HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2023-10-08T14:11:09.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: 1956: The shock of Suez
items: 1916: The long march to modernity
items: 1851: The Crystal Palace
items: 1832: The ‘Great’ Reform Act
items: 1776: The year of American independence
items: 1745: The Jacobite rebellion
items: 1662: Restoration tragedy
items: 1638: The Scottish Revolution
items: 1588: The Spanish Armada
items: 1534: Henry VIII declares his ‘empire’

1956: The shock of Suez
type: item
date: 2021-12-27T07:20:58.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Cold War
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Turning points in British history
description: The final instalment in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1950–1999. The debacle in North Africa confirmed the fact that Britain was no longer a main player on the world stage, says Pat Thane, while at home Angry Young Men challenged the old order…
encoded: We can’t isolate British history in the second half of the 20th century from world events. The year 1956 began with signs that the Cold War was thawing. In January, Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, admitted and denounced Stalin’s crimes. In April Khrushchev and the Soviet premier, Bulganin, made the first visit to Britain of Soviet leaders since 1917. They aroused popular curiosity and the concern of the security services who, apparently unknown to the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, sent a frogman, Lionel “Buster” Crabb, to inspect their ship. He did not return and his headless body was later found floating along the coast near Portsmouth. Doubts over how much Soviet attitudes really had softened were justified in October, when the Hungarian uprising against Russian domination was brutally suppressed. The disastrous attempted invasion of Suez signified that Britain was no longer a first-rank power. In July President Nasser of Egypt nationalised the company which owned the Suez canal, which was jointly owned by the British and French governments. Nasser was desperate to avenge the USA and Britain’s refusal to offer Egypt financial support following its decision to sign an arms deal with the USSR – and seizing control of the most direct route to Britain’s colonies in the east appeared to be the best way of going about it. Tension was also fanned by British concerns over Egyptian support for insurgents in Aden and Nasser’s support of the Algerians’ bloody battle for independence from France. 1956 in context With unemployment down and improved standards of living, Britain was enjoying times of stability – but it was not to last The period between 1945 and the mid-1970s was an unprecedented “Golden Age” of near-full employment and rising living standards, though the benefits were not universal: there was periodic unemployment in regions such as Clydeside and Merseyside, and regional inequalities in income and health. Pay and work cond…

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1916: The long march to modernity
type: item
date: 2021-12-27T07:19:31.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: First World War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Turning points in British history
description: Part nineteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1900–1949. Gerard DeGroot chooses 1916 as a key year, as the acceleration of the First World War, coupled with huge social and political changes at home, marked the birth of modern Britain…
encoded: The British, it is often said, went to war with Rupert Brooke and came home with Siegfried Sassoon. While the aphorism seems to encapsulate the evolution of national consciousness from the naïve patriotism of 1914 to the bitterness of 1918, it is too simplistic to explain the change that came over Britain as a result of the First World War. That change manifested itself most profoundly in 1916 – a pivotal year that neatly divides old Britain from the modern nation of today. Poets are seldom accurate barometers of national temper. The average British soldier did not romanticise, like Brooke, the idea of dying in some foreign field that would be forever England. The millions who volunteered in the first two years of the war did so for various reasons, many of them more mundane then we might think. Patriotism was undoubtedly a big factor, with most displaying a dispassionate willingness to serve their country in its hour of need. Others volunteered for less sublime reasons like pressure from employers or girlfriends, the lure of masculine adventure or simply the need for a job. Read more: 5 influential WW1 poets you should know about Most soldiers did not mirror Brooke’s romanticism, so they didn’t suffer Sassoon’s bitterness. That feeling arose because of the deep chasm between expectation and experience – what Sassoon’s friend Wilfred Owen called “the old lie”. The war poets discovered that it was not “sweet” to die for one’s country and their poems reflect the sense of betrayal that came with that discovery. The common soldier, in contrast, discovered something different, namely that service implied citizenship. War experience was for them an entry in the balance sheet of life, to be compensated by peacetime recognition. The millions who volunteered in the first year of the war were ready for battle in 1916. They were the soldiers of the Somme who walked into German machine gun fire on 1 July. On that day, the British Army experienced the worst losses in its history…

