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16 remarkable moments in the history of the Oscars
When was the first Academy Awards? How many Oscars did Titanic win in 1998? Why did Will Smith slap Chris Rock? Here's everything you needed to know about the history of the most notable event in the film industry calendar...
The Academy Awards were first held in 1929, and each year the film industry awards gold-plated statuettes – commonly called Oscars – in a glittering and star-studded ceremony. Officially the Academy Award of Merit, everyone knows the golden knight holding a sword and standing on a reel of film as Oscar. Cedric Gibbons, art director at movie studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, gets the credit for designing the statuette but not for naming it. Read more | The best historical movies of all time There are three theories. Hollywood journalist Sidney Skolsky always maintained he thought it up as a less-grandiose antidote to the pretentiousness of the award ceremony. Meanwhile, actor Bette Davis claimed she once remarked the statuette’s backside resembled that of her husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson. The most likely winner, however, is Margaret Herrick, a librarian at the Academy, who said the knight (not just his rear) looked like her uncle Oscar. But how much do you really know about the history of the awards themselves, and the dramatic moments that have played out on the biggest night of the Hollywood calendar? The history of the Oscars: 16 key moments 1929: The first ceremony takes place Founded by Louis B Mayer, head of MGM studios, in 1927, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was intended as a non-profit organisation with the goal of advancing the film industry. The first Academy Award ceremony took place two years later at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, on 16 May 1929. Tickets for the private dinner cost $5 and the presentation ceremony hosted by Douglas Fairbanks (actor and first president of the Academy) lasted just 15 minutes. The film industry was undergoing a dramatic change at the time, with the revolutionary introduction of new sound technology. Although hugely popular ‘talkies’ such as The Jazz Singer (1927) had been released before the first Academy Awards, they were not considered, because it was seen as unfair to compare them to silent movies. Read more | Stars, scandals and the end of silent films The first-ever Academy Award was bestowed upon Emil Jannings, for Best Actor for his leading roles in silent films The Way of All Flesh (1927) and The Last Command (1928). The first-ever Academy Award for Best Picture went to Wings, a 1927 silent movie that told the story of two pilots in love with the same woman. The film cost $2 million to produce, making it the most expensive movie of its time. Up until the release of The Artist in 2011, Wings was the only silent film to win Best Picture. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/03/GettyImages-2225661880-bbfceb9-e1773593014852.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large banquet hall filled with formally dressed guests seated at long tables during the 1929 Academy Awards dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel." title="Guests seated at the first Academy Awards banquet, held at the Roosevelt Hotel, Hollywood, on 16 May 1929. The actual presentation ceremony lasted a mere 15 minutes (Photo by Getty Images)" /> 1934: The wrong Frank gets up on stage Arguably one of the most awkward Academy Awards moments happened in 1934, when both Frank Lloyd and Frank Capra were nominated in the Best Director category. Caught up in the excitement of the ceremony, Frank Capra heard Will Rogers, who presented the award, exclaim “Come on up and get it, Frank!” He duly ran up to the stage to claim his award, only to find that it was in fact Frank Lloyd who had won. Capra called the journey back to his chair “the longest, saddest, most shattering walk in my life”, saying “I wished I could have crawled under the rug like a miserable worm. When I slumped in my chair I felt like one. All my friends at the table were crying”. However, Capra’s humiliation didn’t last long: he won the Best Director gong the following year for It Happened One Night (1934). 1938: An imposter nabs an Academy Award The Best Supporting Actress Award of 1938 went to Alice Brady for her role in In Old Chicago (1937). However, she was too ill to attend the ceremony. When her award was announced an unknown man took to the stage to collect it, apparently on her behalf. Before anyone realised something was wrong, the man had vanished. The mystery of the imposter’s identity – and what happened to Brady’s stolen statuette – was never solved. Statuettes vanished again in 2000, when crates containing 55 Oscars disappeared from a loading bay. Some 52 of the statuettes were recovered soon after, found by citizen Willie Fulgear, who was rummaging in a bin behind a food store in LA’s Koreatown. According to The New York Times he was looking for boxes to use for an upcoming house move. Astonished by his unexpected discovery, Fulgear told reporters: “I’ve got more Oscars than any of the movie stars”. Investigators believed that the culprits took the Oscars by accident, unaware of the crates’ contents. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/03/GettyImages-1247583035-7b2e403-e1773592915263.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A middle-aged man in a hat stands beside a large skip filled with discarded Oscars campaign leaflets and packaging in a Los Angeles car park." title="Willie Fulgear stands next to the dumpster where he uncovered 55 stolen Oscars statuettes in March 2000. A truck driver was later sentenced to six months in prison for the theft (Photo by Getty Images)" /> 1939: George Bernard Shaw becomes the first person to win an Oscar and a Nobel Prize After winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, Shaw received an Academy Award for adapting his 1913 stage play Pygmalion into a film script. He didn’t attend the ceremony, however, reportedly saying: “They might as well send some honour to George for being king of England.” 1940: Results are leaked ahead of the ceremony At the first Academy Awards in 1929, the winners had been announced to the public three months previously. However, the following year the Academy decided to create a sense of suspense and instead sent an advanced list of award winners to newspapers, embargoed for publication until 11pm on the night of the Oscars ceremony. Read more | Knights! Camera! Action! Hollywood's obsession with the medieval era This system remained in place for the next 10 years. However, in 1940 the Los Angeles Times broke the embargo and announced the winners in their evening edition, meaning that nominees could find out their fate before turning up at the ceremony. As a result of this fiasco, the following year (1941) the sealed envelope system was introduced and the results became a closely guarded secret. 1940: Hattie McDaniel becomes the first African-American Oscar winner McDaniel made history in 1940 by winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, for her role as ‘Mammy’ in the 1939 Civil War epic Gone With the Wind. However, in the year that McDaniel won, the Oscars ceremony was due to take place in a hotel that upheld a strict racial segregation policy. Film producer David O Selznick reportedly had to call in favours just to have McDaniel allowed into the building. Despite being the recipient of a major award, McDaniel had to sit at the back of the auditorium on a segregated table away from the rest of her co-stars. McDaniel was also banned from attending Gone With the Wind’s Atlanta premiere because of segregation laws. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/03/GettyImages-3248364-8f93e1c-e1773592849432.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara grips a curtain while Mammy, played by Hattie McDaniel, tightens the laces of her corset in Gone with the Wind." title="Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) clutches a bedpost as Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) tightens her corset in Gone with the Wind (1939). McDaniel later became the first African-American actor to win an Academy Award for her role in the film (Photo by Getty Images)" /> 1943–45: Oscar statuettes are made of painted plaster The Oscars statuette, which depicts a knight with a crusader’s sword standing on a reel of film, was designed by MGM’s chief art director Cedric Gibbons in 1929. In the early ceremonies the gongs were made from gold-plated solid bronze, which was later substituted for the pewter-like alloy Britannia metal. However, as the Second World War raged, metal shortages meant that the awards had to be made from alternative materials. Consequently, all awards handed out between 1943 and 1945 were made of painted plaster. When the war was over, all recipients of plaster awards were invited to exchange them for metal ones. 1945: The first Academy Award comes in handy during the Second World War Emil Jannings, winner of the first-ever Academy Award for his performances in silent films The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command (see 1929, above), was ruled out from the new Hollywood talkies because of his thick German accent. Jannings therefore returned to Germany, where he became associated with Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine, starring in several films promoting Nazism. When the Allies stormed Berlin in 1945, Jannings reportedly carried his Oscar statuette around with him to win over American GIs and to demonstrate his former allegiance to the US. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/03/GettyImages-3273720-0eb23a9-e1773588040173.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Emil Jannings in military uniform sits between two soldiers in a scene from the silent film The Last Command." title="Emil Jannings (centre) in The Last Command (1928), one of two films that earned him the first Academy Award for Best Actor in 1929. The German star later appeared in Nazi propaganda films and reportedly used his Oscar statuette to convince invading Allied troops of his pro-US sympathies (Photo by Getty Images)" /> 1968: The ceremony is postponed In 1968 the Academy decided to push back the ceremony from 8 April to 10 April following the assassination of Martin Luther King, whose funeral was scheduled for 9 April. In 1981 the ceremony was postponed for 24 hours following an assassination attempt on US president Ronald Reagan, and the 2021 event was also delayed by two months due to the Covid-19 pandemic. 1973: Marlon Brando’s Oscar is rejected by Sacheen Littlefeather Marlon Brando famously refused his Best Actor award for his performance in The Godfather (1972) in protest of Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans. He did not attend the ceremony, instead sending Native American activist and actress Sacheen Littlefeather to make a speech in his place. When Littlefeather explained Brando’s actions, the audience was clearly unsure how to react – some people cheered, others booed. A confused Roger Moore, who attempted to present the award, apparently took the statuette home with him after Sacheen Littlefeather refused to accept it. Listen now | Hollywood history: everything you wanted to know Brando was not the first person to have refused an Oscar: in 1936 Dudley Nichols rejected his Best Adapted Screenplay award for The Informer (1935) due to ongoing strike action by the Screen Writers Guild. Later, after receiving a Best Actor nomination for his titular role in Patton in 1971, George C Scott informed the Academy that if he won he intended to refuse the award. Everyone was therefore very surprised to hear him announced as the winner. Goldie Hawn, who presented the award, exclaimed “Oh my god!” when she read the result. Unsurprisingly, Scott did not attend the ceremony, which he reportedly dismissed as a “two-hour meat parade”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/03/GettyImages-515575596-c4b96e8-e1773587308777.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black-and-white photograph of Sacheen Littlefeather in a dress and feathered hairpiece speaking to presenters Roger Moore in a tuxedo and Liv Ullmann in an embroidered gown." title="Sacheen Littlefeather remonstrates with presenters Roger Moore and Liv Ullmann at the 45th Academy Awards. The actress and activist had declined the Best Actor award on behalf of Marlon Brando, who refused the accolade in protest at Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans (Photo by Getty Images)" /> 1974: Tatum O’Neal becomes the youngest-ever Oscar winner The 10-year-old received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Paper Moon (1973), in which she starred opposite her father, Ryan O’Neal. She accepted her award wearing a mini tuxedo and platform shoes. 1998: Titanic wins 11 Oscars With 14 nominations and 11 wins, the blockbuster epic Titanic (1997) dominated the Academy Awards in 1998. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, it tells the tragic story of the passenger ship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1912. Films with historical settings have long performed well at the Oscars, from 1931’s Best Picture winner All Quiet on the Western Front, through to recent films such as Lincoln (2012), 12 Years a Slave (2013) and Oppenheimer (2024). Other notable historical films that have swept the boards include the 1959 Charlton Heston epic Ben-Hur (11 wins), 1996’s The English Patient (nine wins) and 1939 Civil War drama Gone With the Wind (eight wins). Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dances with Wolves (1990), Schindler’s List (1993) and Shakespeare in Love (1998) each took home seven awards. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/03/GettyImages-153184430-f61cc2c-e1773586809929.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="James Cameron in a black tuxedo stands on the Oscars stage with arms raised triumphantly, mouth open in celebration, while holding an Oscar statuette." title="A triumphant James Cameron raises his Oscar aloft after winning the Best Director award for Titanic in 1998. The blockbuster won 10 other accolades that evening, including Best Picture (Photo by Getty Images)" /> 2002: Halle Berry wins Best Actress – and makes history In March 2002, Halle Berry won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the romantic drama Monster’s Ball. The film, in which Berry plays the widow of an executed death row prisoner, was critically acclaimed for its depiction of poverty and racism in the American South, with her emotionally charged performance earning most of the plaudits. But the moment carried wider historical significance, too: Berry became the first African-American woman to win the award. The importance of the achievement was not lost on the Ohio-born star, who tearfully dedicated the award to “every nameless, faceless woman of colour that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened”. But while Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win the Best Actress award in 2023, Berry remains the only African-American recipient. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/03/GettyImages-51093737-bfd9528-e1773586577271.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Halle Berry in a burgundy embroidered evening gown raises an Oscar statuette while smiling at the microphone, as a tuxedo-clad Russell Crowe applauds behind her on stage." title="Halle Berry accepts the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Monster's Ball, March 2002. Berry remains the only African-American recipient of the award. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> 2010: Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to win Best Director The 82nd Academy Awards saw Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker scooping six gongs, including Best Picture. But arguably the most significant accolade was that awarded to Kathryn Bigelow, who became the first woman to win the Best Director award. There have been two further female recipients since then: Chloé Zhao for Nomadland (2021) and Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog (2022). 