HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2023-10-09T10:59:54.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Tikal in 7 artefacts: explore the metropolis of the Maya
items: Your guide to ancient Maya: from the writing system to the truth about ‘human sacrifice’
items: Hell on high water: the rise and fall of the golden age of piracy
items: “Indigenous Americans who travelled across the Atlantic were horrified by inequalities in European society”
items: Kwasi Kwarteng: "Wars are bloody expensive – so the only way nations can buy what they need is by printing their own money"
items: Why we should remember when Cortés’s conquistadors were forced to flee the Aztec capital
items: What does Cinco de Mayo commemorate?
items: The Siege of Querétaro: the downfall of Maximilian I of Mexico
items: Mexico’s ill-fated Austrian emperor
items: The real pirates of the Caribbean: your guide to Nassau's pirate republic

Tikal in 7 artefacts: explore the metropolis of the Maya
type: item
date: 2023-06-28T11:14:27.000Z
creator: Paul Bloomfield
subject: General ancient history
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Of the city-states that dominated much of Central America in the first millennium AD, Tikal was perhaps the greatest. Paul Bloomfield explores the pyramids and stone reliefs of Guatemala's most impressive Maya monument
encoded: Grand central Around AD 734, the monumental pyramid now designated Temple I was erected at Tikal to honour and protect the burial of Jasaw Chan K’awiil I (Moon Double Comb, also known as Ah Cacau – Lord Chocolate), the Maya city’s ruler from AD 682. The pyramid soars to 45 metres high and is topped with a roof comb comprising three small rooms. It stands sentinel over the Grand Plaza, epicentre of possibly the greatest city-state of Central America – Tikal. Settled from around 600 BC, by the peak of the Maya Classic Period (c250–900 AD) Tikal sprawled over 30 sq km and was home to more than 50,000 people. Yet the city – and the civilisation of the lowland Maya as a whole – mysteriously collapsed just a century after Temple I was built. Read more | Your guide to ancient Maya: from the writing system to the truth about ‘human sacrifice’ Stone story The limestone monolith known as Stela 31, carved in AD 445 and now displayed in the Tikal Museum, isn’t just an artistic masterpiece – it’s also a crucial historic document. The front depicts Sihyaj Chan K’awiil II (Stormy Sky), a powerful warrior king – the Maya civilisation wasn’t a single peaceful society, but a series of often warring city-states . More important still is the text on the reverse, detailing the early history of Tikal from the foundation of its royal dynasty by Yax Moch Xoc around AD 230. Body language The writing of the Maya consisted of glyphs (symbols) such as this one on a stela (inscribed column) at Tikal, which was called Mutul by its original inhabitants. The system uses logograms to indicate whole words as well as syllabic glyphs. Knowledge of the script was lost by the end of the 16th century after the Spanish conquest of Central America, and it has still not been completely deciphered after more than a century of study. Today perhaps 90% of Mayan texts can be translated. First steps The hulking ‘Lost World Pyramid’ is impressive for its heft – 32 metres high and 80 metres along its base – but al…

