate whose role could include keeping law and order in the city, or taking charge of military affairs if a consul was away fighting.
Aedile: an official whose responsibilities included staging the Roman games and looking after public buildings.
Quaestor: a junior member of the senate responsible for looking after public revenue and expenditure.
Tribune of the plebs: an official elected to represent and protect the plebeian class.
Triumvirate: a group of three men holding power, such as the coalition formed by Octavian, Mark Antony and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus following Caesar’s assassination.
To understand the long roots of the republic’s demise, it is first worth setting out what the republic was. Its name comes from the Latin term res publica, translated as ‘public thing’. This signalled the fact that the business of the state was public property.
The republic was a system of government built around the idea of a mixed constitution, one that protected against the emergence of tyranny by ensuring that power could not lie with one person alone.
In practice, this meant that the highest magistrates, the consuls, were elected annually, and two men held the post at the same time. In order to reach the consulship, Romans would usually have to climb the cursus honorum (‘ladder of honours’), which started with the role of quaestor or tribune of the plebs, and progressed through the roles of aedile and praetor to the consulship. The idea of elite competition, in which the ‘best men’ (aristocrats) competed for the top jobs each year, underpinned, in the minds of some Roman historians, the republic’s success.
But consuls were just one part of the equation of the republican government.
When the mixed constitution worked properly, power was balanced in a way that meant the magistrates, the senate, and the people had a say in ruling Rome.
The consuls, as the leading magistrates, had the right of military command and the power to summon the senate and the people. The senate, made up of Rome’s leading men, proposed and debated laws. The people’s assemblies – the democratic element made up of Roman citizens (always men) – elected magistrates, approved or rejected laws, and decided on issues such as declarations of war. Each part of the system was intended to balance the other.
That, at least, was the theory. The reality was far more grubby. From its inception, the checks and balances that the mixed constitution was supposed to provide were undermined by a chronic lack of accountability.
That was especially the case in the democratic element. Take the comitia centuriata as an example. In this particular people’s assembly, Roman male citizens were divided into groups of 100 men each, called ‘centuries’, to vote.
Yet not all citizens were equal: the wealthiest minority in society took up 98 out of the 193 centuries, while the poorest, most populous section of society had to make do with just five. This was not a system based around the principle of one man, one vote.
The weighting of the political system towards the wealthy few had profound implications for Roman society – not least the fact that it opened up the system to corruption. According to the first-century BC statesman and scholar Cicero, the res publica worked well when those in charge were looking out for the public good.
But, as Rome’s long history of anti-corruption measures shows, politicians often used public office for private gain.
Another ingredient that posed a challenge to the Roman res publica was the fact that it was in a near constant state of flux, shaped and buffeted by a host of ever-evolving challenges, opportunities and threats.
In the second century BC, the historian Polybius described the mixed constitution as the source of Rome’s imperial greatness.
Yet that constitution did not appear fully formed in 509 BC (the year the last of Rome’s kings was expelled). Nor did it ever remain static in its almost 500-year history. One of the main voting assemblies, the concilium plebis (‘council of the plebeians’), wasn’t established until c471 BC after the plebeians refused to take part in military service until they were granted effective political representation.
There was a ban on marriages between patricians and plebeians until the lex Canuleia of 445 BC. And it didn’t become mandatory for one consul to be a plebeian until 342 BC.
The negotiation of power within the republic also shifted. The mid-second century BC saw two brothers, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, attempt to hold the office of tribune of the plebs for more than a year.
The Gracchus brothers earned popular support on the promise of distributing power more evenly across Roman society. They pushed through land reforms and sought to introduce laws against judicial corruption and extortion.
As it turned out, they overreached themselves – Tiberius’s attempt to win re-election for the year 133 BC sparked a riot that caused his death, and Gaius met a similar fate to his brother a decade later. However, their emergence forced a wedge between the office of the tribune and the other aristocratic members of the senate.