2017: La La Land is accidentally named Best Picture instead of Moonlight At the 89th Academy Awards in 2017, romantic musical La La Land and coming-of-age drama Moonlight were in contention for the coveted Best Picture prize, with many commentators suggesting it was a two-horse race between the films. It seemed settled, then, when the ceremony reached its climax and veteran actors Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway – who were presenting the award – opened an envelope apparently revealing that La La Land had been triumphant. The film’s cast and crew, including lead actors Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, made their way on stage to deliver their acceptance speeches and begin the celebrations. Yet it transpired that Beatty had inadvertently been handed the envelope announcing Stone’s earlier Best Actress win, leaving Dunaway to read out the only film title visible on the card: La La Land. The actual Best Picture envelope – which revealed Moonlight as the true winner – was still in the hands of an accountant from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the firm that oversees the Oscars voting process. Once the blunder became apparent, La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz halted the proceedings and held up the correct card showing that Moonlight had indeed won Best Picture, prompting the film’s stars to come forward and accept the accolade instead. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/03/GettyImages-645759516-31a508a-e1773586283673.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Warren Beatty stands at a microphone on the Oscars stage holding an envelope, while presenters and winners gather around him amid confusion during the 2017 Best Picture announcement." title="Actor Warren Beatty (centre) tells the 90th Academy Awards how an envelope mix-up led to La La Land accidentally being announced as Best Picture winner instead of Moonlight. La La Land still won six prizes at the ceremony, however, including the Best Actress award for Emma Stone (Photo by Getty Images)" /> 2022: Will Smith slaps Chris Rock With the film industry returning to normal following the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, the 94th Academy Awards was always likely to be memorable – though not in the way most people expected. Before presenting the award for Best Documentary Feature, comedian Chris Rock made an unscripted joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, who had shaved her head after being diagnosed with the autoimmune condition alopecia areata. Incensed, Pinkett Smith’s husband, Will Smith, strode onto the stage and slapped Rock across the face, before returning to his seat and shouting, “Keep my wife’s name out of your f******g mouth”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/03/GettyImages-1239559037-bcc5989-e1773586126858.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Chris Rock recoils on the Oscars stage after being struck by Will Smith, who stands beside him in a black tuxedo during the 2022 ceremony." title="Will Smith (right) slaps comedian Chris Rock during the 94th Academy Awards in 2022. The actor and rapper was subsequently banned from all Oscars-related events for 10 years (Photo by Getty Images)" /> The bizarre spectacle prompted speculation that the incident had been staged, but the slap was genuine – and the situation grew more awkward when Smith later returned to accept the award for Best Actor for his role in King Richard. The rapper and former Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star is currently serving a 10-year ban from attending Academy Awards events, due to expire in 2032. This article was first published by HistoryExtra in February 2016
"We shall never surrender": 14 quotes that have defined the past century
Words have the power to alter the course of history. They can harden the resolve of an entire nation or people, encapsulate the ideals of a movement, and evoke joy – or provoke anger – long after they have been said. Here, Dr Seán Lang explores 14 of the most influential quotes of the past 100 years
<img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/RooseveltGettyImages-464783507-622899f-e1773405930967.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Franklin D. Roosevelt sits at a desk in an official setting, with papers, a microphone, glasses, and an ashtray arranged in front of him, heavy curtains framing the background." title="President Franklin D Roosevelt prepares for his inaugural speech, 1933. The former New York governor had won the presidency based on his promised ‘New Deal’, which lasted until the Second World War (Image by Getty Images)" /> 1. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” Franklin D Roosevelt, 1933 The United States lay devastated by the Great Depression, an economic collapse without precedent that destroyed the country’s global image as a land of opportunity and reduced millions of Americans to poverty and destitution. The governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had run for and won the presidency on the promise of a massive recovery programme, dubbed the ‘New Deal’, but he knew he could do nothing unless the American people first regained their self-belief. In his inaugural address on 4 March 1933, Roosevelt reassured them that they had nothing to fear, except fear itself – “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” The New Deal lasted throughout the 1930s until World War II set the country back towards full employment. Through the programme of reforms, regulations and projects, Roosevelt understood the power of words. He explained policies simply and clearly to radio listeners in his ‘fireside chats’, reassuring Americans that they had what it would take to improve their own lives and that the government would help. Roosevelt was elected an unprecedented four times, but it was that first inaugural message that set the tone for his time in office and helped give back the US its self-belief. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/ChurchillGettyImages-2667802-081f3a8-e1773403673660.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man in a suit and hat stands outside a brick building, holding a cane and raising his hand in a V‑for‑Victory gesture" title="Winston Churchill gives his famous ‘V for Victory’ hand signal outside 10 Downing Street. The prime minister made some of his most memorable speeches during the first few months of his premiership, when Britain came under threat of German invasion (Image by Getty Images)" /> 2. “We shall never surrender” Winston Churchill, 1940 By June 1940, it seemed that Hitler had won his war. He had conquered Poland; launched a devastating assault in Denmark and Norway; and attacked in the west, invading the Netherlands and Belgium, and storming through northern France to cut off the British army and much of the French. It was only a matter of time before France was forced to surrender and German troops entered triumphantly into Paris. To any impartial observer, it seemed obvious that Britain had no choice but to seek a peace settlement with Hitler. But Winston Churchill, Britain’s pugnacious and controversial new prime minister, decided to ignore those pressing him to do just that. In an electrifying speech to the House of Commons on 4 June 1940, later broadcast on the BBC, he declared that Britain would fight on and never surrender – that “we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be”. Churchill knew that Britain’s navy and air force would make a German invasion hazardous, though not impossible, and that the only chance of defeating Nazism was to keep going until the United States could join the war. His words defined the stubborn defiance and ‘Dunkirk spirit’, which saved not just Britain but the world from a Nazi victory. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Mao-ZedongGettyImages-515210286-5fc8355-e1773403801718.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Mao Zedong, wearing a military-style uniform and cap, stands on a balcony and claps while looking over a wide avenue filled with a dense crowd and banners." title="Mao Zedong, seen here in an undated photograph, first used the phrase ‘paper tiger’ during a 1946 interview. The term is now popularly used to describe threats that are less powerful than they might first appear (Image by Getty Images)" /> 3. “The atom bomb is a paper tiger” Mao Zedong, 1946 The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 redefined the world. Leaders had always been able to plunge their peoples into war, but now they could wipe out whole cities, even countries, with a single order. While the United States was the only one with nuclear capability at first, the Soviet Union was not far behind thanks to communist spies in the west passing nuclear secrets to Moscow. Read more | Reign of the red terror: Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution In an interview with American journalist Anna Louise Strong in 1946, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong, described the atom bomb as a “paper tiger”, something that looks more dangerous than it is. Mao meant that all governments depended on the support of the people, and they would never consent to using atomic weapons. The phrase was taken another way: no government would dare use such weapons for fear of provoking a response from the other side. This was the idea behind the doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’ during the Cold War, as the power and number of nuclear weapons intensified. Even then, the world came perilously close to disaster on more than one occasion. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Mandy-RiceGettyImages-1365867502-dd9056f-e1773403905292.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A group of people gathers outside a stone building while several British police officers in traditional helmets stand among them, appearing to manage or escort individuals through the crowd." title="Mandy Rice-Davies (centre left) leaves the Central Criminal Court after testifying at the 1963 trial of her friend Stephen Ward. Questions about the model’s alleged affair with a Tory peer prompted a now-legendary response (Image by Getty Images)" /> 4. “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” Mandy Rice-Davies, 1963 This ordinary retort marked an unlikely watershed in British social history. Marilyn (better known as Mandy) Rice-Davies was a model and dancer working in London’s Soho, where she met Christine Keeler and her friend and protector, Stephen Ward. A successful osteopath, Ward was well-known in high society, hosting parties and introducing girls like Keeler and Rice-Davies to his well-connected friends, including the Secretary of State for War John Profumo and the Conservative peer Lord Astor. A public scandal ensued when the truth of Ward’s parties was revealed, especially with reports that Keeler had slept both with Profumo and a Russian naval attaché, Eugene Ivanov, which made the affair a diplomatic furore. Rice-Davies was a witness at Ward’s trial. It was widely held at the time that people in high society were trustworthy and honourable, incapable of the lewd behaviour associated with ‘lower’ classes. When it was put to Rice-Davies that Lord Astor denied her claim of an affair, the assumption was that his word was worth more than hers. Her cheeky response – “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” – suggested that the aristocracy were no more honourable than anyone else. The remark caused a sensation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Cassius-ClayGettyImages-545316246-1db1a81-e1773404032921.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A boxer wearing a shiny robe with “CASSIUS CLAY” on the back stands in the ring with both gloved hands raised in triumph as spectators watch from the packed arena." title="Cassius Clay celebrates his win over Doug Jones at Madison Square Garden, March 1963. The boxer, who changed his name to Muhammad Ali the following year, frequently described himself as ‘the Greatest’ (Image by Getty Images)" /> 5. “I am the greatest” Cassius Clay, 1963 Muhammad Ali, who changed his name from Cassius Clay in 1964, was always much more than a boxer: he was a role model for young black people around the world and a major international celebrity, mixing his sporting triumphs with irrepressible charm and wit. Boxing had long been a way for poor Americans to better themselves. Clay, who came from the segregated South, won the light heavyweight gold medal at the age of 18 at the 1960 Rome Olympics before turning professional and starting an immense career that saw him become world heavyweight champ three times. As well as a pugilist, though, Clay was a charismatic self-promoting poet always showing his gifts for trash talking. In 1963, shortly before announcing his conversion to Islam and his new name, he issued a record of rhythmically spoken poetry entitled I Am the Greatest. Ali continued to describe himself proudly as ‘the Greatest’, but he put his reputation and career on the line, and even risked jail, by refusing to serve in the US Army in 1967 as the war in Vietnam raged. His case went to the Supreme Court and Ali became a symbol of growing American opposition to the war, and a figurehead of the civil rights movement. He was now a champion of the dispossessed as well as ‘the Greatest’ in the boxing ring. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Martin-Luther-KingGettyImages-517357504-1305bdb-e1773404333188.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Martin Luther King Jr. stands at a podium filled with microphones, delivering a speech to a large crowd. People in the background wear uniforms, hats, and formal clothing." title="Martin Luther King Jr delivers his iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech during the March on Washington, 1963. The rally is considered a watershed moment in American history (Image by Getty Images)" /> 6. “I have a dream” Dr Martin Luther King Jr, 1963 Martin Luther King Jr’s iconic speech was delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, an enormous statue of the US president who had ended slavery in the United States. By the 1960s, however, true emancipation was still far off as African Americans faced entrenched legal discrimination and police violence. King, who had made his name leading protests against racial segregation, was speaking to a huge civil rights rally calling for jobs and fair treatment for America’s black population, but his speech went much further than that. Read more | How did the US civil rights movement influence Britain? King’s style of oratory owed much to his background as a Baptist preacher and his imagery, of a dream in which black and white people lived in harmony and friendship – and where his children “will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character” – was in line with the visionary sermons that many of his listeners had heard in church. The power of his words went far beyond the 17 minutes that his speech took and the 250,000 people gathered on that day, 28 August 1963. They became not only a defining moment of the civil rights movement, but of US history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Hannah-ArendtGettyImages-135314633-43360a4-e1773404990659.