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Your guide to ancient Maya: from the writing system to the truth about ‘human sacrifice’
type: item
date: 2023-06-21T05:11:19.000Z
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
description: Professor Matthew Restall of Pennsylvania State University answers key questions on the ancient Maya civilisation
encoded: Is it correct to say Maya or Mayans? Or could we use either? It's Maya; Mayan only applies to the language they speak. So, it’s the people of the Maya or the Mayas with an ‘s’, but they are not the Mayans. Who were the Maya? I love that question because it gives me a chance to rephrase the question. It must be ‘Who are the Maya?’ There are six or seven million Maya alive today, defined more or less as people who speak Mayan. Most are still in the Maya area, but there has been the Maya diaspora so many are in Mexico, the United States, parts of Central America, and Europe. Alternatively, you could add a word to the question: ‘Who were the ancient (or pre-Colombian) Maya?’ Now we’re talking about the civilisation of the ancient Maya, which is usually what people mean. The short answer is the Maya are an ethnic group who built a spectacular civilisation and have been around for thousands of years. In terms of area, their civilisation geographically comprises loosely of southern Mexico and northern Central America (all of modern-day Guatemala and Belize, much of Honduras, parts of El Salvador, and a big chunk of Mexico, including the Yucatan peninsula). When was the start of the Maya civilisation? Archaeologists debate and constantly change the date as they discover more about the early Maya. But we can agree, more or less, on somewhere around 1000 BC, when peoples developed a lifestyle and culture that we can start talking about as being Maya, and some of the other hallmarks of who the Maya were – like their calendar and hieroglyph writing system. But that date tends to get pushed further and further back as archaeologists dig deeper, both literally and metaphorically. What are some common misconceptions about the Maya civilisation? I think the obvious one is that the Maya don't exist anymore, and not only that, but that they disappeared in some mysterious way. Another is that they were very violent. Misconception 1: the Maya disappeared Over the last hundred years or …

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Hell on high water: the rise and fall of the golden age of piracy
type: item
date: 2023-05-22T07:02:32.000Z
creator: Dr Rebecca Simon
subject: General Early Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Pirates
description: The golden age of piracy saw waves of rogue sailors terrorising the Atlantic world from 1670 to 1730. But what, asks Rebecca Simon, drove this period of maritime pillage and plunder?
encoded: Listen to a version of this article: In August of 1720, a pirate named Captain Bartholomew Roberts led an attack on a British merchant ship out of Boston. According to the Boston News-Letter, the pirates stripped the sailors of their money and effects (weapons, tools and jewellery) and stole the ship’s artillery and gunpowder. Survivors claimed that the pirates were “cursing, swearing, damning and blaspheming to the greatest degree imaginable”. The pirates knew that if they were captured, they would publicly hang, but they paid no heed to these consequences. They claimed that “if it should chance that they should be attacked by any superior power or force which they could not master, they would immediately put fire with one of their pistols to their powder and all go merrily to hell together”. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of incidents like this during the golden age of piracy – a 60-year period when organised piracy flourished in the Caribbean, East Indies and along the North American seaboard. Pirates have plied their trade throughout history, but most of them were so-called privateers, working for kingdoms and governments to attack enemies and bring wealth back home. The 17th century saw a new breed of pirate emerge: men (and sometimes women) who plundered ships entirely for their own gain. On the podcast | Rebecca Simon responds to your questions on the 17th-century golden age of piracy What were the pros of piracy in the 17th century? While piracy was a dangerous world, where anyone caught was almost guaranteed to hang, but the life appealed to many people. Pirate ships were extremely diverse. Crews were made up of men and women from Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, North America, India and China. Christians, Jews and Muslims sailed together – sometimes alongside freed or escaped enslaved people from Africa. Pirate ships were places where people could escape social persecution, and their crews had often chosen piracy over careers in th…

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“Indigenous Americans who travelled across the Atlantic were horrified by inequalities in European society”
type: item
date: 2023-01-19T10:55:07.000Z
subject: General Early Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Slavery
description: Caroline Dodds Pennock talks to Ellie Cawthorne about her new book tracing the remarkable stories of Indigenous Americans who voyaged to Europe after 1492
encoded: Let’s start with the title of your book, On Savage Shores. What can you tell us about the meaning? People often use the term “savage” as a racial slur to diminish and belittle Indigenous peoples. I wanted to deliberately invert that stereotype. In my book, I follow Indigenous Americans who travelled to Europe after 1492 – from their perspective, Europe was a much more savage place than the Americas. We tend to think of the “Columbian exchange” as a one-way cultural encounter – a story of Europeans going to the Americas. Why is it that we don’t hear much about Indigenous Americans coming to Europe? That’s a good question. It’s not that historians have never written about this; I’m standing on the shoulders of other scholars in my work. But for some reason the presence of Indigenous peoples in Europe doesn’t seem to have made an impression on popular understanding of the past. I think that might be because, in our imagination, 15th and 16th-century Europe is a white, ruffed and codpieced “Golden Age”. The stories we’re told are about kings, lords and royal dramas. But how many people know that there was a Brazilian king at the court of Henry VIII, or that there were tens of thousands of enslaved Indigenous people in Spain? Read more | America: Brave new world or accident? How many Indigenous Americans came to Europe, and when? Exact numbers are difficult to pin down, because the official statistics we have are almost certainly far too low. We know that there were tens of thousands, at least, but the number may be very much larger. The vast majority came as enslaved people into Spain and Portugal, but there are also Indigenous people recorded in England, the Netherlands, the other Low Countries and Germany. And they appear from as early as Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, when he brought back Taíno people from the Caribbean. So, from the first moment of encounter, Indigenous travellers are part of the story. On the podcast | Indigenous American travellers in Europe…