Among the factors driving the brothers’ rise was the rapid expansion of empire, and that growth’s destabilising effect on Rome’s imperial centre. One salient issue confronting Rome’s decision-makers was the question of how new people could be incorporated into the citizen body.
Since the early republican period, Rome had been expanding its territory out into Italy. Many Italians subjugated by the Romans were not offered citizenship, but at the same time they were expected to fight with the Romans as allied forces (socii). The socii were so enraged by this state of affairs that, in the 80s BC, they went to war with the Romans.
The so-called Social War resulted in the enfranchisement of most Italians. But this was not a quick-fix solution to Rome’s structural problems. The expansion of empire created vast inequalities allowing certain citizens to be- come extraordinarily wealthy, particularly those with extensive military careers.
One ancient historian, Livy, describes Lucius Aemilius Paulus returning from the Macedonian wars in 167 BC on a boat with 16 banks of oars, displaying to those who gathered along the Tiber his spoils of war, including a magnificent array of royal fabrics. Paulus donated some of these spoils to the public treasury, but spent the rest on public and private displays of wealth.
The emergence of a new class of super-rich generals not only supercharged the ‘wealth gap’ between the wealthiest and poorest in society, it also created disparities among Rome’s elite.
Men such as Caesar and Pompey – two of the most successful generals of the mid-first century BC – accumulated massive fortunes. This not only enabled them to buy political support by way of bribes, it also allowed them to use magnificent building projects and spectacular games to win the acclaim of the people.
Neither the evolution of the political system nor the expansion of the empire were, on their own, enough to bring down the Roman republic. But the combination of the two seems to have lit a match under Rome.
Rome had seen powerful individuals before the rise of Pompey and Caesar. Scipio Africanus amassed significant personal power following his defeat of Hannibal in 202 BC. So, too, did Scipio Aemilianus after the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC.
The difference was that the victories of Pompey and Caesar came at a moment in history when, while a select band of military men grew fat on the proceeds of their conquests, an increasing number of people felt left out of Rome’s imperial picture.
By the middle of the first century BC, such tensions began to manifest themselves in successive waves of political violence. In 52 BC, a former tribune of the plebs, Clodius Pulcher, was murdered after a brawl between his gang and that of his political rival, Milo.
Following Clodius’s death, his followers took his body to the senate house and used it as a pyre for his cremation. The building – which, according to Roman tradition, dated back to Rome’s third king, Tullus Hostilius – was burned to the ground.
The animosity between Clodius and Milo was in part caused by the fact that they supported rival political factions. The optimates, exemplified by senators such as Cicero and Pompey, believed in doing politics through the senate; the populares, with Caesar to the fore, preferred to take their policies straight to the people.
The violence between Clodius and Milo would soon be overshadowed by another, more consequential, outbreak of internal unrest. In 49 BC, tensions between Pompey and Caesar reached boiling point and erupted into a full- blown civil war, with the latter famously crossing the Rubicon and marching on Rome.
This clash has been portrayed as the product of the ambition of individual men, but the instability of the previous decades suggests that it was also a result of political and social shifts in Rome’s widening empire.
After Caesar had inflicted a conclusive defeat on Pompey at Pharsalus in 48 BC, the politicians who supported him squeezed the system further still, by giving him the title ‘dictator perpetuo’ (dictator in perpetuity). The role of dictator was a constitutional one, which had its roots as an emergency office used during the Roman republic to deal with situations of extreme danger (such as enemy attack).
But Caesar used the office to separate his power from that of other magistrates. The taking of the title in perpetuity was, according to the second-century AD historian Cassius Dio, the final straw for Caesar’s enemies. Two months later, he was assassinated.
After Caesar’s death on the Ides of March, the conspirators had envisaged a return to the republic. But it’s not necessarily the case that this republic embodied the principles of the mixed constitution with its checks and balances intact.
One of the most famous pieces of material evidence that remains from this period is the ‘Ides of March’ coin. On the coin’s reverse side are images related to Caesar’s killing – daggers and a ‘pileus’ cap representing freedom (shown above).