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person in a dark buttoned shirt with a brooch and patterned trousers reclines against a plain wall, one hand resting beside them holding a cigarette, their gaze angled upward." title="Hannah Arendt poses for a portrait, 1949. The philosopher’s reflections on the atrocities of the Second World War – and the motives behind them – sparked fierce debate (Image by Getty Images)" /> 7. “The banality of evil” Hannah Arendt, 1963 In May 1960, Israel took the world by surprise when its secret service agents kidnapped and abducted a German living in Argentina who gave his name as Ricardo Klement. In fact, he was Adolf Eichmann, one of the key figures in the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’, the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. He was put on a plane to Israel and in 1961 he faced a criminal trial in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt, a Jewish German-American writer and academic, asked the New Yorker if she could cover the trial for them. They agreed. In Arendt’s eyes, the bespectacled Eichmann, wearing a cheap suit instead of his Nazi uniform, seemed like any other middle-ranking office clerk; he could just as easily have been working for an insurance company or a bank. She coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to highlight the way evil can flourish not just by good people standing by, but by ordinary people in ordinary jobs carrying out instructions without ever questioning their morality. Her analysis ran into a storm of controversy. Jews were unhappy at her criticisms of what she saw as a show trial by the State of Israel; more recently, Holocaust scholars have pointed out that the viciously antisemitic Eichmann was very far from being a small cog in the machine: he was a proactive and energetic enforcer of the Final Solution, most notably directing the mass murder of the Jewish population of Hungary. However, Arendt’s idea that evil does not need supervillains, but merely enough ordinary people doing their ordinary jobs remains a powerful insight. She gave us the words to describe it. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/BeatlesGettyImages-84999643-9c296eb-e1773405091446.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Four men pose at a busy press event as photographers gather around them. Behind them are large globe‑shaped balloons and clusters of bright red, yellow, and blue balloons. One man holds a sign that reads “LOVE.”" title="The Beatles take part in a press call to promote the Our World television broadcast, in which they performed ‘All You Need is Love’ for the first time. The song’s simple refrain was designed to have international appeal (Image by Getty Images)" /> 8. “All you need is love” The Beatles, 1967 The Beatles were at the height of their fame and influence by the 1967 ‘summer of love’. Pop music had developed into a young people’s lifestyle and outlook that their parents, of the wartime generation, found utterly bewildering. The Beatles did not just produce hit records: they put forward a new philosophy, which overturned the older generation’s assumptions about behaviour, dress and morality. When their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band appeared in May, it quickly took on cult status. A month later, the group unveiled a new song, ‘All You Need is Love’, as part of the first global live television link-up called Our World, which was watched by an audience of approximately 400 million. The song had been purposely written with simple repeated lyrics to appeal to the international viewers, and so summarised the new attractive, easy-to-grasp philosophy in clear terms. As the song itself says, “It’s easy”. Older heads might point out that life needs a lot more than love, but in 1967 few young people were listening. Pop music has been one of the defining cultural influences that mark the postwar world: it has overcome generational, social, political and cultural barriers with its infectious rhythms and simple messages. While ‘All You Need is Love’ may have always been an ideal, it has endured. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Neil-ArmstrongGettyImages-1512723-8b06da7-e1773405173996.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A photograph of a ridged footprint in a grey clay-like floor" title="A close-up photograph of Neil Armstrong’s famous boot print, 1969. The astronaut’s first words after stepping onto the Moon became instantly iconic – despite a slight stumble in delivery (Image by Getty Images)" /> 9. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” Neil Armstrong, 1969 That, at any rate, is what Neil Armstrong meant to say when he stepped down from the lunar module onto the surface of the Moon on 20 July 1969. Either he slipped on his words, or they were obscured by a bleep in the transmission, because the version heard back on Earth did not have that crucial “a”. It did not seem to matter. Armstrong was right: it was a giant leap, though at the time no one quite knew in what direction. Space exploration had excited people around the world since the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite in 1957 and putting a human being on the Moon had seemed the ultimate prize. Where was all this endeavour to go after that? Science fiction suggested a world of space voyages, but the reality was to be much closer to home. Space technology moved into the world of satellites, first for telecommunications and later for everything from television to meteorology and traffic management. Inevitably, the military potential of space was quickly recognised. The Moon missions opened space up as a further area of operation for the nations of the Earth, so Armstrong was right, even if he got his words wrong. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/ThatcherGettyImages-1215188595-b93ab08-e1773405339874.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A woman with wavy, permed hair sits at a microphone, wearing a black and white patterned suit and white shirt with V neck collar. She has large pearl earrings and sits against a blue background" title="Margaret Thatcher addresses a press conference at Conservative Party HQ in 1987 – the year her interview with Woman’s Own magazine sparked controversy (Image by Getty Images)" /> 10. “There is no such thing as society” Margaret Thatcher, 1987 The Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister, ushered in a revolution. Her immediate aim was to resolve the economic problems into which the country had sunk in the 1970s, which she did by promoting a new philosophy based on free enterprise and the rolling-back of state control. In an interview for Woman’s Own magazine, Thatcher outlined her belief that, ultimately, it is not for the government to resolve people’s problems; individuals and families must look after themselves and their neighbours. In that sense, she said, “There is no such thing as society”. The phrase provoked a storm of controversy. Supporters applauded her emphasis on individuals, while opponents denounced what they saw as her uncaring attitude towards the Welfare State, which many regarded as the most significant change in 20th-century British society. The phrase encapsulated two completely different political philosophies: a belief in the power of the state as a force for good or as an enervating drain on the people’s energies. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/ReaganGettyImages-514906046-9ed3ad8-e1773405425624.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Ronald Reagan delivers a speech at a podium surrounded by microphones, seated officials behind him. A section of the Berlin Wall stands in the background with a German warning sign." title="Ronald Reagan makes his famous challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. The Berlin Wall was toppled two years later (Image by Getty Images)" /> 11. “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Ronald Reagan, 1987 The postwar Soviet Union seemed a menacing, repressive world, in the grip of its secret police and ruled by a set of grim-faced old men in coats, so the emergence in 1985 of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party came as a pleasant surprise. Not only did he seem more human and approachable, but he was clearly open to a closer and warmer relationship with the west. Even Mrs Thatcher commented that she liked Mr Gorbachev: he was a man she could do business with. Gorbachev embarked on a wholesale reordering of Soviet life and institutions, beginning with perestroika (restructuring) and notably glasnost (openness), encouraging people to speak openly and honestly about their lives, their past and even their government. Western countries sat up and took notice. Was it changing into a western-style democracy? Were the days of tanks rolling into eastern European capitals to crush liberation movements truly over? Read more | Did Ronald Reagan 'Make America Great Again'? US president Ronald Reagan decided to test him. In 1987, the president gave a speech at the Berlin Wall, the most potent symbol of the Soviet Union’s hostile rejection of the west. He welcomed the changes Gorbachev was making, but called on him to take the most far-reaching step of all: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” No one really believed he would, but it was thought that it might force Gorbachev onto the defensive. What no one predicted was that only two years later a mass movement of people, taking their cue from Gorbachev’s glasnost policy and calling openly for freedom of speech and movement, would force communist governments from power. When in May 1989 a journalist asked Gorbachev if the wall might come down, he replied, smilingly, “Why not?” By the end of the year, it had. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Hillary-ClintonGettyImages-526599660-40d8ade-e1773405542290.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Hilary Clinton, with shoulder length coiffed blonde hair, wearing a dark top and a pink, white and gold neck scarf. She stands in front of a microphone, and is turned towards the left, looking at someone out of frame" title="First Lady Hillary Clinton addresses a news conference in 1995. Her declaration that “women’s rights are human rights” helped bring the cause of gender equality into the global spotlight (Image by Getty Images)" /> 12. “Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights” Hillary Rodham Clinton, 1995 The feminist movement had used a shorter version of this phrase since the 1980s, but it entered the mainstream when Hillary Clinton, wife of American president Bill Clinton, spoke at a United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. The transformation of the position of women in society was one of the most striking changes to take place in the 20th century. In Britain and the US, the century had begun with the celebrated campaign for women to have the right to vote, and by the end feminism had developed as a movement and philosophy that sought to transform human society along the lines of equality. Clinton was an apt figure to give voice to the aim. She was a lawyer who, in 1974, had been part of the Watergate investigation team that brought down President Richard Nixon. But her husband’s own presidency meant that she had to perform what was essentially a ceremonial role. She could support Bill in his duties, but could she hold office herself? As long as women’s rights continued to be regarded as a category on their own, it seemed that women would never be accepted as equals – hence her impassioned iteration that women’s rights are not just rights for women: they have always been basic human rights. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/harry-potter-and-the-sorcerers-stoneB8C7su-215cbe1-e1773405675845.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A young boy with dark hair and round glasses stands in a snowy street, dressed in a black robe with a yellow and maroon badge on his chest and a yellow and maroon striped scarf around his neck. On one arm he is holding a white owl" title="Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) with his trusty owl, Hedwig, in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001). JK Rowling’s wizarding franchise rapidly became a global phenomenon – despite opposition from some Christian groups (Image by Warner Bros.)" /> 13. “You’re a wizard, Harry” Robbie Coltrane (as Rubeus Hagrid), 2001 When JK Rowling’s debut novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997, it was regarded as simply another imaginative children’s book from a first-time author. As word went round school playgrounds, however, the popularity of the series grew. Soon, crowds were gathering at bookshops to buy each new title as soon it appeared, along with Harry Potter audiobooks, videogames, tie-in toys and merchandise. Then in 2001, the first of a highly successful series of Harry Potter feature films made its way on to the big screen. What had begun as a series of children’s books had become a global phenomenon, with the words “You’re a wizard, Harry” (spoken by Hagrid actor Robbie Coltrane in the first film adaptation) becoming part of cinematic history. Hogwarts, Harry’s school of witchcraft and wizardry, is clearly a nostalgic throwback to the days of Britain’s famous private schools, with their uniforms, dormitories and special trains. But much of her message is more universal: a passionate defence of honesty and integrity against the dark forces of evil in the world, including those to be found in people who sit in authority. The formidable but kindly headmaster Albus Dumbledore is a sort of Old Testament prophet; the clash between Harry, whose parents gave their lives for him, and Voldemort (aka Tom Riddle), a boy who has given in to his dark side, is a modern stand-off between Jesus and Lucifer, the fallen angel. Did Harry Potter come to embody a substitute religion in the secular post-Christian western world? Certainly, fundamentalist Christians denounced the books and forbade their children from reading them. We can be sure that historians will be looking closely at the Harry Potter phenomenon for many years to come. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/For-EveryoneG5BD6F-9c59143-e1773405794351.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A packed stadium at night glows with blue and purple lighting. In the upper stands, illuminated seats spell out “THIS IS FOR EVERYONE,” while a central stage features a house‑shaped structure with projected visuals." title="Tim Berners-Lee’s cameo appearance at the 2012 Olympics ended with the words “This is for everyone” being beamed around the stadium. The words were intended to convey the democratic ideals behind the World Wide Web (Image by Alamy)" /> 14. “This is for everyone” Tim Berners-Lee, 2012 One of the most significant moments during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics was also one of the quietest. After a stunning display that charted rural Britain’s transformation into an industrial powerhouse came a dance sequence depicting a 21st-century house party, complete with a full-size replica of a suburban home at its centre. Then, the house lifted up to reveal a middle-aged man sitting at his computer sending out a tweet: "This is for everyone.” The man was Tim Berners-Lee, and in 1989 he laid the foundations for what would become the World Wide Web. The web transformed the modern world just as totally as the Victorian industrialists had. Computers had always been huge, complex objects, the preserve of scientists and governments; until fairly recently, the most sophisticated item that people carried around with them was a pocket calculator. What Berners-Lee did was to create a way that would connect computers with each other, anywhere in the world, whether they were in people’s bedrooms or in the headquarters of international agencies. Suddenly, ordinary people had access to pretty much anything they might want to see. This was a democratic revolution as well as a technological one. As any government knows, access to information is power, and it was now in the hands of ordinary people everywhere. Tech companies grew from small gatherings of like-minded geeks into formidable multinational powers, able to face down governments. Of course, such power also brings responsibility, but Berners-Lee’s message at the Olympics was that the web should always be for everyone. A simple message – but a truly revolutionary one.