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Kwasi Kwarteng: "Wars are bloody expensive – so the only way nations can buy what they need is by printing their own money"
type: item
date: 2022-09-28T12:45:44.000Z
subject: Elizabethan
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Money
description: In this interview from 2014, Kwasi Kwarteng talks to Matt Elton about his book War and Gold, which explores how new wealth fosters war, in turn leading nations to debt and failure – and why this pattern is repeated through history
encoded: The book starts with the discovery of the Americas. What impact did this have on Europe’s economy? It was hugely transformational. Silver and gold flooded Europe, pushing up prices. This was a great stimulus to business activity: if you are opening a shop in an environment in which prices are rising, there’s a big incentive to trade. In many ways, the discovery of the New World kickstarted Europe’s economy. You argue, however, that there were also less desirable results of this boom. Spain relied on these endless flows of silver and gold, and its industry and agriculture fell behind as its people became addicted to these imports. The thing about becoming rich is that you are aware of your money, so spend it: the fact that Spain was extracting riches from the Americas, causing prices to rise, meant that they had to spend more money. This influx of wealth coincided with the military revolution, when the hardware of fighting became much more expensive. So while Spain was getting richer the cost of its endeavours ballooned, and it borrowed money to try to meet the shortfall. At this point, politics became involved. Charles V of Spain inherited a vast empire through a series of dynastic alliances made by his grandfather and his parents. The big question in the Europe of the early 16th century – the backdrop to all that’s familiar to us in British history – was how to accommodate this superpower. For his part, Charles had to spend a lot of money to maintain armies in several theatres of war, which put heavy strains on his kingdom. Was it this international rivalry that led Spain to overspend? It was all about strategic dominance of Europe. What drove Spanish spending was its bid for hegemonic mastery, while the other powers in Europe tried to drag it down. In a sense, that’s what British foreign policy of the period was about: an attempt to limit the mighty powers in Europe. This pattern was repeated through the 17th century, with the burgeoning power and military campaig…

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Why we should remember when Cortés’s conquistadors were forced to flee the Aztec capital
type: item
date: 2022-06-30T05:31:30.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Why we should remember
description: Amy Fuller considers the retreat of Spanish forces from the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1520
encoded: Five hundred years ago, on the night of 30 June 1520, Spanish forces and their allies fled from the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan under attack. Known as La Noche Triste (Night of Sorrows), this shameful retreat marked a key moment in the conquest – or, as it should more accurately be called, invasion – of Mexico. The Spanish were led by Hernán Cortés, whose illegal expedition had begun in February 1519. Cortés had left Cuba against the direct orders of his superior, Diego Velázquez, and evaded arrest several times. He had forged alliances with several indigenous groups, including the Tlaxcalans, who were enemies of the Aztecs. In November, the Spaniards reached Tenochtitlan, where they were received peacefully by Moctezuma II. However, they soon took the emperor hostage as a puppet ruler. Meanwhile, Velázquez sent a force of 1,100 men, led by Pánfilo de Narváez, to arrest Cortés, landing in Veracruz in April 1520. Cortés headed out to face them with only 226 soldiers, but he captured Narváez in a surprise attack and persuaded his men to join the mission to conquer Tenochtitlan. Read more about Cortés, Moctezuma and the conquering of Tenochtitlan In Cortés’s absence, the situation started to unravel at Tenochtitlan. Apparently afraid of an uprising (though only according to Spanish sources), Pedro de Alvarado, who had been left in charge, ordered the massacre of thousands of celebrants taking part in the sacred Toxcatl festival. This greatly diminished the Aztec forces, but meant that any pretence of friendship was over. Moctezuma lost all support: he was no longer a useful hostage, let alone able to continue his reign. Cortés returned to a compound under siege. The Spaniards forced Moctezuma to make a rooftop appeal to his people, but he was pelted with rocks and most likely then murdered by the conquistadors. Bridges had been raised by the Aztecs to cut off a Spanish retreat, and provisions were low; the only choice was to escape to their allies in Tlaxcala, or die…

