istoryworld
Chronometer
The terms are demanding. To win the prize a chronometer (a solemnly scientific term for a clock, first used in a document of this year) must be sufficiently accurate to calculate longitude within thirty nautical miles at the end of a journey to the West Indies. This means that in rough seas, damp salty conditions and sudden changes of temperature the instrument must lose or gain not more than three seconds a day - a level of accuracy unmatched at this time by the best ...
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Horse-racing
There have undoubtedly been horse races ever since humans first learned to tame and ride the animal. In classical times the second day of the Olympic games is occupied with races for charioteers and for mounted riders, and chariot races are among the dangerous and exciting spectacles of the Roman amphitheatres. Medieval horsemanship is reserved more for the skills of the mounted knight-at-arms, displayed in competitive form in jousts and tournaments. An exception is the Palio, held twice a year in the Campo in Siena ...
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Cave paintings
Prehistoric cave paintings have been discovered in many parts of the world, from Europe and Africa to Australia. Africa has some of the earliest paintings and rock engravings to have been securely dated. Nearly 30,000 years old, they are discovered in 1969 on the rock face in a cave near Twyfelfontein in Namibia. But the most numerous and the most sophisticated of prehistoric paintings are on the walls of caves in southwest France and northern Spain. About 150 painted caves have been discovered in this ...
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Falklands War
On May 3 the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano is torpedoed and sinks with heavy casualties (368 dead). This becomes the most controversial event of the war, because of allegations that the ship was outside the exclusion zone and was heading away from it. The following day the British destroyer HMS Sheffield is hit by an Exocet missile, with the loss of twenty men.The first British landing is on East Falkland, where a bridgehead is established by May 21. Within the following week Port Darwin and ...
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Pharos at Alexandria
The sun god Helios features also in the last of the seven wonders. This is the lighthouse put up on the island of Pharos at Alexandria (as a result pharos becomes the Greek word for any lighthouse). It consists of a three-tier stone tower, said to be more than 120 metres high, which has within it a broad spiral ramp leading up to a platform where fires burn at night. They are reflected out to sea by metal mirrors. Above the fires is a huge ...
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Pompeii: 1st century AD
Pompeii is therefore a normal Roman town, of considerable prosperity in its privileged coastal position, during the first century of the empire. Large villas are built for its prosperous citizens, elaborately decorated with murals and mosaics and enclosing courtyard gardens. Public buildings are improved, a new theatre is provided, an aqueduct is constructed to improve the town's water supply. Then, in AD 62, the first of two disasters strikes. A serious earthquake damages most of the buildings. The citizens are still in the process of ...
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Steps to independence
Increasingly, during these months, colonists are coming to the view that a complete break from Britain may be the only way forward. In May 1776 the revolutionary convention of Virginia votes for independence and instructs the Virginia delegation to present this motion to the Continental Congress. Early in June, in Philadelphia, a small committee is set up to draft a declaration of independence. Its five members include Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. The task of composing the document is left to Jefferson. It is passed ...
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Van Eyck and portraiture
The faces in the panels of the Ghent altarpiece are so real that they could be portraits, and indeed two of the panels depict the kneeling donors. This degree of realism, introduced here in Flanders, is also found in the paintings by van Eyck which are commissioned as portraits - again among the first of their kind. Van Eyck's most famous portrait is of a married couple - an Italian merchant in Bruges, Giovanni Arnolfini, and his wife Giovanna. Painted in 1434 and known now ...
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The first Greek civilization
Their fortress palaces are protected by walls of stone blocks, so large that only giants would seem capable of heaving them into place. This style of architecture has been appropriately named Cyclopean, after the Cyclopes (a race of one-eyed giants encountered by Odysseus in the Odyssey). The walls at Tiryns, said in Greek legend to have built by the Cyclopes for the legendary king Proteus, provide the most striking example. At Mycenae it is the gateway through the walls which proclaims power, with two great ...
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Villa and country seat
Palladio's skill in applying his classical principles brings him commissions for public buildings in Vicenza and churches in Venice. But it is his villas for private patrons which win him lasting influence and fame. Most of these villas are built in Venice's hinterland, the Veneto. Palladio's designs for them become widely known after he publishes I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura ('The Four Books of Architecture') in 1570. The purpose of this work is to explain the principles of Roman design, following the example of his master, ...