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1851: The Crystal Palace
type: item
date: 2021-12-27T07:18:18.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Turning points in British history
description: Part eighteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1850–1899. The Great Exhibition glorified the industrial achievements of the empire, and set the foundations for much of modern Britain, says Peter Mandler…
encoded: Oh no! Not the Crystal Palace again! Surely there must be better vantage-points from which to view the high Victorian period? Surely there must be something fresher and more surprising than that overblown and over-exposed greenhouse? Yes, there is – and it is still the Crystal Palace, but one we can now see differently. The Crystal Palace has proved so capacious that every generation can find something new in it. Historically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with that so long as we remember that we haven’t displaced the older interpretations, only enriched them. So the Crystal Palace remains what it has always been, the starting-point of a great Victorian era of peace, industry and empire. This spectacular centrepiece of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, opened by Queen Victoria on 1 May 1851 and straddling the year until it closed its doors officially on 11 October, did celebrate with more than a touch of complacency the peaceful triumph of Britain’s unique compound elite, part-aristocratic, part-capitalist. Britain had escaped the revolutions that had plunged continental Europe into social division and civil war in 1848, and the planning and execution of the Great Exhibition in 1851 was naturally timed to remind the world of that fact. It did celebrate Britain’s industrial supremacy, both in its form and its content. A vast shed – a blend of greenhouse, railway terminus and museum, half again as long as the Millennium Dome built 150 years later – the Crystal Palace was constructed from prefabricated and interchangeable parts made of the most modern materials, iron and glass. It was deliberately filled with products of great size and ingenuity to shock and awe – huge blocks of coal, the largest steam locomotives, hydraulic presses and steam-hammers, a scale model of the Liverpool docks with 1,600 miniature ships in full rigging; sewing machines, ice-making machines, cigarette-rolling machines, machines to mint medals and machines to fold …

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1832: The ‘Great’ Reform Act
type: item
date: 2021-12-27T07:17:25.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Turning points in British history
description: Part seventeen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1800–1849. Parliament could not ignore the rising spirit of democracy, and, amidst fears of revolution, was forced to bow to popular pressure – at least to a limited extent, says Catherine Hall…
encoded: On 7 June 1832 King William IV reluctantly gave his assent to the Reform Act (which extended the parliamentary franchise in England and Wales), marking the end of a period of high political tension across the country. Three years previously, in 1829, the Tory party had been split by the decision of Wellington (Prime Minister) and Home Secretary Robert Peel to grant Catholic Emancipation. Faced with the danger of civil war in Ireland, they chose to bow to popular pressure. The sanctity of “the Protestant Constitution” had been breached and Catholics could now sit at Westminster. In July 1830 a revolution in France raised the spectre once again of disorder at home while violent disturbances among agricultural labourers in the South East between August 1830 and December 1831, the so-called Captain Swing riots when machines were smashed and burnt, terrified landed society. In Birmingham the banker Thomas Attwood had formed the Birmingham Political Union, an organisation that mobilised middle- and working-class support, demanding parliamentary reform. The townspeople of places such as Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds sought representation, an end to corrupt patronage, and a wider electorate – though there was little agreement as to who should be included. Attwood wanted “an army not less formidable than that legally exhibited in Ireland, before which ministers were compelled to bend”. Wellington, however, a firm believer in aristocratic power and privilege, was convinced, despite much evidence to the contrary, that Britain “possessed at the present moment a legislature which answered all the good purposes of legislation, and this to a greater degree than any legislature ever had answered in any country whatever” and that “it possessed the full and entire confidence of the country”. His confidence was misplaced and the Whigs came into power knowing that some measure of reform was essential. In March 1832 the Whig proposals for reform were presented to the House of Commons…

