Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Laura Cumming, The Vanishing Velazquez (Scribner) Art history detective story: looking forward….

The sky was not a big thing in the supernatural before the early modern period. Yes, there were the odd wild hunts, some dragon flights (aurora borealis?) and some airy elementals. But there was no sense that the heavens were worth watching for the supernatural in their own right. Then the modern age begins: Protestantism, […]

Socrates makes his contribution to world history. Then there was sociology…

Beach offers the second in his series of lost sounds: the noises that were familiar to our ancestors but that have now for ever vanished and that we struggle to reconstruct. Last time, the Lancashire clog charge, this time the criers of early eighteenth-century London. The idea of London street criers, perhaps particularly from Victorian […]

These were some interesting love tips from early nineteenth-century Britain. The sources is included, below, with apologies and joy, it is terribly wonderful. The good and bad signs are mixed naturally. If the maid has the first and last letters of her forename the same as the first and last letters of gentleman’s surname this […]

John Man, Saladin: The Sultan Who Vanquished the Crusaders and Built an Islamic Empire A new biography of the great Kurdish leader of the Arab world.  

Ho, ho, ho!

Witches fly in many different cultures: the British anthropologist Needham argued that it was a way of expressing their power, their ability to bring maleficum to all who get in their way or on their nerves. But in the European tradition witches have been associated, above all, with broomsticks: though note that witches were also […]

Always love the crests…

A lovely story from New Market in Co Cork in the wild west of Ireland and another episode from the series on horse charming. Not least interesting is the fact that this seems to be the origin of the modern phrase ‘horse whispering’. Among the curiosities of this district [New Market, 1810] may be properly included […]

Remarkable sword from the Civil War: brings out my inner cavalier.

Surrenders are never very easy moments but the meeting between William Tecumseh Sherman and Joseph E. Johnston at Bennett Place on 17 and 18 April 1865 as the American Civil War was winding down proved a generally civilized affair. Sherman, the Union commander, was a Democrat and had a natural sympathy for the south: despite […]

Paris, anteaters…

How the chaps in purple bought it…

Sometimes the blogger finds a newstory that he cannot let go. After a week of wrestling with his conscience Beach has decided that he simply has to give this particular incidence of love between the peoples of Europe wider coverage. We are in 1931. Prague. Thursday. Two schoolboys were killed in the course of a […]