From Stranger Things to communist cars: why we can't resist nostalgia
In our politically unstable modern world, the allure of retreating into memories – sometimes mirages – of bygone eras seems to have grown. Six historians explore how this tendency impacts our historical understanding
“The nostalgia that Stranger Things evokes is complicated” The first thing to remind ourselves is that our view of the past is definitely shaped. The way that we understand history is translated, constructed, created for us in multiple ways – the majority of which have very little to do with the actuality of what happened. We imagine and dream history across culture, making versions of it that comfort us and accord with our world views. Film, television, games, adverts, heritage spaces, novels – they all enable us to inhabit other times, to form our sense of memory, to consume the past. Nostalgia is simply one of the ways that we access these feelings of pastness. It is incredibly powerful because of its appeal to emotion beyond rationality. It is a way of connecting with the historical that ignores order and authority – and historians underestimate it at their peril. Nostalgia has become a keynote for contemporary collective memory. Global populist politics are shot through with a dangerous nostalgia for a claimed glory that has been seemingly squandered. This is not new, but it is newly dominant. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2WX7XXY-CMYK-12a5f8b-e1772530438298.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A poster for the TV show Stranger Things, showing four children on bikes on a long road with a yellow line down the middle. They are all looking towards a red, cloudy sky" title="The hit series Stranger Things is “a confection of an imagined 1980s”, says Jerome De Groot, enjoyed by an audience of whom many have “no memory of the eighties other than a cultural hangover of tropes and clichés” (Image by Alamy)" /> In the television series Mad Men (2007), Don Draper cynically uses the past to sell product, observing: “Nostalgia – it’s delicate, but potent.” Memories of the past can be manipulated. The biggest English-language show worldwide in 2025 was Stranger Things, a confection of an imagined 1980s – Spielberg, Nike, Kate Bush and the Cold War melded to present a version of the decade. Yet the nostalgia that Stranger Things evokes is complicated. Much of the show’s target audience has no memory of the eighties other than a cultural hangover of tropes and clichés. The eighties it recollects is itself rooted in a view of 1950s US small-town life. The nostalgia at work here is culturally performative, sold as an expression of algorithmic power rather than actual choice. No one remembers in a neutral way; everyone’s version of the past is a translation enabled by culture. Nostalgia is delicate, but this fragility is a kind of pure experience – even if it is prone to commodification. Jerome De Groot is professor of literature and culture at Manchester University, and author of Double Helix History (Routledge, 2022) “Nostalgia is one of history’s greatest promoters” Nostalgia seems to be everywhere – so much so that some people argue there’s something specific about the 21st century that prompts nostalgia. But it has been around, in one form or another, for centuries – and it has profoundly shaped our relationship with the past. The term ‘nostalgia’ was coined by a Swiss physician in the late 17th century. At the time, it was deemed a disease – a kind of pathological homesickness. It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century that it morphed into its more familiar form: a longing for a bygone time rather than a distant place. Since then, nostalgia has been our constant companion, becoming rife in popular culture, journalism and political commentary in the 20th century. The 1970s has even been dubbed the “second-hand seventies” for that reason. Psychologists have also studied nostalgia’s prevalence, arguing that it’s experienced by pretty much everyone, all of the time. Though some people might be more or less prone to the feeling, nostalgia is a core human experience with distinct evolutionary advantages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3259343webready-3771e14-e1772529840639.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a large group of children playing on a roundabout in a playground. Some adults stand to the right, watching over them. Behind them all are some large brick walls and a few high rise buildings" title="Children play on a roundabout in a London housing estate, 1973. Thanks to nostalgia in popular culture and media, that decade has been dubbed the “second-hand seventies”, notes Agnes Arnold-Forster (Image by Getty Images)" /> Broadly, nostalgia can be divided into two types: personal and historical. The first is the nostalgia you feel about your own life; the second is nostalgia for some period in the past that you haven’t yourself experienced or lived through. Read more | Swings and roundabouts: a history of Britain's playgrounds It is the latter that poses the most problems. In political life, it is often lambasted as the emotional driver behind rightwing populist movements. Academic historians also take issue with this brand because it paints a sentimental and often inaccurate portrait of the past, and advocate detached, dispassionate and objective investigation. Yet not only is it impossible to quell nostalgia’s influence, that also shouldn’t be the goal. Nostalgia is one of history’s greatest promoters. And history is not just an academic enterprise. It is a vibrant ecosystem of period dramas, battle re-enactments, museums, documentaries and genealogists. Nostalgia might not be the only thing that draws people to the past – but where would this ecosystem be without its seductive emotional force? Agnes Arnold-Forster is chancellor’s fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and author of Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion (Picador, 2024) “Today, nostalgia speaks in a different idiom, in ALL CAPS and acronyms” Nostalgia, as the old joke goes, isn’t what it used to be. Twenty years ago, the term was popularly associated with the embattled citizens of eastern Europe, who retreated from the shock of market capitalism into a cosy world of Trabants, Lenin statues and the evocative smell of communist-era pickle jars. Appropriately enough, it was the Russian-American scholar Svetlana Boym who came up with the era’s most perceptive analysis of nostalgia. For her, the pull of a “restorative nostalgia” – a longing for a home or homeland that has never existed – was always at play in the nationalist fantasies of the right as much as it also shaped people’s memories of communism. Today, nostalgia speaks in a different idiom, in ALL CAPS and acronyms – MAGA, MEGA, ‘Take Back Control’ – but Boym’s warnings still ring loud and clear. Here, a look at recent history can be helpful. Nostalgia for a fantasy of imagined racial homogeneity is hardly a new force in British politics. Keir Starmer’s unconscious echoing of Enoch Powell’s noxious rhetoric (in 2025 the PM said Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers”, a phrase he later expressed regret for using) highlights how the spirit of Powell is animating contemporary political discourse. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-2233375765webready-490da1a-e1772529952548.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing twelve tall lampposts in a line, each with a single England flag on them, blowing in the wind" title="The English flag flies from lampposts in Sheerness, 2025. The way Britons express nostalgia has changed a great deal over the past 20 years, argues Benjamin Jones (Image by Getty Images)" /> In my field, modern British history, a number of analysts have diagnosed ‘imperial nostalgia’ as an underlying cause of the Brexit-era lurch to the far right. I wonder if this is quite right. Though we might accept that some nationalists dream of resurrecting the British empire, most people’s feelings regarding our imperial past are probably messier and less coherent. Cultural theorist Paul Gilroy argued two decades ago that, rather than acknowledging the complexities of empire, the British instead retreated into “postcolonial melancholia”. Imperial pride was expressed just as colonial violence was denied. We need a cure for such morbid symptoms. Migrants – the enslaved, the indentured, the impoverished, more rarely the privileged – made empire and re-made Britain in turn. Clear vision is required to understand this past; rose-tinted lenses will only obscure our view. Benjamin Jones is author of The Working Class in Mid Twentieth-Century England (Manchester UP, 2012) “German Democratic Republic nostalgics are a minority, but a growing one” When Boris Johnson visited socialist East Germany months before reunification in 1990, he was “amazed at how far behind West Germany” it was: a land “of strange little cars with two-stroke engines and fake coffee”. Most East Germans agreed, keen to swap those “strange little” Trabant cars for VWs, and to leave behind the dictatorship and its make-do economy. Today, things are changing. Cars made in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) are seeing a revival. Restored Trabants fetch up to 7,000 Euros – close to the sum paid when new. Though half of owners are over 60, thousands are under 30, born long after the last Trabi left the factory. This fits into a wider trend of GDR nostalgia, or Ostalgie. In 2019 – 30 years after the Berlin Wall fell – a survey found that 10 per cent of East Germans wanted the GDR back. When the newspaper Nordkurier asked the same question recently, it was nearly a quarter. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1555920290webready-0db3990-e1772530085287.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of several small, colourful cars parked together, in front of a large building with a central circular tower and pointed rooftops" title="Trabant cars in central Leipzig, East Germany in February 1990, shortly before that state’s reunification with West Germany. A resurgence in the brand’s popularity reflects nostalgia for the certainties of communist rule (Image by Getty Images)" /> GDR nostalgics are a minority, but a growing one. Ask them why, and most cite not socialist convictions but a feeling that life was simpler during the Cold War. The present, with its wars, economic uncertainty and rapid technological change, can feel frightening. So the small world of the GDR appears reassuringly predictable, irrespective of the Stasi’s omnipresence. The Trabi embodies this paradox: it’s a tiny, underpowered car but one that anyone can repair and on which families relied for decades. West Germans aren’t free from nostalgia. With the rise of the far right, unstable coalitions and economic pessimism, many reminisce about the postwar era and its political stability and economic miracle. West Germany was no dictatorship but it was staunchly conservative, initially limiting opportunities for women and social mobility. There is no moral equivalence, but Westalgie also views history through a soft filter. Read more | Life in East Germany: the cultural evolution behind the Iron Curtain In our uncertain times, the pull of Cold War nostalgia is seductive. Historians must stay the course of academic rigour and integrity, providing a much-needed lifeline of solid analysis until calmer days return. Katja Hoyer is a historian, journalist and visiting research fellow at King’s College, London. Her forthcoming book is Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe (Allen Lane, May 2026) “The ‘nostalgia’ label is often applied indiscriminately to almost any period film” As Agnes Arnold-Forster concludes in her recent historical work on this “dangerous emotion”, there are “many nostalgias”, not just one, so assessing whether it shapes our view of the past depends on context and specific detail. Of course, we should be concerned by nostalgia’s role as a social and political emotion – the contentious yearning for an idealised ‘lost’ place or past. Its potential for manipulation demands particular scrutiny in relation to histories, collective memory and public understandings of the present as well as the past. These are no idle fears in our present times. When it comes to period films, historical media genres and their audiences, I would question how much nostalgic pleasures and practices really tell us about the public’s relationship with British history. The ‘nostalgia’ label is often applied indiscriminately to almost any period film or media text, regardless of its genre or intentions, and also to audiences. This issue was a core motivation for my 2011 empirical study Heritage Film Audiences. Even the (few) respondents who expressed acute nostalgia were self-reflective on the subject. “We would not really swap our comfortable modern lifestyle for those days,” wrote one. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1319979896webready-5db6466-e1772530181978.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a person's hands holding an old photo of a woman in a high necked dress holding a small child in a white dress. Behind the photo are several others strewn across a desk and an open laptop with a family tree on it" title="Popular factual television programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? can act as a bulwark against idealised versions of the past, contends Claire Monk (Image by Getty Images)" /> The first two decades of the 21st century brought an unprecedented new wave of accessible public history, from free digitised resources (such as Old Bailey Online) via the rise of online family history to innovations in history television that engaged audiences with fact-based histories, primary sources and historical methods. The BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?, launched in 2004, has now run for 22 seasons. Channel 4, particularly during the late Hamish Mykura’s tenure, excelled in innovations in primary-source-based historical drama and drama documentary. The series Georgian Underworld (2003) and City of Vice (2008), on the formation of the Bow Street Runners, were notable. However, the future of engaging public-history media for British audiences rests on institutional factors, not least the future of UK public-service broadcasting itself. Claire Monk is professor emerita of film and film culture at De Montfort University “In contemporary politics, nostalgia is playing a powerful role” Nostalgia is neither inherently good nor bad. It helps us connect to the past, remembering friendships, experiences, places. It can help us work through regrets, offering insights that benefit us in the present. But nostalgia can produce sentimentality based on mischaracterisations of how things once were, painting the past in rose-tinted hues that bear little resemblance to historical reality. Either way, it produces very strong emotions. And in contemporary politics, nostalgia is playing a powerful role. We are seeing a surge in far-right nationalism, not least in the UK. Nostalgia feeds into this, weaponising ‘great’ moments in the past. These are taken selectively from British imperial history, evoking, as cultural theorist Stuart Hall puts it, “the fantasy of a late return to the flag, family values, national character, imperial glory and the spirit of Palmerstonian gunboat diplomacy”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-526776478webready-1b1f2a8-e1772530266615.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A 17th‑century coastal scene showing a large group of men, women, and children gathered on a shoreline as they prepare to board ships. Several sailing vessels wait offshore, with small rowboats ferrying passengers to them. People wear cloaks, bonnets, and wide‑brimmed hats typical of the period. Behind them, cliffs rise to a fortified stone building overlooking the harbour. The mood suggests a significant departure or migration" title="A coloured engraving shows Huguenot refugees landing at Dover after toleration of Protestantism ended in France in 1685. Contrary to a populist narrative invoking false nostalgia, “Britain was never a homogeneous nation”, notes Anamik Saha (Image by Getty Images)" /> As Benjamin Jones notes, Paul Gilroy described this turn as “postcolonial melancholia”. The issue is not only how nationalists refabricate moments from history for their own ends, but also how they bind them to strong feelings of nostalgia. Crucially, Gilroy highlighted the racial dimension of this longing for a Britain before postwar immigration from the former colonies, when life was supposedly simpler, more peaceful and more homogeneous. Read more | Catholics vs Huguenots: your guide to the French Wars of Religion Postcolonial melancholia relies on a wilful amnesia about the past. Historians show us that Britain was never a homogeneous nation free from internal conflict. It has experienced waves of immigration over many centuries, following a familiar pattern: immigrants are initially met with fear and distrust before becoming naturally absorbed into British life and identity. Yet this is buried in popular representations of British history. Historical precision now struggles against nationalistic nostalgia that paints Britain’s past in broad, brutal strokes, obscuring important histories for political ends. Good history can salve postcolonial melancholia, helping the nation face and work through the troubled elements of its past. Anamik Saha is professor of race and media at Leeds University, and author of Race, Culture and Media (Sage, 2021) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Think the Victorians were prudes? Their filthiest jokes will shock you