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What does Cinco de Mayo commemorate?
type: item
date: 2022-05-03T10:44:46.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
description: Cinco de Mayo takes place on 5 May each year in celebration of Mexican heritage, culture and food. But what does it commemorate, and why is it a bigger celebration in the United States? Historian Edward Shawcross explains…
encoded: Sometimes confused with Mexico’s Independence Day (which is on 16 September), Cinco de Mayo commemorates the Mexican army’s victory over invading French troops at the battle of Puebla on 5 May 1862. Despite it having been a significant moment in Mexican history, Cinco de Mayo is not a national holiday in Mexico. In fact, its biggest celebrations take place in the United States. This is because people of Mexican heritage in California were some of the first to formalise commemorations of this epic victory over foreign invaders. In 1862, the French emperor Napoleon III sent soldiers to support Mexican conservatives. Recently defeated in civil war, these men wanted to overthrow the liberal, democratically elected president, Benito Juárez, and replace him with a European emperor: Habsburg archduke Ferdinand Maximilian. Read more | Peace, stability and pragmatism: a brief history of US-Mexico relations To achieve this, the French army needed to occupy Mexico City. The French commander in chief of the expeditionary force, Charles Ferdinand Latrille, Comte de Lorencez, was arrogantly confident: “We have over the Mexicans such superiority of race, organisation, discipline, [and] morality . . . that now at the head of 6,000 soldiers I am the master of Mexico”. In May 1862, his army deployed before Puebla, Mexico’s second city and key point on the route to the capital. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/05/GettyImages-587490316-0e86df4-e1651574526898.jpg" width="1024" height="823" alt="Artist Patricio Ramos Ortega's depiction of the battle of Puebla" title="Artist Patricio Ramos Ortega's depiction of the battle of Puebla, which took place on 5 May 1862 near the city of Puebla during the French intervention in Mexico. (Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)" /> General Ignacio Zaragoza commanded the Mexican force facing the invaders. He had roughly the same number of men as Lorencez, but many were poorly trained and badly equipped, wit…