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Aachen or Aix-la-Chapelle
Five years after the coronation in Rome, Leo III is again with Charlemagne at a religious ceremony. But this time it is in Germany. He is consecrating Charlemagne's spectacular new church in Aachen, begun just nine years previously in 796. The French name of Aachen, Aix-la-Chapelle, specifically features this famous building - a small but richly decorated octagonal chapel which Charlemagne has consciously modelled on another famous imperial church, Justinian's San Vitale in Ravenna.
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Ajanta, Ellora and Elephanta
India is the country with the greatest tradition of rock-cut temples, and all the region's three indigenous religions are involved. The earliest site is Ajanta, where elaborate pillared halls are carved into the rock - from an almost vertical cliff face - from about the 1st century BC to the 8th century AD. The Ajanta caves are chiefly famous for their Buddhist murals, surviving from at least the 5th century AD. But the chaityas or meeting places are equally impressive, with their rows of carved ...
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Machu Picchu
Ever since the arrival of the Spaniards in Peru there have been rumours of a lost city of the Incas. Many have searched for it before the challenge inspires Hiram Bingham, an American historian. In 1911 he arrives in Cuzco with a party from the university of Yale. After several disappointments, following up rumours of ruins, the group stops for the night by a canyon of the Urubamba river. An old Indian, named Arteaga, walks into the camp. He says that he knows a ruined ...
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Stone Age graves and temples
In a later stage of this deeply mysterious neolithic tradition the megaliths, previously hidden beneath the mounds of the tombs, emerge in their own right as great standing stones, often arranged in circles. The ritual purpose of such circles is not known. They too, in many cases, have a solar alignment, usually now relating to sunrise at the summer solstice. The most striking of these circles is Stonehenge, in England. The site is in ritual use over a very long period, from about 3000 to ...
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Hub of the Mediterranean
Sicily, a large fertile island at a pivotal point in the Mediterranean, is one of the world's most desirable patches of land. Colonized by Phoenicians and Greeks, and fought over between Greeks, Carthaginians and Romans in the Punic Wars, its architectural and artistic remains bear witness to its past grandeur - in the great series of Greek temples, or the Roman mosaics at Piazza Armerina. In medieval times the island achieves a different creative blend, of three later cultures - Byzantine Christianity, Islam and Roman ...
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Wives of Henry VIII
Not many men have six wives. Even fewer execute two. It is not surprising that Henry VIII and his wives have an assured niche in popular history. The king is married to Catherine of Aragon for nearly two and a half decades, then fits five more wives into just fourteen years. His marriage to Anne Boleyn, at first passionate, lasts only three years. The king is disappointed that her first child is a girl (the future queen Elizabeth). He is further distressed when she has ...
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Ten calming years
When Elizabeth I comes to the throne, succeeding her sister Mary peacefully in November 1558, England is in need of calm on several fronts. The religious friction of the past two reigns must be resolved, though it will not be made easier by large numbers of Protestant exiles hurrying home from Zürich or Geneva and eager for their turn. Peace has to be made with France and her ally Scotland, with whom England has been at war since 1557 as a result of Mary loyally ...
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Michelangelo the sculptor
Michelangelo works on David from September 1501 until January 1504. In 1505 the pope, Julius II, summons him to Rome with a commission to provide a sculpted tomb, with many figures, for the pope's own memorial. The vast project hangs over Michelangelo for the next four decades. Some of his best known works are later carved to form part of it (the great marble Moses and the two tormented Slaves of 1513-6). But the project is doomed to remain unfinished.Part of the reason is that ...
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Gold rushes
From the middle of the 19th century the nature of Australia's colonies is transformed by gold. The first mining boom has been in South Australia with the discovery of copper in 1845. But the real rush begins in 1851, just two years after the California gold rush has turned men's thoughts to instant fortunes. Gold is found at several sites in New South Wales and in Victoria. The richest finds are at Ballarat and Bendigo. These are fields rather than mines of gold. The nuggets ...
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Maori and the first Europeans
New Zealand is the last major temperate region of the globe to be reached by humans. The indigenous people, the Maori, are believed to have arrived by about800. Their language is Polynesian, relating to the dialects of Tahiti and Hawaii. Their own legends describe their arrival in a great fleet of canoes from a land called Hawaiki.New Zealand is first visited by Europeans in 1642, when Abel Tasman makes a brief attempt to land - resulting in a clash with the Maori and several deaths. ...
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