Victorian audiences revelled in riddles, physical comedy and bawdy jokes that challenge everything we think we know about 19th-century respectability
The words ‘Victorian Britain’ might evoke images of men with waxed moustaches and women in high-necked dresses, sitting upright in houses drawn back from the London smog. Indeed, ‘Victorian’ has become shorthand for prudishness, referring to the long reign of Queen Victoria: a period associated with notions of strict social etiquette, restraint and rigid ideas about respectability. But this view irons out a lot of the period’s complexities. Beneath a visage of stiff morality was a culture that delighted in wordplay, physical comedy and, in private, jokes that were startlingly explicit. So what, precisely, did these people find funny? As historian Dr Bob Nicholson explains on the HistoryExtra podcast: “It’s really hard to define the sense of humour of millions of people over a generation, just as it would be now. But when I look at Victorian comedy, I guess there are certain recurring patterns or themes that they really liked.” The Victorian sense of humour The Victorian-era was defined by transformation on a vast scale, powered by world-leading industrialisation, urbanisation and expanding literacy. The population of England and Wales more than doubled during the 19th century, and cities like Manchester and London grew at rapid pace. Now, newspapers, penny weeklies and comic magazines such as Punch could reach a new, mass readership. Music halls became hugely popular too, offering working and lower-middle class audiences a place to enjoy an evening of singing and comedy. Read more | What was daily life like for 'ordinary' Victorians? It was both in print and the spoken word that the Victorian sense of humour really managed to flourish. “The first thing you’ll see when you look at their jokes is that they love puns,” Nicholson says. “They absolutely love wordplay, to a degree that I think we would look at now and think: these are some pretty laboured, torturous puns.” The increasingly literate Victorians delighted in verbal dexterity, double entendres and clever linguistic turns of phrase. Here, Nicholson says, we can see that Victorian humour ran “from incredibly erudite and witty bits of satire through to the most base form of slapstick – somebody slipping on a banana skin. So, I would say their sense of humour was pretty much as broad and varied as ours is.” Physical comedy was the most accessible, requiring no literacy at all, making it especially appealing for large, mixed audiences. Life in Victorian Britain | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | This six-week course covers everything you need to know about Victorian Britain, guided by historian Ruth Goodman and filmed on location at Black Country Living Museum. Explore the course now Word puzzles and wordplay One particularly Victorian form of humour was essentially a riddle disguised as a punchline. Conundrums had earlier roots in 18th-century parlour games but flourished in the 19th century. “These types of pun jokes were really popular,” Nicholson explains. “They were treated almost like puzzles rather than jokes. In fact, they were known as conundrum jokes in the nineteenth century. “You would often have a pause between the setup and the punchline where people were invited to try to solve the riddle,” Nicholson says. “That doesn’t necessarily make for the best rhythm of joke-telling, but it can be very satisfying when you figure it out. The Victorians really enjoyed doing that.” Read more | How I uncovered Victoria's secret love: Historian Fern Riddell explains all “They even had conundrum competitions on very large scales,” Nicholson notes. “People in the town would submit their jokes, they would be read out on stage, and then judged by a committee of local gentlemen who would decide on the best pun, which would win a prize.” A private appetite for indecent jokes While Victorian public comedy was fairly harmless, more private humour could be shockingly blunt – and rude. The enduring stereotype of prudery comes largely from what was printed in the mainstream. Victorian Britain had strict obscenity laws. The 1857 Obscene Publications Act, for example, gave authorities new powers to seize and destroy material deemed immoral. But censorship didn’t eliminate people’s appetite for more risqué comedy. Nicholson points to an underground publication called The Pearl, “a pornographic magazine circulated in private among gentlemen.” Its limericks and anecdotes were explicit in ways that directly contradict many modern assumptions about Victorian social delicacy. “There are some incredibly rude Victorian limericks,” says Nicholson. One such example that Nicholson gives, among others, is: “There was a young lady of Hitchin Who was scratching her **** in the kitchen. Her father said, “Rose, It’s the crabs I suppose.” “You’re right, Pa, the buggers are itchin’.” “The reason I share these is that they seem so un-Victorian,” he says. “The idea of them using that kind of language, joking about those kinds of things – about lice, sexually transmitted diseases – it seems so unfamiliar to how we imagine the Victorians. Read more | He's the Victorian serial killer you've never heard of – and we may now know who he was “But those jokes were circulating. They were there and have survived in these fragments. They are not the kind of material you would hear in a mainstream musical or read in a magazine or newspaper,” Nicholson notes. “We have this image of the Victorians as being much more respectable and not interested in bodily humour, in part because that material was edited out for public consumption.” As for Queen Victoria, even her own sense of humour was surprising. What made Queen Victoria laugh? Victoria is often attributed with saying “we are not amused”. While it’s unlikely she actually said it, the sentiment of the phrase has stuck to her reputation. But the reality, Nicholson reveals, was very different. “What did Victoria laugh at? The answer is: loads of things,” Nicholson says. Her diaries contain frequent references to things that amused her at dinner parties and court events and, as Nicholson explains, “she is constantly talking about funny things said at the dinner table.” Victoria kept extensive journals throughout her life, leaving historians a detailed record of her private reactions and amusements. From what Nicholson can gather, she enjoyed physical comedy: “Somebody falling over, a man sitting on his hat, somebody trapping their fingers in a door. The old classics.” Read more | Who were Queen Victoria's sons and daughters? Nicholson also recounts an anecdote from a dinner conversation with a partially deaf admiral describing how he intended to recover a sunken ship. Mishearing the queen’s polite inquiry about his sister, he explained how he would “have her turned over, take a good look at her bottom and scrape all the barnacles off.” Victoria was helpless with laughter, while the admiral remained oblivious. “The image we have of her as incredibly serious does not resemble the version you see in private,” Nicholson notes. After the death of Prince Albert in 1861, it was Victoria’s prolonged public mourning that reshaped her image. For decades she wore black and withdrew from many public appearances. That visible grief hardened into our defining image of Victoria. And her seclusion contributed to a wider association between the monarchy and solemnity during the later 19th century. “In public she had to project the power, authority, and dignity of a sovereign,” Nicholson says. Despite that veneer, Nicholson says that it’s important to remember precisely what the Victorians, including the queen herself, were amused by. Bob Nicholson was speaking to David Musgrove on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
10 children and 12,000 pieces of art: the remarkable life of Lady Charlotte Schreiber
She was a headstrong scholar who contributed hugely to the study of medieval literature and challenged the societal norms of the 19th century. So why isn’t she better known? Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth traces the adventures of an unsung heroine
While hunting for antiques in the Netherlands in the 1880s, the esteemed art dealer Joseph Joel Duveen received a tip-off that some “wonderful pieces of china” had come up for sale in a remote village. Getting there would involve a tediously long journey but, undeterred, Duveen set out. Several hours later, however, he spotted a carriage speeding past in the opposite direction, and was able to make out its passenger. Recognising the face of his great rival, Duveen promptly turned around, empty-handed, ruefully realising that she had beaten him to the village and “snatched the prize”. The victor on this occasion was Lady Charlotte Schreiber. Surprisingly, given her long life – she was 82 when she died, in 1895 – which included two marriages, 10 children, scandalous affairs and a celebrated translation of the medieval Welsh Mabinogion, Lady Charlotte remains relatively unknown today. Often erroneously dismissed as a mere magpie obsessed with trinkets, for decades her second husband and sons were credited for accumulating her great collection. Yet, shortly before her death, she donated a trove of some 5,000 pieces to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) and the British Museum. Defiance and scandal Charlotte endured a difficult childhood. Born Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Bertie in 1812, she lost her father, the 9th Earl of Lindsey, when she was only six years old. Her mother remarried, and her new stepfather, the Reverend Peter Pegus, turned out to be a violent alcoholic; he once drank a whole mug of lamp oil, mistaking it for beer. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain At the age of 10, Charlotte started keeping a diary, in which she wrote almost every day until she lost her eyesight in her late seventies. A true polymath, she gave herself “a man’s education”, studying history and literature, and learning Arabic and Farsi (Persian) as well as Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian and even Hebrew. She dedicated hours to her “oriental studies”, devouring Barthélemy d’Herbelot de Molainville’s monumental 1697 compendium Bibliothèque Orientale, and later became a subscriber to the Oriental Translation Fund. To a young woman frustrated by her privileged yet undeniably restrained upbringing, the ‘Orient’ represented an imagined place of freedom where the stagnant and gendered traditions of elite British life did not exist. Throughout her years, Charlotte defied the strict protocols of Georgian and Victorian society, causing various scandals. As a teenager she fell in love with a local squire, Augustus O’Brien, but her mother “had sooner see me in my grave than married to Augustus”. She also had a dalliance with her brother’s tutor, a Mr Martin, and shortly after became “very good friends” with Benjamin Disraeli, whom she described as “wild, enthusiastic, and very poetical”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/HYB33K-fcd5698-e1771492464411.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A historical-style painting of a large industrial complex with many smokestacks releasing thick smoke into the sky. Several furnaces glow with open flames. In the foreground, workers shovel coal and operate machinery, surrounded by carts and industrial equipment. The scene conveys the intensity, pollution, and harsh labor conditions of early industrialisation." title="A painting of the Dowlais Ironworks, where Charlotte and her husband Josiah oversaw the management of over 5,000 employees (Image by Alamy)" /> In 1833, Charlotte married Welsh ironmaster and Whig politician Josiah John Guest. Although he was 27 years her senior, the two fell madly in love and had 10 children. Together they oversaw the day-to-day management of the Dowlais ironworks and its 5,000-plus employees. Charlotte managed the financial accounts, translated engineering manuals, established evening schools for the workers and their families, and even conducted business meetings. By 1839, she observed that she had successfully “schooled myself into habits of business that it is more congenial to me to calculate the advantage of half percent commission on a cargo of iron than to go to the finest ball in the world”. Welsh legend Charlotte’s marriage to John – whom she called Merthyr, Welsh for ‘martyr’ – gave her the freedom she so desperately craved. She used her autonomy to embrace her passion for history, carrying out archaeological excavations at ruins such as Morlais Castle in Glamorgan, where she discovered medieval seals and coins. Inspired by her “violent affection for Welsh castles”, Charlotte became a founding member of the Cymdeithas Cymreigyddion y Fenni (Abergavenny Welsh Society), encouraging the use of the Welsh language among all social classes. Resolving to outwardly demonstrate a sense of Welsh patriotism befitting her new social position, she wore traditional Welsh dress, taught herself medieval Welsh and received the Bardic name ‘Olwen’ – a famous protagonist from Welsh folklore. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/AY4G19cmykwebready-8a87b35-e1771492225305.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of two women dressed in long dresses with aprons over the top, tall black hats and shawls around their shoulders. One is standing in front of a spinning wheel, and the other is to the left behind it, standing in a doorway" title="This photograph shows women in traditional Welsh dress, which Charlotte adopted on marriage to Welshman John Guest (Image by Alamy)" /> While still in her twenties, Charlotte began the colossal task of writing an English translation of the Llyfr Coch Hugest (Red Book of Hergest), a compilation of medieval Welsh ballads and oral traditions including the tales known as the Mabinogion. It was not a straightforward undertaking. Contemporaries were concerned that the work would not be taken seriously if translated by a woman, never mind an English one, and she suspected that her Welsh teachers were passing her translations on to others. Read more | She held wealth, power and prestige: so why did this Georgian aristocrat fake her daughter’s death? Her fears were realised when the French writer Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué tried to publish her translation of the Mabinogion story Peredur, passing it off as his own work. Determined to thwart his plans, Charlotte poured all her energy into completing her version. At one point she worked on it for 12 hours straight, taking a break only to give birth to her fifth child. Thanks to these monumental efforts, she published her Mabinogion in seven parts between 1838 and 1845 to great acclaim. In the 1840s Charlotte began to assemble an art collection, seeking out works from the great European schools of the Renaissance. Her purchases included a piece by a follower of the great 16th-century portraitist Hans Holbein the Younger, which she acquired in 1842 at the ‘Great Sale’ of the celebrated 18th-century gossip and socialite Horace Walpole’s estate of Strawberry Hill, near London. Her husband, John Guest, died in 1852, and the following year Charlotte hired Charles Schreiber (1826–1884), a young Cambridge academic, to tutor her eldest son. They initially attempted to hide their affair, but it wasn’t long before Charlotte appeared with her hair dyed brown – likely to diminish the couple’s 14-year age gap – and announced their engagement. Court cases ensued, and only three of her 10 children attended the wedding. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/Credit-Common-Crow-Bookss000104757cmykwebready-e198adb-e1771492058978.jpeg" width="1500" height="1001" alt="An open book showing a colour illustration of ornate Persian glassware on the left page and a title page on the right. The illustration depicts a tall decorative bottle with a stopper and two matching cups, all with intricate floral and bird designs. The title page lists bibliographic details for “Lady Charlotte Schreiber’s Journals,” including publication information and handwritten catalog markings." title="The opening page from a copy of Lady Charlotte Schreiber’s Journals, which was originally published in 1911, detailing all 12,000 objects that Charlotte had collected (Image by Common Crow Books)" /> Making a mark With newfound joie de vivre, Charlotte spent the next few decades travelling the world with Charles, dedicating herself to forming the greatest collection of ‘ceramic art’ ever seen. She acquired more than 12,000 objects, all of which she numbered and recorded in her journal. Armed with a red velvet bag, she often spent upwards of seven hours per day in search of objects, particularly European and Asian ceramics. Back at home in London she meticulously researched everything she’d bought, transcribed archives and documentary sources, and even got her hands dirty assisting with excavations at archaeological sites. Read more | "Museums are magical places": Kavita Puri on a new initiative encouraging close encounters with history Charlotte approached collecting just as she did everything else in her life – with an unyielding commitment to the pursuit of knowledge, and an ever-growing desire to succeed and make her mark on the world. As a committed cultural philanthropist, she believed in the educational power of museums and, after Charles’ death, declared her collection “the property of the nation”. From 1885 until her death 10 years later, she gave thousands of pieces to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) and the British Museum – unprecedented bequests for a woman collector. At a social gathering one evening in the 1840s, Charlotte was perusing the ‘finest London ladies’ featured in Heath’s Book of Beauty for 1839 – an annual of contemporary fashion and style. A fellow guest, seeing that Charlotte was not listed among the women, commented that “not all the fairies are present; the Welsh fairy Olwen is missing”. “She was not a fairy,” Charlotte replied, “she was a Goddess.” Here’s to that. This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
