History

There once was a small European nation, whose people found themselves part of a much larger and more powerful state. These people had their own language at one time. However, centuries of marginalisation from the state education and legal…

Laskarina Bouboulina was born in chains, both figuratively and (in a way) literally. She was conceived during one of her mother’s conjugal visits to her father in a prison in Istanbul and was born nine months later in May of 1771. Her…

The sport of horse racing has provided a plethora of historic moments throughout time. One such moment was produced on a racetrack across the Atlantic 95 years ago when a morbidly mad record was created by an Irish American by the name of…

Elizabeth Margaret McNally died 100 years ago in the Summer of 1918 at the age of 59. The County Antrim lady is not known to many today, but at the turn of the 19th century she was dubbed 'The worst woman on earth' and became the first…

The story of the abolition of slavery in America is a long and tortuous one. Like many such stories it has its heroes and its villains. One group that almost always fell on the right side of history was the Society of Friends, better known…

The American frontier was a place of legends, tall tales and wild stories. But among these stories were true tales of extreme human endurance and courage in the face of extreme conditions. One such story became a legend in its own right,…

Brendan Behan entered the world's stage on the 9th of February 1923. As the Irish Civil War was raging Behan was born in the heart of Dublin city to a family steeped in the Irish Republican tradition. Being born into a staunch family of…

We don’t know as much about history as we like to think we do sometimes. For example, almost our entire knowledge of the druids of ancient Britain comes from the writings of the Romans who quite thoroughly suppressed them. How much of what…

Piracy has been used throughout history as a tool of state policy. Giving free reign to brigands to attack civilian merchants from an enemy kingdom is definitely one way to weaken your enemy and enrich yourself, though one that does seem…

Marriage is a tricky business, even in a legal sense. Victorian law treated the wife as the servant of the husband, which among other things meant that a wife killing her husband was (up until 1828) actually guilty of “petty treason” and…