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1776: The year of American independence
type: item
date: 2021-12-27T07:16:03.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Turning points in British history
description: Part sixteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1750–1799. In 1776, America voted to sever their political ties to Great Britain. The American Declaration of Independence was adopted on 4 July, a date that is now celebrated as 'Independence Day' or the 'Fourth of July'. Here, Jeremy Black looks at the year of the declaration, in which the rejection of British authority by American settlers led to a war that not only threatened the whole British empire but would also, in the long term, lead to changes in its political traditions…
encoded: The American Declaration of Independence, adopted on 4 July 1776, was a key moment in the history not only of North America but also of Britain and the English-speaking world. Until that moment, it has been possible that the fighting that had started outside Boston the previous year would end in a compromise, with George III backing down, the solution indeed sought by most of the American Patriots. However, the failure to reach compromise took the Patriots to revolution. What had seemed possibly a short-term conflict, ending when the British withdrew from Boston in March 1776, became instead a major civil war as the British empire struck back with a concerted effort at regaining the lost colonies by force and as the Patriots opted for independence. In March 1776, Congress was still unwilling to accept a motion by George Wythe and Richard Henry Lee that King George III, not the ministry, nor Parliament, be seen as “the author of our miseries”. Why does the United States of America celebrate Independence Day on 4 July? This became possible only because George III in effect disowned the Americans as rebels and treated them accordingly. British policies, including the ban on trade with the rebellious colonies, were designed to hurt, while the government’s attempt to recruit subsidy forces (called foreign mercenaries in the Declaration of Independence) was associated directly with George, not least because these troops were Germans. The rejection of British authority was symbolic as well as constitutional. On 9 July 1776, after the colonial assembly of New York gave its assent to the Declaration of Independence, the inhabitants of New York City pulled down a gilded equestrian statue of the king erected on Bowling Green in 1770 (its metal was to be used for cartridges), while, more generally, the royal arms were taken down, and usually treated with contempt. The king’s name was removed from governmental and legal documents, royal portraits were reversed or destroyed, and …

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1745: The Jacobite rebellion
type: item
date: 2021-12-27T07:15:06.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Turning points in British history
description: Part fifteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores explores 1700–1749. The uprising of 1745 enjoyed spectacular early successes yet, as Daniel Szechi reports, it only succeeded in breathing new life into the very regime it aimed to bring to its knees
encoded: The most significant watershed in the first half of the 18th century came between July 1745 and April 1746, when the Jacobites launched their last attempt to overthrow Whig control of the British Isles. When the uprising failed, the Jacobite cause was irretrievably damaged and slipped into rapid decline. And with its internal enemy at last vanquished, the Whig regime could turn all its energies to imperial aggrandisement. Out of the Jacobites’ defeat came the epic victories of the Seven Years War, the conquest of the first British Empire and the consolidation of a political order that was to last until the middle of the Victorian era. Yet things hadn’t always looked so rosy for the Whig administration. In fact, it was a British defeat at Fontenoy in modern Belgium on 11 May 1745 that precipitated the rebellion. Prince Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonny Prince Charley”), grandson of James II and VII, had been summoned to France in December 1743 to head a French invasion of southern England scheduled to take place in early 1744. Bad weather, the Royal Navy and English Tory faintheartedness eventually brought that attempt to naught, and the Prince frustratedly idled away his time for the next year. Or so it appeared. In fact, with the help of a syndicate of Irish merchants resident in France, he was secretly preparing a surprise attack on the British Isles. And the news of Fontenoy provided exactly the opening he needed. On 5 July Charles Edward sailed from Nantes with two ships. His plan was to force the Jacobites of the British Isles to live up to their promises by throwing himself into their midst. If enough Jacobites responded and he could expose the weakness, as he believed, of the Whig regime he was sure the French would invade and victory would be his. It was either a bold gambit or a foolhardy gamble, and certainly the odds against success were greatly increased when the Prince encountered a Royal Navy patrol on the way to Scotland and one of his ships was damaged a…

