by Mike Dash
Many apologies to subscribers who received a notification of a new post earlier today. Unfortunately this was an error on my part. I was working on an upcoming essay and managed to hit the publish button in error well before the work was done. So I ve unpublished, and will try to get on with finishing Continue reading The Sin-Eaters (a preview)
If you were down and out in Victorian London, where would you sleep? In a bedbug-ridden lodging house, perhaps, or, if money was too tight for that, in one of the repurposed coffins offered by the Salvation Army. But if even that sort of accommodation was beyond your means, you'd turn to a twopenny hangover – a rope, stretched across a filthy room at chest level, across which the truly desperate…
For almost three years now, while my other responsibilities have prevented me from updating the main blog as I would wish to, I ve been adding material to this site on a new page, Ask Mike, which you can access via the menu above. This page contains original material I ve contributed to AskHistorians, the world s biggest Continue reading Ask Mike
Before Europeans arrive to ruin everything, Australia lay dreaming in unchanging isolation for nearly 70,000 years. Right? Wrong. Read on for the stories of Aborigines who voyaged as far as Singapore and built their own community in the bustling heart of the East Indies.
Eerily well-preserved Iron Age bodies pulled from ancient peat bogs display the marks of ultraviolence – garrottes, slit throats, pulverised skulls. Are archaeologists dangerously prone to look for evidence of ritual? Or are bog bodies evidence for a Europe-wide cult of human sacrifice?
Why has everybody heard of Spartacus, when they have never heard of Eunus? The Thracian gladiator's forgotten predecessor led a slave war against Rome that was five times the size, and lasted three times as long – and he did it breathing fire and spouting prophecy as an annointed god-king, too.
In 1768, close to the peak of its prosperity, China was swept by fear of sorcery. Master-magicians were said to be at work, sending out servants to stupefy victims, clip their hair – and steal their souls. The lost souls, in turn, were to be used to animate malicious paper men and animals... creating an unstoppable supernatural army that would have the power to overthrow the Emperor himself.
The story of a Breton count, Conomor the Cursed, features a man seared into memory as the most evil tyrant of his time. A ruler believed to roam his dominions as a werewolf. And a husband whose brutal murder of a string of wives made him the template for a million nursery nightmares...
Who served out the longest prison sentence known to history? My extensive investigation – begun in 2010 but now comprehensively updated – answers that question [it’s Charles Fossard, of Australia, with an all-but-incomprehensible 70 years, 303 days]. It also takes a look at some of Fossard’s unwitting and unwilling rivals, and tries to go inside the cells, to hear from the prisoners themselves.…
The idea of a fanatical Japanese soldier, unaware the war is over, fighting on for decades in the jungles of some remote Pacific island is so familiar it has become a cliché. But Teruo Nakamura, the very last of more than 120 such known stragglers, broke almost every rule of this game – and his story is all the more interesting for it.