Just as important, however, is the obverse of the coin, which features a bust of Marcus Junius Brutus. Living individuals were not portrayed on coins in the republic – this was an honour reserved for gods and revered ancestors.
Julius Caesar was the first to break with this tradition in 44 BC, minting a coin with his bust on the obverse and the legend ‘Dict(ator) Perpetvo Caesar’. Now Brutus was doing the same.
That he did so, following in the footsteps of the man he’d helped assassinate, emphasises how attitudes to representations of individual power had changed. In the republic as imagined by Brutus, there now seemed to be space for this new articulation of aristocratic status.
But Brutus did not manage to restore even this revised version of the republic. In 43 BC, Caesar’s killers were outmanoeuvred by Octavian (Caesar’s adopted son), Mark Antony (Caesar’s co-consul in 44) and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who formed a triumvirate that afforded them extraordinary powers.
The so-called triumvirs used that power to make and annul laws, appoint magistrates, command armies – and hunt down the conspirators. After suffering defeat at Philippi in 42 BC, Brutus and his fellow conspirator Cassius both fell on their swords.
But then the triumvirs fell out with each other. In 36 BC, Octavian forced Lepidus into retirement and then went to war with Antony, triumphing over his erstwhile ally at the battle of Actium – a victory that led to Antony’s suicide (and that of his lover, Cleopatra) in 30 BC.
Octavian was now the last triumvir standing. He held a triple triumph in Rome in 29 BC, and then in 27 BC, in recognition of his power, the senate conferred on him the title ‘the most revered one’: Augustus.
In his Res Gestae, the inscription erected outside his mausoleum to record the achievements of his reign as Rome’s first emperor, Augustus would claim that he restored the res publica after Actium. However, retrospect makes it clear that, by the time he died in AD 14, the mixed constitution that characterised the republic had, for the most part, disappeared.
It was Rome’s second emperor, Tiberius, who formally transferred the powers of the voting assemblies to the senate. But Augustus had already begun to undermine their role by proposing his own candidates for the magistracies (adlection).
The senate retained its role as a body that administered the empire, with most provincial governors chosen from among its ranks, but the emperor took over matters of policy.
Because the Roman political system had always been subject to reform, Augustus could frame these changes as natural ones that responded to the social and political needs of the time. And he did so using a rhetoric that claimed the spirit of the republic still lived.
The problem, of course, as the historian Harriet Flower has pointed out, is that the political reality was not of one republic, but rather a series of Roman republics, in which evolving political situations necessitated a continual re-imagining of the relationship between individuals, aristocrats and the wider Roman state.
According to Augustus, his re-imagining merely took this evolution one step further. The result was the rise of the imperial Roman principate.
Shushma Malik is Onassis classics fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Her books include The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm (Cambridge, 2020). Accompanies the BBC Two series Julius Caesar: Making of a Dictator
]]>There is some debate about where and when printing first developed. Although the ancient Egyptians used woodblock printing to mark textiles, the technology was refined in China and Korea, probably around the sixth century AD.
Crucial to that later development, however, was the development of papermaking in China. The process pioneered during the Han dynasty – according to tradition, in AD 105 – involved pulping rags, mulberry fibres and hemp waste with water. Engravers carved whole texts into wooden blocks that were coated with ink and pressed onto paper, producing facsimiles.
The earliest-known printed texts were produced using this technique, including the oldest extant book – the Diamond Sutra by Wang Jie, printed in AD 868.
For six centuries, the Chinese kept papermaking a closely guarded secret. But following the defeat of the Tang dynasty at the battle of Talas in 751, the Muslim rulers of the Abbasid Caliphate extracted details from Chinese prisoners of war.
Paper mills soon proliferated in Samarkand, a major centre of learning on the Silk Road in what is now Uzbekistan, exporting the commodity throughout the Islamic world.
Eventually, knowledge of the process reached Europe, where paper was first produced in 1151 in Xàtiva inal-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled tract of the Iberian Peninsula.
The arrival of papermaking in Europe proved instrumental in the eventual success of modern printing.