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1662: Restoration tragedy
type: item
date: 2021-12-27T07:14:21.000Z
creator: Professor John Morrill
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: The Restoration
subject: Turning points in British history
description: Part fourteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1650–1699. Charles II had been on the throne since 1660 and civil war scars were fading. But now, says John Morrill, attempts to restore a national church set the scene for 200 years of political turmoil
encoded: The year 1662 was a warm, bright year: the warmest winter and spring of the whole half century and one of the warmest overall – only dwarfed by the scorching summer of 1686. The scars of civil war, the buildings burned and wrecked by war, were being repaired and replaced. Carpenters and masons were reconverting churches from whitewashed auditoria into sacramental spaces and theatres were being built at an unprecedented rate. Samuel Pepys was able to see a new show most weeks, including The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The French Dancing Master and the first recorded Punch and Judy show. The king was to be seen at many of these plays with his pregnant mistress, a casual insult to the reformation of manners at the heart of Interregnum high-mindedness. A grimmer kind of theatre was enacted at Tyburn where the procession of Regicides dragged there to be half-hanged, eviscerated and cut into pieces was completed. The Restoration made an example of those who took part in Charles I’s trial and execution but passed a wide-ranging indemnity that protected everyone else from prosecution for what they had done over the past 20 years. Read more | Your ultimate guide to the Restoration period But a series of parliamentary acts revealed an on-going neurosis: in late 1661 an Act “against tumultuous petitioning” required all but the humblest petitions to be initiated by JPs and grand juries at quarter sessions; the Licensing Act of 1662 brought in a tougher regime for the control of the press than had existed even before the Revolution – one of its results was effectively to drive newspapers off the streets for most of the next 30 years. Later in 1662, “an Act for the relief of the poor” allowed local officials to forcibly remove all newcomers from a parish if they were “likely to be chargeable” to the poor rate and to return them to their previous place of residence. This was motivated as much by fear of sedition as of vagrancy. But for the better off, 1662 was a good year. The s…

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1638: The Scottish Revolution
type: item
date: 2021-12-27T07:13:43.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Stuart
subject: Period
subject: Turning points in British history
description: Part thirteen of our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1600–1649. At first, Charles I saw Scottish opposition to his absolutism and crypto-Catholicism as a local difficulty, but it destabilised all of the Three Kingdoms, says Rab Houston
encoded: Crowned King of England in 1625, Charles I progressed north for his coronation as King of Scots in 1633. On his visit, he basked in the compliance of Scotland’s still separate Parliament and the utter obedience of his instruments of government in Scotland – Privy Council, Church and Court. His power within the multiple monarchy of Britain and Ireland, newly made at the accession of his father James I in 1603, seemed absolute. Yet just five years later, Scotland was convulsed by a revolution that caused monarchical authority to evaporate throughout the Three Kingdoms of England (with Wales), Scotland and Ireland, and eventually led to Charles’s execution in 1649. Intelligent, flexible yet tenacious, James proved a much better king of Scotland than of England, but he was able to keep all his kingdoms together – and apart. His second son, Charles, proved good at neither. At the heart of his failure was the close link between religion and politics. Europe’s Renaissance princes had grown politically powerful – too potent for many subjects. They feared monarchs were ready to use the authority they had by virtue of simply being princes (“prerogative” powers) to establish arbitrary or “absolute” government untrammelled by representative institutions like England’s Parliament or the rule of law. Rulers also preferred their subjects to follow their religion. James was a Protestant, but not a Calvinist. Charles was thought a closet Catholic and was married to an open one, Henrietta Maria. To a modern reader, dislike of “big government” may be understandable, but religious affiliation seems a personal choice. In the 17th century religion had very public implications, especially for a monarch, because princes ruled as well as reigned. To contemporaries faced with the last great war of religion on the Continent, the Thirty Years War (1618–48), and the real threat of the extirpation of Protestantism, Catholicism or “popery” was viewed as a danger not only to faith, but also to all…