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The Siege of Querétaro: the downfall of Maximilian I of Mexico
type: item
date: 2022-04-21T10:08:18.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Historical people
description: In the early 1860s, as the American Civil War raged, a plot was hatched to have a European archduke assume the throne in Mexico. The royal was promised that his rule would have both popular support and imperial resource, but Maximilian I of Mexico would instead meet a bloody end. Edward Shawcross, a historian whose research specialises in French imperialism in Latin America, takes up the tale…
encoded: Before lunch on 13 February 1867, Ferdinand Maximilian, a Habsburg archduke, and – to his supporters at least – emperor of Mexico, had been drinking champagne. Before dinner, he found himself staring at the mutilated body of one of his soldiers. The corpse was hanging upside down from a tree in a churchyard, another victim in a war that Maximilian was losing. The dead man served as a warning to the military convoy that the emperor was leading from Mexico City to the provincial town of Querétaro. Here, at the head of what remained of his army, Maximilian hoped to begin a fight back that would restore confidence in his empire. When Maximilian accepted the Mexican crown on 10 April 1864, the idea that he would one day lead an army would have been laughable. After all, the Mexican exiles who offered him the throne had promised him that monarchy was popular in their country. In fact, these exiles had no throne to offer. They were a mere faction defeated in a civil war, but they had the support of the one of the most powerful men in the world: French emperor Napoleon III. In a brazen act of regime change, by the end of 1862, the French emperor Napoleon III had some 30,000 French troops in Mexico. His plan was to use French military power to drive the constitutional president Benito Juárez out of the capital and create the Second Mexican Empire with Maximilian as its ruler. A French-backed monarchy, Napoleon III reasoned, would provide all the benefits of colonialism to France at a fraction of the cost, roll back the republicanism in the Americas and check the rise of US power. Read more | America’s hidden empire: the USA's forgotten imperial expansion Napoleon III told Maximilian that all this was the will of the Mexican people. But when the emperor of Mexico arrived, he found a country where many still saw Juárez as the legitimate president. He and his liberal supporters – known as Juaristas – had merely retreated into the vastness of Mexico to wage war against a Habsbur…

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Mexico’s ill-fated Austrian emperor
type: item
date: 2022-02-09T12:10:14.000Z
creator: Elinor Evans
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Historical people
description: Edward Shawcross describes a little-known attempt to install an Austrian archduke as emperor of Mexico in the mid-19th century
encoded: Edward Shawcross speaks to Elinor Evans about a little-known and disastrous attempt to install a Habsburg archduke, Ferdinand Maximilian, as emperor of Mexico in the mid-19th century, at a time when the US Civil War was raging. Edward Shawcross is the author of The Last Emperor of Mexico: A Disaster in the New World (Faber & Faber, 2021) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones How to download the HistoryExtra podcast Download as MP3

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The real pirates of the Caribbean: your guide to Nassau's pirate republic
type: item
date: 2022-01-20T13:39:47.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Pirates
description: In the early 18th century, one small, salty, sun-splashed corner of the Bahamas was the epicentre of an organised crime wave that washed across the islands of the Caribbean and along America’s Atlantic coast. Pat Kinsella tells its tale
encoded: Late one evening on 26 July 1718, the inky black Bahamian night was ripped asunder by a fireball, as the pirate captain Charles Vane set his flagship aflame and sent it towards the Royal Navy frigates that had escorted the newly appointed Governor of the Bahamas into Nassau harbour earlier in the day. The governor was Woodes Rogers, a name that struck fear into even the darkest pirate heart. A former privateer, Rogers was on a mission to rid the Bahamas of the villainous seafaring gangs that were decimating trade routes through the region, and to shut down the den of iniquity that was the Republic of Pirates. Read more | Famous pirates: the worst and most despicable in history Rogers’ reputation preceded him, and the circumstances that had led the British government to turn a blind eye to the crime wave emanating from their far-flung colonial outposts had changed. A cold wind was blowing across the renegade republic, unsettling the pirate flag that brazenly flew from the hill fort above the harbour. Many of the most infamous figures of the day – a collective of pirate captains known as the Flying Gang, who had been bossing and bullying the Bahamas for over a decade – were preparing to accept the King's Pardon the new governor offered, rather than risk the likelihood of a grizzly death at the end of a short rope by staying on the wrong side of the law. Listen | Dr Rebecca Simon responds to your questions on the 17th-century golden age of piracy and discusses how accurate pop culture portrayals of pirates are But not Vane. A cruel character with a horrible history – supported by a crew that was even more rash and unrepentant than their captain – he wasn’t about to give up his lucrative life of crime without a fight. Wrong-footed and hemmed in by Rogers’ sudden arrival, Vane bought time by demanding the right to dispose of his ill-gotten swag before promising to accept the terms of the pardon, but by nightfall he knew he was cornered. It was time to surrender or swashb…

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