For centuries, reeds harvested from the banks of the Nile had been used to make papyrus on which information could be recorded. Rome’s annexation of Egypt in 30 BC gave the empire a monopoly over its production.
Books – albeit handwritten by scribes on papyrus scrolls – were commonplace across the Mediterranean Basin until the fracturing and decline of the Roman empire in the fifth century AD.
In East Asia, meanwhile, durable and affordable paper was in plentiful supply, and bound blank notebooks were available to buy.
In Europe, the start of the Middle Ages saw a schism within Christianity between Rome and Constantinople (now Istanbul). Biblical scholars depended on a limited supply of vellum (calfskin parchment) to preserve and reproduce scripture.
Copying text onto vellum was a time-consuming and extremely costly process. Scribes would work long hours, sometimes in special rooms within monasteries known as scriptoria, copying out reams of text by hand – with errors unsurprisingly common – painstakingly creating beautifully illuminated manuscripts.
Even after knowledge of papermaking had spread to Europe, typography remained a largely East Asian skill.
Evidence suggests that Chinese printer Pi Sheng had developed moveable type made from clay in the 1040s.
Then, in 1403, the Korean monarch Taejong oversaw the manufacture of around 100,000 pieces of type.
Soon after, the use of woodblock printing began to take off in Europe. But the fragility of wood soon prompted experimentation with more durable materials.
Johannes Gutenberg, born probably in the 1390s in Mainz (then within the Holy Roman Empire), is credited with inventing the printing press.
A skilled metalworker and inventor, he is also acknowledged as the first person to mass-produce resilient, standardised type.
To create dies, each letter of the Latin alphabet was carved into a soft metal, such as bronze. That was then coated with molten lead to form a mould, into which an alloy of lead, tin and antimony was poured to cast the type.
Gutenberg emulated the block-like design of the Latin characters typical of manuscripts, yielding a close facsimile of the font common throughout Catholic Europe at the time.
Gutenberg’s printing press enabled the mass production of printed works at a speed and quality never seen before.
The printing press transformed the production of documents, drawing on the earlier principles of woodblock printing and technology used in the production of wine and olive oil.
Type was arranged in lines, bound into a sturdy frame, inked, then pressed into paper to form an impression.
Having revolutionised the printing process, Gutenberg’s approach to the aesthetic of the finished product remained conservative.
Gutenberg’s earliest project – the first book printed in the western world – was his 42-line Bible.
First appearing in the mid-1450s, several copies were initially printed on parchment and adorned with the kind of artistry more typical of medieval illuminated manuscripts.
Printing workshops soon spread across the continent, churning out a plethora of printed material.
Works produced before 1501 are known as incunabula (from the Latin for ‘cradle’). Notable among early adopters of the new technology was Venetian humanist Aldous Manutius, who printed ancient Greek and Roman texts in portable and affordable formats, reflecting rising literacy rates.
Venice quickly became a major commercial port for printers. In the late 1530s, the Qur’an was printed by Paganino Paganini and his son in the city. Though this seemed a good business opportunity, given the millions of devout Muslims living in the Ottoman empire, the venture ultimately failed.
Unlike its Latin counterpart, the cursive style of Arabic script was more difficult to translate into moveable type. Moreover, the art of Arabic calligraphy still garnered huge prestige, and Ottoman scholars continued to rely heavily on handwritten texts into the 19th century.
Tellingly, the advent of the printing press coincided with the end of the Middle Ages.
It sent book prices plummeting and, with greater access to learning, new ideas swept Europe, expediting the ‘recovery’ of Classical knowledge and giving impetus to the Renaissance.
Theologian Martin Luther’s critique of Catholic doctrine in his Ninety-five Theses was a significant beneficiary of the new medium: quickly appearing in print, it went viral in 1517, kickstarting the Protestant Reformation.
Subsequently, the luminaries of the Scientific Revolution depended heavily on printed works to critique and advance theories.
Combining ancient technologies, Gutenberg’s press launched an information revolution – the legacy of which still reverberates in the frenetic digital age we are navigating today.