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1588: The Spanish Armada
type: item
date: 2021-12-27T07:12:11.000Z
subject: Elizabethan
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Turning points in British history
description: Part 12 in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1550–1599. Pauline Croft says the decisive defeat of Spain's invasion force helped reconcile England and Scotland – and had great significance for western Europe too
encoded: You may think it hardly original to choose the defeat of the Spanish Armada as the key event of 1550–99. However, its significance is often misunderstood. It was not merely an English or even British drama, but a contest when much of the fate of western Europe hung in the balance. After the accession of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I in 1558, friction between England and Catholic Spain became endemic. In 1580, the English sea captain Sir Francis Drake returned from his successful circumnavigation of the globe, including sailing up the Pacific coastline of south America and ransacking Spanish settlements. At the same time, Philip II of Spain’s forces invaded Portugal, where the royal line had died out, leaving Philip as the nearest heir. The conquest of Portugal brought huge extra colonial territories to the Spanish crown: it also brought the deep-water Atlantic port of Lisbon, a great naval asset. The successful takeover of the Portuguese islands of the Azores and Terceira in 1582/3 confirmed Spain’s new status as an oceanic power. Meanwhile France was devastated by divisions between the Huguenot (Protestant) party and the extreme Catholic League. The death in 1584 of the Duke of Anjou, next in line to his childless brother Henri III, indicated that the throne would go to their distant cousin, the Huguenot Henri of Navarre. That was intolerable not only to the Catholic League but also to Philip II. They secretly concluded an agreement that Spain would support the League when civil war inevitably resumed. In the Netherlands, a dominion inherited by Philip from his father, a long standing rebellion appeared to be waning. Philip’s nephew, the Prince of Parma, was proving an effective general and in July 1584, the rebels’ charismatic leader, William the Silent, Prince of Orange, was assassinated. England now faced the possibility that Spain might soon control the entire coastline of western Europe, from the western Mediterranean around France to the borders of north H…

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1534: Henry VIII declares his ‘empire’
type: item
date: 2021-12-27T07:11:19.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Turning points in British history
description: Part eleven in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1500–1549. Henry VIII's new vision of kingship carried with it lofty ambitions of controlling the British Isles from Westminster, says john guy – but neighbouring nations weren't keen on the idea
encoded: Few events in England have rippled out to create a tsunami affecting the whole of the British Isles as much as those of 1534. In this year Henry VIII, who had divorced Katherine of Aragon and married Anne Boleyn, completed his break with the Pope by getting Parliament to acknowledge him as Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England. This meant that Henry had the right to appoint the bishops, vet the articles of faith, and impose his will on the monasteries, all of which he did. To enforce his new powers, Henry revised and extended the treason law. Anyone disputing the royal supremacy, even by words alone, would be put on trial. To winkle out opposition, he set a test: an oath of supremacy and allegiance to the king and the “imperial Crown”, to be taken by those holding offices in Church and State, sitting in Parliament, or who were in religious orders until he dissolved them. Historians like to debate whether Henry ushered in a reign of terror, which misses the bigger picture. The effects weren’t just confined to England. To justify his actions, Henry announced a new theory of kingship based on Biblical and classical prototypes, giving an extra layer of meaning to the phrase the “imperial Crown”. In a nutshell, he claimed imperium (“empire”) with expansionist territorial overtones. When the Duke of Norfolk discussed this with a bemused Spanish ambassador, he cited the precedent of King Arthur, “emperor of Britain, Gaul, Germany and Thrace”. The ambassador could barely keep a straight face, saying it was a pity that Arthur hadn’t also been “emperor of Asia”. Soon no one was laughing. In 1534, Henry began a radical overhaul of provincial government. Implemented in its initial stages by Thomas Cromwell, its focus was Wales, Ireland, the northern borderlands, and finally Scotland. All but Scotland were Tudor dominions, although more in name than in fact. The crown’s writ ran unevenly north of the river Trent and was ignored in Wales and Gaelic Ireland: the people wh…

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