This content first appeared in the June 2023 issue of BBC History Revealed
]]>Our monthly series exploring how the past informs today’s world returns with a special episode catching up on some of 2023’s biggest stories, and considering how they might shape the events of 2024. Regular panellists Hannah Skoda and Rana Mitter discuss the surprisingly brief history of elections, the panda democracy phenomenon, and the long roots of the Oxford Word of the Year – ‘charisma’.
]]>The last Iberian Islamic kingdom is taken by Ferdinand and Isabella
Every year on the second day of January, the city of Granada celebrates the most important festival in its calendar with marches and processions, bands and banners. But this is more than just another Spanish fiesta. It marks one of the crucial moments in European history: the moment when Islamic Spain breathed its last.
Muslims had occupied Spain for almost eight centuries when, in April 1491, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the final assault on the last redoubt of Al-Andalus. Granada was renowned as one of the most beautiful cities on the continent, dominated by the jewelled palaces of the Alhambra. But it was also a city exhausted, friendless and isolated, a fruit ripe for the plucking.
For eight months, Boabdil (Abu ’Abdallah Muhammad XII), the last emir of Granada, appealed vainly for help. At last, with the city facing starvation, he accepted the inevitable. On 2 January Boabdil rode out of the city with some 80 retainers to Ferdinand’s camp on the banks of the river Genil. There he glumly handed over the key to the city. Among those watching was a young Genoese man called Christopher Columbus who later, in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella, recalled seeing “the royal banners of Your Highnesses planted by force of arms on the towers of the Alhambra”.
For the Muslims of Granada, the fall of their city was a disaster. For almost a century their lives would be scarred by persecution, involuntary conversion, unsuccessful revolts and forced expulsion. As for Boabdil, he eventually fled into exile in Morocco. As he quit the city for the last time, he reputedly turned back and gave a great sigh of misery. “Now you weep like a woman,” his mother said, “over what you could not defend as a man.” | Written by Dominic Sandbrook
The last issue of the thrice-weekly Tatler essay paper was published. Two months later Richard Steele, Tatler’s editor, and Joseph Addison, the paper’s major contributor after Steele, co-founded The Spectator magazine.
The schools of the Royal Academy of Arts meet for their first session in Pall Mall, London with Academy President Joshua Reynolds delivering the first of his famous ‘discourses’ on art.
Georgia becomes the fourth American state (after Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey) to ratify the United States Constitution.
Manila, the capital of the Philippines, fell to the Japanese. It was recaptured by the Americans in March 1945 but was almost totally destroyed in the fighting.
How did British agents bug German PoWs during the Second World War? What qualities do you need to be a successful spy? And how are deepfakes changing the face of modern warfare? Amanda Mason introduces Spencer Mizen to some of the 150 objects starring in the new Imperial War Museums’ exhibition, Spies, Lies and Deception.
]]>Telemachus intervenes in an attempt to halt Rome’s bloody public games
By the beginning of the fifth century AD, the gladiatorial games that had once so entranced the Roman crowds were in steep decline. To the disappointment of the connoisseurs, brutal slaughter had gone out of fashion. Under the new state religion, Christianity, the games were seen as a reactionary relic. Attendances were dwindling, the arenas were crumbling and the standard of the fighters was not what it had been.
Then, for the fans, came the worst blow of all. On the first day of AD 404 (though in truth it’s hard to be sure of the exact date), a crowd gathered at one of Rome’s arenas, perhaps the Colosseum, for some good unclean fun. Just as things were getting interesting, a scruffy figure leapt into the arena, rushed to the gladiators and tried to drag them apart. “In the name of Christ, forbear!” he shouted – or so some later accounts claimed.
The protester, it transpired, was an ascetic monk named Telemachus from the eastern part of the empire, who was visiting Rome for some purpose of his own. Appalled by the “abominable spectacle”, he was determined to stop it. The fans, though, were not happy. According to the church historian Theodoret of Cyrrhus, writing just a little after these events, the crowds reacted violently to Telemachus’s intervention, stoning him to death. And that seemed to be the end of that.
But it wasn’t. When the young (and extremely God-fearing) emperor Honorius heard about the monk’s fate, he decided that enough was enough. By his edict, gladiatorial games were banned. So were trousers, interestingly – but that’s another story. | Written by Dominic Sandbrook
The rambunctious king discovers a fatal incompatibility
As the winter sun dipped towards the horizon on New Year’s Day 1540, Anne of Cleves stood at the window of the Bishop’s Palace in Rochester. She had been on the road for weeks, having pledged to become the fourth wife of King Henry VIII.
Suddenly, footsteps sounded on the stairs and a man appeared in the doorway: Sir Anthony Browne, master of the king’s horse, who had left Greenwich earlier that day.
Bored of waiting for his bride, Henry had decided to welcome her with what he considered a hilarious prank. He and a group of friends rode to Rochester in matching hoods and capes, like Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Out of politeness, though, he sent Browne ahead to warn her.
As Anne stared at Browne in bewilderment, he knew she was wrong for Henry. He had, he later recalled, never been “more dismayed in all his life”.
Then the door burst open and men in multicoloured hoods leapt into the room, roaring with laughter. Anne said nothing, but gave a nervous half-smile. The largest newcomer bowed low and held out a gift – from the king himself, he said grandly. Baffled, Anne took it. Then she turned away.
There was a dreadful silence. The large man stood there, flummoxed, then strode out of the room. A few moments later he returned without his hood. Only then did Anne realise he was her future husband.
She tried to smile, but it was too late. On the barge back to Greenwich, Henry sulked in silence before calling for Browne. “I see nothing in this woman as men report of her,” he said bitterly. “And I marvel that wise men would make such report as they have done.”
Browne said nothing. He knew the marriage was doomed. | Written by Dominic Sandbrook
Ben Johnson’s masque, Oberon, the Fairy Prince, was performed at Whitehall. Inigo Jones designed the scenery and Prince Henry, the eldest son of James I, took the title role.
A former slave ship worker sets his search for God to music
When the villagers of Olney, Buckinghamshire assembled for their regular prayer meeting on New Year’s Day 1773, few could have imagined that they were about to hear the first performance of a hymn that has become famous the world over.
Most were poor and illiterate, scratching a living from making lace. They were lucky, however, in their curate, a much-travelled man called James Newton. Born in Wapping in 1725, he had served in the Royal Navy and had worked for many years on a slave ship. During a terrible storm, Newton had cried out to God for help, and afterwards he underwent a conversion experience.
After abandoning the slave trade and training as a priest, Newton was offered the curacy of Olney. There he befriended a failed writer called William Cowper, who had flirted with suicide and since undergone a similar born-again experience. Together they wrote hymns for the village’s regular prayer meetings, usually with simple lyrics that would appeal to the locals.
In the final days of 1772 they produced something special: a moving account of Newton’s conversion, in the direct language of evangelical Protestantism. “I once was lost, but now am found,” Newton wrote, “Was blind, but now I see.” The title was ‘1 Chronicles 17: 16-17, Faith’s review and expectation’. Today it is one of the world’s best-known songs, with versions by, among others, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. It even features in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. We know it, of course, as ‘Amazing Grace’. | Written by Dominic Sandbrook
Shute Barrington, the bishop of Durham, sent troops from Durham Castle to break up a strike by miners at collieries owned by the dean and chapter of Durham Cathedral at Chesterle Street.
Following the passing of the Old Age Pension Act in the previous August, half a million people receive Britain’s first national noncontributory old age pension. Payments of between one shilling and five shillings a week are made to men and women of over 70 years of age with an annual income of under £31 a year. Recipients have to be of “good character”. Those who have habitually failed to work or who have been imprisoned in the last ten years are not entitled to the pension.
Britain’s four largest railway companies – Great Western; London, Midland and Scottish; London and North Eastern; and Southern – are nationalised to form British Railways.