Fascism? No thanks! Why Britain rejected extremism in the 1930s
Extremism was on the march across continental Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet Britons chose a different, more moderate, path. Alwyn Turner explores why the posturing and rants of would-be dictators largely fell on deaf ears between the wars
“Is this the age of dictators?” asked veteran journalist Sir Sidney Low. He was writing in September 1923, the month in which a military coup brought Miguel Primo de Rivera to power in Spain. At the same time, Benito Mussolini was reinforcing his new dictatorship in Italy, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was shaping the nascent republic of Turkey, and disruptions – including those fomented by Hitler’s Nazis – were building to a climax in Germany. Taken together, these developments led Low to wonder whether the world might be witnessing “the general decline of parliamentary institutions”. Over the years that followed, his comments were to become commonplace. By 1938, there was autocratic rule in more than a dozen European countries across the continent, from Portugal to Poland and beyond to the Soviet Union. Even in some countries that remained democracies, substantial anti-democratic elements were growing in power and influence: in the 1936 Belgian elections, the far right won nearly 20 per cent of the vote, while the Communist Party took 15 per cent in French elections that year. In Britain, however, there was no equivalent body of support for extremism in the interwar years. There was, of course, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) under the leadership of Oswald Mosley – a Conservative MP who then sat as an independent before switching to Labour and eventually finding his way to fascism. But Mosley was never more than a peripheral figure. At its peak in mid-1934, the BUF briefly numbered around 45,000 members. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) never got above 20,000 members in the 1930s. By comparison, the Labour Party claimed up to half a million members, and there were 6 million trade unionists. The CPGB’s best electoral showing came in the 1931 general election when it fielded 26 candidates, averaging fewer than 3,000 votes each – 0.3 per cent of the total – while Mosley’s New Party got 0.2 per cent. In 1935, the BUF didn’t even put up candidates. It’s not that Britain narrowly escaped the extremism that swept across Europe in the interwar years – it never came even vaguely close. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-545715027webready-1d9cdc7-e1771233358771.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a large group of people, dressed in long coats, scarves and hats marching through the street. They all have sad, concentrated looks on their faces" title="The National Hunger March (1932) saw men and women converge on London from around the country. The Great Depression caused a great deal of hardship, but Britons weren’t as badly affected as many other nations (Image by Getty Images)" /> Safe across the water There were multiple reasons why Britain didn’t succumb to the appeals of fascism or other extreme ideologies. There was the security of being an island, and the stability of a long existence as a nation within fixed borders. There was the fact that, horrific as the numbers of British fatalities were in the First World War, they were dwarfed by those of other combatant nations. Similarly, although the Great Depression brought hardship to many, Britain was not affected as badly as other countries. There was also the nature of the Labour Party, committed to the parliamentary process, as were the trade unions. And indeed the nature of the Conservative Party under the One-Nation leadership of Stanley Baldwin – as well as the electoral system that made it so difficult for rival parties to emerge. Read more | When Mosley's fascists took on East End London and lost: the Battle of Cable Street explained In his 1937 account of life in the industrial north, The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell made the suggestion that “cheap luxuries” kept the working class quiescent. “It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution,” he wrote. But low-level consumerism was not unique to Britain. If the country chose “to make the best of things”, it was surely because the national culture was already averse to radical disruption. It’s relevant, for example, that this was the great era of voluntary associations. There had been working men’s social clubs in industrial towns and cities for decades, but numbers grew substantially in the aftermath of the First World War. By 1922, its diamond jubilee year, the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union could boast 2,300 affiliated clubs with more than a million members. The Women’s Institute, which was founded in Canada and had reached Britain during the war, grew in the 1930s to around 300,000 members. Rotary Clubs, founded in Chicago, had around 19,000 members, and the League of Nations Union more than 400,000. Perhaps most important of all was the British Legion, which merged various ex-servicemen’s groups in 1921. Within a decade, it had a membership of 300,000 – around one in 10 of those who had served in the forces. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-2170737679webready-ac4bf6e-e1771233487438.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of five women standing around a long table with a white tablecloth on it. There are various items on the table, including some wicker baskets and a set of scales. The woman in the centre, an older woman dressed in dark clothing, is holding up a bunch of carrots" title="Members of the Women’s Institute gather at a garden show in 1922. By the end of the 1930s, Britain’s WI had grown to around 300,000 members (Image by Getty Images)" /> Beyond these big networks, Britain nurtured a vast array of local societies and groups dedicated to single interests: photography, prison reform, amateur dramatics, vegetable growing, jazz records and a thousand other issues and hobbies. What they had in common, pointed out the novelist Phyllis Bentley, was a high level of self-regulation. “Each of these societies has a properly elected committee and chairman,” she wrote, “and conducts its business by means of an agenda, a proper procedure of moving and voting resolutions, an annual report and a balance sheet open to all members.” The British, she observed, were a people “unexcelled in the proper conduct of public business by entirely voluntary but strictly self-regulated methods”. This was the institutionalised form of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”, a term coined by the philosopher and politician to express the importance of societal bonds formed at a local and family level. There were also political clubs – some 2,000 Conservative, nearly 1,000 Liberal, the early stirrings of Labour – but it was the institutions that weren’t based on party that really mattered. The non-aligned status of the various societies allowed for diversity of opinion, and for finding common cause. The societies operated on the basis of cooperation and coalition. It was from voluntary societies and trade unions, argued Baldwin, that the people had learned “the elements and principles of a democracy” which “they will never let go”. Democratic practice was thus embedded in everyday life, far beyond politics. Cultural caution Indeed, there was a striking absence of politics in British social life, and even more so in cultural life. The cinema, for example, was regulated by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), a body whose only remit was not to offend and which approved nothing more provocative than resilience in the face of adversity. The espousal of doctrines of revolution or free love were banned, as were “references to controversial politics”, including “relations between capital and labour”. So a proposed movie of Walter Greenwood’s Depression-era novel Love on the Dole was rejected by the BBFC for having “too much of the tragic and sordid side of poverty”. Permitted, however, was the comedy Off the Dole in which George Formby was “sacked” by the Labour Exchange after four years of not working, and which displayed nothing more contentious than the gentlest of political satire. (“A member of parliament is a man who gives your life for his country.”) Also banned by the BBFC was anything “calculated to wound the susceptibilities of foreign people”, as well as “the insistence on the inferiority of the coloured races” and “scenes calculated to inflame racial hatred”. Read more | The BBC begins: how a group of radio pioneers launched one of Britain's most famous institutions It was a very British take on censorship, quite unlike that of most European countries. It wasn’t any particular political viewpoint that was banned, but politics as a whole. “We may take pride,” said Lord Tyrrell, president of the BBFC, in 1937, “in observing that there is not a single film in London which deals with any of the burning issues of the day.” The BBFC had been established – and was still run – by the industry itself and, although its writ was never challenged, it had no statutory authority. This system of self-regulation was, acknowledged Labour politician Herbert Morrison, “a curious arrangement” but, he added, “The British have a very great habit of making curious arrangements that work very well.” In any event, it was surely preferable to the intense government control seen in Germany under Joseph Goebbels, or in Russia, where the head of the Soviet film industry, Boris Shumyatsky, was executed as a traitor in 1938 for not doing his job well enough. Reithian values An equally curious arrangement governed the BBC, founded in 1922, which operated first as a private company and then as a public-service corporation under royal charter. It had a monopoly on radio broadcasting in Britain and became the most significant cultural institution in the country. By the end of the 1920s there were 3 million radio licences, 9 million by the end of the thirties – virtually every household in the country had a radio. It was a little odd, though. Even in its early commercial days, the BBC was never a conventional operation that responded to audience demand. Nor did it ever become an organ of government. Instead, general manager (later director-general) John Reith created his own vision of public service broadcasting, and mostly resisted external pressure from those who wished to shape this new medium. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-613463542webready-2ec1964-e1771233639521.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a man wearing a white shirt, dark sweater vest and striped tie, sitting at a desk with papers in front of him. To the right is a large microphone with the letters BBC on the front" title="Announcers such as Alvar Lidell (above), the man who told the nation of Edward VIII’s abdication, were trusted figures whose work helped bind the nation together (Image by Getty Images)" /> There were restrictions, of course. Like the cinema, radio was not a place for disruption. The government, explained Reith, had given “an explicit instruction to avoid anything in the nature of religious, political or industrial controversy”. There wasn’t even a great deal of news. The newspaper industry, fearful of being made redundant, successfully lobbied the government to ensure that the first radio bulletin of the day wasn’t broadcast until 7pm, so that it wouldn’t harm sales of morning or evening titles. That curfew was broken – never to return – during the nine-day General Strike of 1926, when independent newspaper production was suspended and the radio became the chief source of news for many. During the dispute, Reith complained about the government – “I do not think they treat me altogether fairly,” he wrote in his diary – but he strove to keep coverage calm and detached. Even in this moment of national crisis, the BBC was not a propaganda station – largely because Baldwin overruled those in his cabinet (most notably Winston Churchill) who wanted to commandeer the airwaves. More broadly, as political coverage expanded, the BBC allowed for a variety of voices but had a clear bias towards parliamentary democracy: communists and fascists were seldom heard on the radio. It was ecumenical but definitely mainstream. So too was its approach to religion. Despite his own Presbyterian faith, Reith believed that religious broadcasting should be based on “a non-sectarian Christianity, confined, in respect of doctrine, to those simplest essentials to which all Christians of the west can adhere”. With only one national channel, augmented in most regions by a local station, the intention was to occupy a shared middle ground. As with the cinema, there was no wish to ruffle feathers. And, also like the cinema, the BBC was essentially self-regulating. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-590536530webready-693ada3-e1771233743610.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a man in uniform holding tightly onto the raised arm of a woman, who is holding a gun above her head. She is dressed in a collared shirt and long skirt. Behind them is a set of windows" title="Catherine Lacey stars in Judgment Day in 1937, at a time of tight control over what could be seen on theatre stages (Image by Getty Images)" /> For other cultural forms, there existed a patchwork of censorship that had evolved over generations without any sense of logic or coherence. The London stage was under the tight control of the Lord Chamberlain, while variety theatres were overseen by local councils. Books and exhibitions required no prior approval but were subject to the Obscene Publications Act. The Post Office was empowered to intercept mail, and customs officers to seize material brought in from abroad. None of this was draconian. It simply smothered: a comfort blanket that insulated against conflict. The resultant lack of cultural engagement with burning political issues on stage, screen and radio was part of the reason why the country felt – and was – so much more stable in the 1930s than most of Europe. Culture in Britain was far quieter than in its neighbours. There was something more that underpinned these cultural manifestations: a conviction that dictatorship ran against the grain of the nation. “Autocracy is abhorrent to the British mind,” wrote a columnist in the West Sussex Gazette in 1933, “and the kind we see in operation in Germany seems to us almost incredible.” The totalitarian state, with its intrusion into private life, offended a culture that had always prided itself on privacy and independence; somehow, it all looked so alien. The leader-worship accorded to Hitler, Stalin and their ilk – the ubiquity of their images on posters, placards and public portraits – felt wrong. That role was already taken by the monarchy, whose iconography was woven into the social fabric, from the national anthem to banknotes and coins, postage stamps and pillar boxes. The words “an English Hitler”, reflected novelist Louis Golding in 1931, were “comically contradictory of each other”. (Which didn’t stop people from trying them out: the previous year, Labour minister Arthur Greenwood had used precisely that phrase to describe Winston Churchill.) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-2630393webready-0ec36cd-e1771233973188.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a man dressed in a black uniform with a wide belt around his waist. He is standing above a crowd, shouting out to them with his right arm raised and curled towards his face" title="Oswald Mosley, far-right leader of the British Union of Fascists, addresses his supporters. The party never won a single parliamentary seat (Image by Getty Images)" /> No need to get shirty Equally alien, if not downright silly, were fascism’s quasi-military uniforms – all those monochrome shirts. “The number of nations that may be led to salvation, generally an undemocratic salvation, need to be limited only by the number of colours that shirts may be dyed,” mocked the Roscommon Herald. They became a standing joke in the literature of the time. There were Green Shirts in John Buchan’s 1935 novel The House of the Four Winds and again in Richmal Compton’s William the Dictator, White Shirts in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (both 1938), and unspecified Imperial Shirts in Agatha Christie’s One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940). Best of all, in his 1938 novel The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse introduced Roderick Spode, a parody of Oswald Mosley who leads the Black Shorts. As Gussie Fink-Nottle explains: “There were no shirts left.” In the same book, Wodehouse ridiculed “those pictures in the papers of dictators with tilted chins and blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words”. That was another part of the problem with such figures: the posturing and the bragging rants looked out of place in a British context, in the same way that fire-and-brimstone evangelicalism doesn’t work in a home counties accent. When Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists, he replaced his conventional tweeds and suits with a black polo-neck sweater tucked into black trousers, held up by a wide black leather belt, and his onstage persona adopted a more declamatory tone and exaggerated arm gestures. But he looked unconvincing, as though he was playing a dictator in an amateur dramatics society show. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-2634991webready-fc16f26-e1771233862476.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a short man in a suit and bowler hat walking in an exaggerated manner, arm in arm with a taller woman dressed in a long coat. They both look excited. Behind them is a large crowd of people, cheering the on" title="Irene Dipper and Billy Pease do ‘The Lambeth Walk’ in London, 1938. While the song was wildly popular in Britain, in Nazi Germany it was labelled “degenerate” (Image by Getty Images)" /> If there was a single cultural symbol of Britain’s instinctive distrust of the dictator, it was perhaps ‘The Lambeth Walk’ – the song, and accompanying dance, that swept the country in 1938. A highlight of the musical Me and My Girl it was a simple and instantly catchy tune that cried out to be whistled cheerily by postmen and plumbers. The lyrics were even simpler, notable for the shout of “Oi!” and for the happy-go-lucky bridge: “Everything free and easy; do as you darn well pleasey.” The song seemed to speak of a people free from an overbearing state – an anomaly in an increasingly authoritarian world. And it was embraced across the whole of society – danced, according to Mass Observation reports, “in Mayfair ballrooms, suburban dance halls, cockney parties and village hops”. Read more | From Mosley to the summer riots of 2024: the opportunistic evolution of Britain’s far right Some 350,000 copies of the sheet music for ‘The Lambeth Walk’ were sold in Britain in its first year, and it was exported successfully, too. It was recorded by dozens of artists including American bandleaders Artie Shaw and Duke Ellington, as well as Europe’s greatest jazz group, the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. As the continent lurched towards another conflict in the year of Munich and the idea of “peace for our time” proved illusory, The Times predicted that the song would “be the ‘Tipperary’ of the next world war”. In Nazi Germany, however, the song encountered stiff opposition. It was banned at the Shrovetide Carnival festivities in Munich and at the University of Heidelberg – where Joseph Goebbels had been awarded his PhD – and Hermann Göring reportedly forbade Luftwaffe bands from playing it. “This is degenerate music and the people who dance it are also degenerate,” thundered Der SA-Mann, newspaper of the Brownshirts. From a British perspective, this was a fundamental clash of cultures and values. “There is nothing free and easy in Nazi Germany,” said the Liverpool Echo. “‘The Lambeth Walk’ must seem out of place in the land of the goose step.” If that comparison seems a little fanciful – perhaps trivial – it made sense at the time. And even Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, drew exactly the same conclusion. “I understand that Hitler regards the Lambeth Walk as too democratic a dance for Germany,” he said. “All they can do there is the goose step.” Alwyn Turner is senior lecturer in cultural and literary history at the University of Chichester. His new book is A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars (Profile, January 2026) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
"I can lose myself for hours in a hypnotic trance": why we should all spend more time in archives
"Every one of us has an archive of our life, which is part of a bigger history", writes Kavita Puri
Having spent so much time in newsrooms and edit suites making television and radio documentaries, I have come to archives late on in my life. These are the precious places that hold records, whether that’s a digital file, an audio recording, or perhaps a paper diary, all of which can take you instantly back in time and place. I can lose myself for hours in some hypnotic trance as I stumble across a sentiment, a betrayal, a confession. All the while, I’m piecing together from these different voices a part of history. There are the official records and the private. And in both it can feel as if you are trespassing, as you turn a page that was perhaps once held by its author. In his beautiful book An Archive (Ivory Press, 2025) the British artist, potter and author Edmund de Waal writes: “Archives are purposeful and they are random. They record the personal and the institutional, plural and singular histories. They are passed on, inherited, stolen, plundered and lost. They are destroyed by accident and by design. They record rewritings, rethinking and retellings. They hold stories so they don’t disappear. They preserve information in the hope of a future.” Read more | “A tidal wave of digital material will overwhelm recordkeeping institutions”: the future of history Archives are, as he suggests, many things. They also reflect choices made about what and who we think should be recorded, and of what we remember. They can be self-consciously curated, but they may also not look in the direction we are expecting. Walking around de Waal’s vast studio in south London, I saw the rows of shelves that hold all the pots he has ever made (and are not currently out on loan to museums). He pointed at different ones, and was instantly able to explain when he’d made it and how he’d felt at that precise moment in time. Standing in that room, I realised the objects in that space were not only a record of his work, but were also an emotional map of his life. Archives are not just for historians writing books, and they aren’t (always) dusty rooms in a basement. They can also be objects like de Waal’s pots. The past lives all around us, not only in documents, but in material and physical ways, as well as in homes and public spaces. And it is not always about the great and good, but can be personal too. An archive might comprise the books we read, the letters we write, even the emails we send. Every one of us has an archive of our life, which is part of a bigger history. Most of us will not end up in a history book, museum or library, with the contents of our lives pored over in the future. But our own personal archive is meaningful nevertheless, and is something to be valued. Sometimes an archive takes on its own life. I was recently at the exhibition Lorca and the Archive: Memory in Motion at the Centre of Federico Garcia Lorca in Granada. It tells the story of the Spanish poet, who was murdered during the Spanish Civil War in 1936. After his death, his personal archive was hidden for years from the Nationalists. His family feared it would be destroyed for political reasons and so much of it was smuggled out of the country, but decades later it was returned to Spain and carefully preserved. To this day, Lorca’s body has never been found. But the archive of his work – his intimate feelings, his political recordings – was saved and lives on. Read more | Agony and adventure: the hidden histories inside women's diaries Ultimately, archives offer us clues to another time, which like a detective in the present we can try and piece together. We shall never all agree on that version of the past, and so history is perpetually revised. Cataloguing what has been before us will always be incomplete. Items are lost, and there are silences and absences that may be unrecovered. Ultimately, as de Waal says: “Archives are absolutely unfinished. That is the point.” This column was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
From maniacal horses to bat-men on the moon: 14 strange newspaper headlines from history
Muckraking journalists and money-hungry editors have been publishing sensational stories since newspapers first began. Hilary Mitchell flicks through the archives and reveals some of the weirdest press cuttings of all time
1. "German ghouls: corpses converted to soap and explosives” Yorkshire Telegraph and Star, April 1917 If you think that ‘fake news’ is a new phenomenon, think again. One of the most notorious pieces of misinformation actually dates to the First World War. During the conflict, a gruesome rumour spread that German leaders were using “Kadaververwertungsanstalten” – ‘corpse factories’ – to turn the dead bodies of their own soldiers into products such as soap, candles, and even bombs. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/German-Ghouls-0741ad1-e1769765897344.jpg" width="620" height="411" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline GERMAN GHOULS across the top" title="German leaders were creating soap and explosives out of corpses, claimed this 1917 newspaper article. In reality, they were victims of a deliberately shocking propaganda campaign (Image by the Newspaper Archive)" /> The lurid story unsurprisingly sparked widespread outrage, but it wasn’t true. It was a purposefully shocking piece of war propaganda, and the German government protested in the strongest terms against the “loathsome and ridiculous” claims. However, that didn’t stop the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star gleefully reporting on the hoax in April 1917, in an article that claimed the Germans were making “dividends from death” by distilling glycerine from dead bodies “and so obtaining some portion of their explosives.” 2. "O Dammit wants his name changed" The Richmond Climax, 6 June 1913 Orlando Dammit was featured in the 6 June issue of the equally curiously named Richmond Climax newspaper. The short article explained that the man wanted to change his name from “O. Dammit” because he “can’t tell whether people are calling him or merely venting injured feelings when they say ‘O, dammit.’” It’s not clear what he wanted to change his name to, or if he was successful in his attempts to change it, but presumably he would have been happy with anything that didn’t begin with the letter ‘O’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Vampires-in-Rhode-Island-Public-Domain-3e1421d-e1769766218331.jpeg" width="620" height="413" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline BELIEVE IN VAMPIRES across the top" title="Rhode Islanders were convinced the undead were sucking the blood of their own relatives and causing consumption – sparking ‘vampire hysteria’ throughout the state" /> 3. "Vampires in Rhode Island" Boston Evening Transcript, 18 January 1896 On 18 January 1896, a particularly strange story ran in the Boston Evening Transcript. The headline was ‘Vampires in Rhode Island’, and the story went on to explain: “Respectable people [are] digging up the bodies of defunct relatives… The belief is that persons dead of consumption leave their graves and suck the blood of members of their own families.” This outbreak of ‘vampire panic’ was sparked by a wave of tuberculosis (then known as consumption) in New England. Some rural communities decided that the often-fatal illness was the work of the undead and began exhuming bodies, looking for what they believed were signs of vampirism, such as fresh blood in the heart. The most famous case occurred in 1892 in Exeter, Rhode Island, when the body of a young woman called Mercy Brown was exhumed. Her heart was reduced to ashes and given to her sick brother as a remedy for his own illness. He died anyway – after all, burned organs aren’t a cure for TB – but the story became a lasting symbol of the panic. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Ouija-boardPublic-Domain-7d2ac73-e1769766295767.png" width="904" height="1000" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline CONSTANT USE OF OUIJA BOARD DRIVES SEVEN PEOPLE INSANE across the top" title="Rooted in the Victorian obsession with spiritualism, encounters with ouija boards were common. The story of Adeline Bottini, featuring an alleged séance in the nude, was particularly dramatic" /> 4. "Constant use of ouija board drives seven people insane" The Long Beach Telegram and The Long Beach Daily News, 4 March 1920 In 1920, Long Beach newspapers reported that a 15-year-old girl in California had introduced “the [ouija board] and convinced other six [people] of its spiritual power”. The story went on to claim that all seven of the people involved were now under observation in the “insane ward”. The girl at the heart of the scandal was one Adeline Bottini, who police alleged was performing séances in a state of undress, “the better to communicate with the spirits”. Ouija boards were first commercialised in 1890 by a businessman from Baltimore, towards the tail end of the Victorian obsession with spiritualism: the belief that the living could communicate with the spirits of the dead. The craze began in 1848 with the Fox sisters in New York state, whose séances drew wide attention, and it didn’t take long before copycat socialites started to host similar gatherings. At these, participants were – unlike poor Adeline Bottini – always fully clothed. Read more | Fake news and the Dreyfus affair: the media-fuelled scandal that divided France <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Boy-Eats-BibleGettyImages-164563808-960838d-e1769766508270.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A cartoon of a boy wearing a pink T shirt, green trousers, a blue backwards cap on his head, and blue shoes, eating a blue Bible" title="In one of the more trivial stories from rural 1920s Hilton, Mellzo McCoy munched on the family Bible, resulting in an appearance in the newspaper – and a stomach ache" /> 5. "Boy eats Bible" The Hilton Record, 17 June 1926 “Unknown to his parents, Mellzo McCoy ate the family Bible with the exception of the covers and a few pages. The loss was only discovered when Mellzo complained of a stomach ache.” This 1926 snippet in The Hilton Record – the weekly community newspaper for the village of Hilton in Monroe County, New York – definitely won’t win any awards for the most detailed news article of all time. This is probably why it was buried on page eight of the publication, alongside another article (‘Bee Causes Wreck’) about a man losing control of his vehicle after a bee got into it. When it comes to stories like this, it’s important to understand how local papers worked at the time. Rural weeklies like the Record often had unpaid neighbourhood correspondents who contacted them with (fairly trivial) stories about what had happened in their neck of the woods. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Terrified-by-Donkey-f14e9ba-e1769766740393.jpg" width="620" height="414" alt="A black and white illustration shows a woman falling to the floor in front of a donkey" title="Scared to death by the sound of a donkey’s footsteps behind her, a young woman’s sad demise ended up in the Illustrated Police News, known for its lurid coverage (Image by The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive)" /> 6. "Trampled to death by a donkey" Illustrated Police News, 21 July 1883 The Illustrated Police News was a sensationalist Victorian weekly newspaper published in Britain, infamous for its lurid crime coverage and emotive illustrations. It launched in 1864 and this rather sad story ran in their 21 July 1883 edition. It recounts the final hours in the life of a young woman who had set off to visit her grandparents and heard footsteps behind her. She ran for her life. Her grandfather found her body the next day, noticed his donkey standing close by and concluded that she’d been frightened by the sound of the animal following her home. Although the stories featured in the Illustrated Police News were reported in a very melodramatic way, they were, unlike the German ‘corpse factory’ article above, completely true. The publication’s content, though bombastic, was based on police reports, coroners’ inquests and court reporting. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Children-Not-Fish-Public-Domain-889d371.jpg" width="299" height="258" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline CHILDREN NOT "FISH" SO CAN'T BE MAILED across the top" title="After at least two separate attempts to send children via mail, the postal department had to step in. Children, they said in 1920, were not “harmless animals” so couldn’t be mailed" /> 7. "Children not 'fish' so can't be mailed" Des Moines Tribune, 16 June 1920 “Children do not come within the classification of ‘harmless animals’, and therefore are not mailable,” the Des Moines Tribune reported the postal department as saying in 1920, apparently prompted by two applications to ship children around the country inside packages. Parcel post was still a relatively new phenomenon in 1920, having been introduced in 1913. Some inventive parents realised that the cost of sending a package was often cheaper than a train ticket and news reports of the time carried stories about attempts to mail children: for example, in St Louis in 1913, a mother allegedly tried to mail her eight-year-old to relatives a few hundred miles away and in 1914, a 10-year-old-boy was purportedly mailed as a parcel to his grandmother. 8. "Battle with a bald eagle" San Francisco Call, 9 October 1891 The San Francisco Call was known for its flamboyant coverage, and this thrilling tale of a balloonist’s high-altitude encounter with an eagle, published in 1891, is a great example. The article describes the ascent of a 24-year-old named Arthur Cleveland in a hot air balloon. Once he had climbed to 3,000 feet, “he saw a huge bird flying swiftly toward him” and became aware it was a bald eagle. The article goes on to describe Cleveland’s daring – and victorious – battle with the rogue bird. He later retrieved the dead eagle, only to discover the local constable wasn’t too impressed; he suggested Cleveland be fined $550 for killing a protected species. Read more | A Victorian-era journalist snuck into an infamous asylum, and what she exposed shocked New York <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Real-Puppy-Love-Public-Domain.jpg-f48d0e7-e1769767410147.png" width="620" height="413" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline REAL PUPPY LOVE HERE AS DOGS GO ELOPING across the top" title="Canines under the spell of Cupid were the news of the day in 1910s Minneapolis – showing the sensationalism of early 20th-century press" /> 9. "Real puppy love here as dogs go eloping" The Minneapolis Morning Tribune, 2 March 1911 It must have been a slow news day in Minneapolis on 2 March 1911, as one of the headlines in the Tribune appears to have been about dogs having sex. The rest of the headline reads: ‘Canines Fall Under Shafts of Cupid and Kennel Society is Stirred, Four Hundred of Dogdom Buzzes over Scandals Among Young Set, Irate Husband of French Poodle on Warpath after His Rival.’ Although the full details of the story are lost in the mists of time, it’s another good example of early 20th-century press sensationalism, one which also documents the rise of pet culture we still have today. The early 1900s saw a rise in the popularity of organised dog breeding, which in turn led to the formation of kennel clubs; these sometimes became embroiled in controversies and rivalries, which were equally good tabloid-fodder. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Bat-Men-GettyImages-1397982878-a7ec22c-e1769767491349.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white illustration of large winged creatures flying around a mountainous area with a river running through it" title="A lithograph depicts the lunar civilisation that New York newspaper The Sun claimed had been found on the moon (Image by Getty Images)" /> 10. ”Bat-men on the moon” The Sun, New York, 1835 In August 1835, New York newspaper The Sun published a series of six articles claiming that life had been discovered on the moon. Not only life, in fact, but an entire lunar civilisation. The stories, credited to the famous astronomer Sir John Herschel and supposedly sourced from a (non-existent) Edinburgh paper, detailed lunar landscapes populated by bison, goats, unicorns, tail-less beavers, and bat-like humanoids called ‘Vespertilio-homo’ who built temples. The articles claimed that discoveries had been made using a revolutionary new telescope. It turned out that the hoax was the work of one of The Sun’s reporters who later admitted to inventing the stories to boost sales. However, The Sun never issued a formal retraction, making the ‘Great Moon Hoax’ one of the most famous examples of 19th-century ‘fake news’. 11. "Man doesn't trust horses" Amador Ledger, 3 October 1902 Letters to the editor aren’t a new phenomenon, as this extract from the Amador Ledger, itself lifted from Harper’s Weekly, shows. In this example, a man from Kentucky wrote into Harper’s to share his opinion that, in his long experience, “every horse at some time in his life develops into a homicidal maniac… I have driven one commonplace horse every other day for six years over the same road and then had him go crazy and try to kill himself and me because a leaf fluttered down in front of him.” The entry had the subheading: ‘Part maniac and part idiot, is what one man calls them’, which many present-day horse owners will no doubt relate to. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/TypistGettyImages-97226313-cb961e1-e1769767620435.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white cartoon of a woman sitting at a typewriter" title="In an eerie ‘true ghost’ story, a woman reportedly saw a ghost fall from a building in Aldwych, London – the same building from which a woman had previously fallen to her death (Image by Getty Images)" /> 12. "Girl typist saw a ghost fall in city street" Sunday Mirror, 29 July 1934 In July 1934, the Sunday Mirror reported the case of a typist who claimed to have seen a ghost fall from a building in Aldwych, London. She fainted and was carried into a nearby chemist’s shop. When she regained consciousness, she told reporters she’d seen a girl fall from a high window and land at her feet. Interestingly, 18 months earlier, a young woman had actually fallen from an upper storey at that very location and was killed. The typist claimed she had no prior knowledge of the tragedy – whether you believe her is entirely up to you. As noted above, the mid-19th century saw a rise in spiritualism and séances. As a result, papers often reported ‘true ghost’ stories or mysterious happenings. However, by the 1920s and 30s these stories had begun to decline in mainstream tabloids, so this 1934 Mirror story is a bit of a (spooky) outlier. Read more | Did he photograph the ghost of a president? Meet the scheming Victorian who exploited a grieving America <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Devil-WorshipGettyImages-1387752195-62248fc-e1769767805608.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Seven people are standing in a line with their heads bowed slightly forward. Each is wearing a black hooded gown and a red devil mask on their faces" title="The global ‘satanic panic’ of the 1980s led to many stories of witches and ritualistic practices. In Utah, a 12-part series in the Provo Daily Herald was dedicated to devil worship (Image by Getty Images)" /> 13. "Satan worship in Zion" Provo Daily Herald, July–August 1985 No, this isn’t a particularly far-fetched plot from hit Netflix series Stranger Things: the US newspaper Provo Daily Herald really did publish a series of 12 articles in 1985 alleging widespread devil worship in Utah Valley. The articles were written by two reporters, Patrick Christian and Vicki Barker, who claimed to have interviewed “dozens” of psychologists, therapists and law-enforcement officers so they could “educate readers about the prevalence of Satanic worship in this area”. Subjects of the articles included a teenager who, it was claimed, drank animal blood after meeting a Satanist in seventh grade. Also, two Utah County Sheriff's deputies reported on “covens of witches” operating in abandoned buildings. Proof of these claims was lacking, to say the least, and the Provo Daily Herald faced criticism for adding fuel to the global ‘satanic panic’ that gripped the media in the 1980s. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Tiger-WoodsGettyImages-1097899790-f941754-e1769767906185.jpg" width="620" height="747" alt="A man wearing a black Nike sports jacket and black Nike cap stands holding multiple white golf balls in his hand" title="Tiger Woods holding his custom-made golf balls, which caused a stir following his endorsement of Nike Tour Accuracy ones (Image by Getty Images)" /> 14. "Tiger Woods plays with own balls" Associated Press wire story, 2000 The editor of this news story by journalist David Kravets was either very naive or purposefully channelling their inner Carry On scriptwriter when they crafted this saucy headline in the year 2000. The story is about the fact that pro golfer Tiger Woods had endorsed Nike Tour Accuracy golf balls in adverts, when (shock horror!) he actually played with custom-made balls unavailable to amateur players. Nike was eventually forced to confess that the balls Woods played with had a slightly harder inner and outer core than the balls sold to the public. It wasn’t exactly the most exciting story of all time, which is possibly why it was given such a cheeky, Barbara Windsor-esque headline.
Medieval vampire slayers: why did our ancestors dig up and dismember the dead?
At the turn of the 12th century, two men from a Staffordshire village died suddenly. A few days after they were solemnly laid to rest, they were spotted walking around the village, with their coffins on their backs. John Blair investigates the medieval terror of the living dead
In the last decades of the 12th century, the townsfolk of Annan in the Scottish borders were terrified by a sinister nocturnal revenant that stalked the dark byways. “Each night his corpse, driven by Satan, left his grave and wandered through the streets” accompanied by howling dogs and spreading sickness and death, according to the contemporary chronicler William of Newburgh. Desperate to put an end to the unholy scourge, two brothers whose father had been carried off by the plague opened the grave and “exposed the corpse, which was distended to a huge corpulence, with a swollen, livid face. It was observed that the shroud, which had been wound around it, was completely shredded up. Too angry to be frightened, the young men struck a blow at the lifeless corpse, whereupon such a flow of blood gushed out that they understood it to be a sucker of many people’s blood. Dragging it out of the town, they quickly built a pyre.” Recalling the accepted wisdom that such a being would burn only after they’d cut out its heart, the brothers took their shovels and hacked out the organ – after which the cadaver was immolated. The curse was finally over. Walking corpses To modern ears, this story stretches credulity far beyond breaking point. Not so to William of Newburgh: he recorded another three such tales, and hinted at many more. There are “numerous modern cases and abundant reports”, he wrote, but “it would be just too laborious and burdensome to write down all episodes of this kind that I have heard to have happened in our own times”. Yet though walking corpses were boringly commonplace in the 1190s, they had almost vanished from the English scene only a few decades later. Apparently they retreated northwards, leaving only occasional traces south of the border with Scotland. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/W45702webready-05b1689-e1769699879666.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration shows two people standing over a cut up body, with the person on the left handing the decapitated head of the body to the person on the right" title="A corpse is dismembered in a medieval illustration. During the Middle Ages, mutilation was inflicted on cadavers believed to be restless (Image by Alamy)" /> This spotlight on high medieval Britain illustrates a basic fact about ‘vampire’ beliefs in many periods and places across the globe: they tend to come and go. Though some societies retained low-level fears about dangerous corpses over many centuries, there have also been many short, sharp episodes of corpse-killing that reached an intensity justifying the label ‘epidemic’. Some are described in medieval texts such as William of Newburgh’s, covering a period from about 1050 to 1200. Others leave no written evidence, and must be inferred from distinctive patterns of mutilation found in excavated burials: corpses turned upside-down, hearts pierced or removed, limbs broken or bound, heads removed, craniums and jaws separated. Read more | Long before Dracula, an ancient Mesopotamian civilisation raised the world's oldest vampires Why do communities suddenly erupt into frenzies of corpse-killing? Fundamentally, the act reflects fear of social disruption, fear of political or religious change, or fear of disease. In fact, it can be defined as a form of persecution mania – that tragic, paranoid reaction that makes people turn against minority groups in their midst. But there is a crucial difference: unlike witches or heretics, corpses cannot suffer because they are dead already. Killing the dead is better than killing the living. Archaeological evidence from late Roman and early Anglo-Saxon England suggests several persuasive cases of posthumously ‘killed’ corpses. There are too few of them to suggest clear patterns – until we reach a group of distinctive female burials in Yorkshire and County Durham from c550–80 AD. These women were buried face-down – often accompanied by charms and other ritual items – in strange, contorted attitudes, often with one leg or arm raised so that it almost touched the surface of the grave. It looks as though these were traditional healers or ‘wise women’ – powerful in life and potentially troublesome after death, so measures to restrain them were necessary. In that society, as in many others, the dangerous dead were mainly female. Unholy nuns From around 650, that perception carried over to the new world of royal nunneries that dominated early Christian England. Traditionally powerful women could reinvent themselves as holy nuns and abbesses, exercising something like their erstwhile supernatural powers within the new belief system. One narrative from Wimborne nunnery in the 720s hints at corpse fears. It recounts the story of a sadistic prioress who died unreconciled with the young nuns whom she had tormented. They gleefully danced on her grave – but then, to the abbess’s horror, the grave-earth sunk, a phenomenon explained in later eastern European folklore as a sign that the corpse has climbed out. In England around 650–700, a series of non-monastic burials – almost entirely of young women – were mutilated in a consistent way: the corpse was pulled over onto its front, the heart was possibly removed or pierced, the head was removed, and the cranium and lower jaw were thrown back in different parts of the grave. Read more | Marvellous medieval medicine: why their curious cures were better than you think The seventh century was a period of rapid religious change and social transformation, so it is unsurprising that people felt disorientated, and that their fears focussed on certain ‘special’ women who were perceived to be reservoirs of supernatural power. Corpse anxieties seem to have died down across the eighth century, but did not disappear entirely. Young women were still sometimes targeted, their trussed and mutilated corpses laid face-down in boundary ditches. The gender balance then shifted. In a ninth to 10th-century cemetery at Godalming in Surrey, it was mostly male corpses that had nails and iron spikes driven into their shoulders, necks and knees. The age of castles, military power and ‘feudal’ dominance was approaching in northern Europe, and there was no lack of disruption and psychological trauma to breed paranoid fears. In this increasingly man’s world, as traditional wise women declined in power and status, violent corpses were increasingly envisaged as male. That brings us back to the lurid prose of William of Newburgh and his contemporaries. The high medieval British epidemic coincided with a period of greater theological sophistication in north-western Europe (including, for instance, the elaboration of the idea of purgatory), more complex scholastic thought, and higher levels of literacy. Accordingly, there was more questioning of received doctrine, and more concern by the clerical establishment to define, stigmatise and punish ‘heresy’. It is very interesting that, whereas the French persecuted heretics and not corpses, England saw virtually no heresy trials but widespread corpse-killing – an excellent illustration of how attacks on the dead can help to spare the living. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/BAL1278768webready-497e003-e1769698475877.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A red, blue and black stained glass window showing four people sitting alongside one another, praying" title="Souls in purgatory, shown in a 14th-century French stained-glass window. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory may have shaped medieval concepts about the dead who had not moved on (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Noxious corpses Ten stories survive from 12th-century England, all concerning noxious male corpses: excommunicates, oath-breakers, corrupt judges, dissolute priests. One Buckinghamshire man paid unwelcome night-time visits to his widow, “took to dancing around wildly among the animals”, and finally “started wandering around by day, frightening everyone though visible only to some”. For sheer excitement, a story recorded by a monk of Burton-upon-Trent, and set in a nearby village around 1100, is in a class of its own. Two perjured villagers died suddenly and were buried. They then appeared walking around the village, sometimes carrying their coffins on their backs and sometimes in the shape of animals. They behaved threateningly and spread disease, causing many deaths. When their graves were opened, the corpses proved to have resisted natural decay, and the cloths over their faces were “very horribly bloody”. Their heads were cut off and placed between their thighs, and their hearts were cut out and burned on a hilltop, where they crackled with a loud noise; a black crow flew up from the flames. Read more | “Ghoul-like beyond nightmare dream, they were the living dead”: belief in Vampires through history After 1200, most of the British evidence comes from Scotland. A story set in the Clyde Valley west of Glasgow in 1295 describes how an evil-living monk returned from his grave to visit a knight’s house. “Having assumed a body – it is uncertain whether natural or aerial, but it was dank, gross and tangible” – he appeared in broad daylight in his monastic habit, and took to climbing around on the roofs. People tried to shoot and stab him, but anything penetrating “that damned substance” immediately burned up. No later Scottish stories are quite so lurid, but a resilient substratum of belief can be seen in the many post-medieval oral ballads that describe dead relatives and lovers coming home in bodily form. A strand survived the Reformation and was assimilated into Calvinist theology in the idea that the devil could occupy the corpse of even a virtuous person. In his Daemonologie of 1597, King James VI (later I of England) observed reassuringly “that the Devil may use as well the ministry of the bodies of the faithful in these cases as of the unfaithful, there is no inconvenient: for his haunting with their bodies after they are dead can no-ways defile them, in respect of the soul’s absence”. Beliefs about the dangerous dead didn’t disappear from England entirely. There seems to have been an undercurrent of low-level but persistent anxiety that surfaced at different times and in different places. A 14th-century story from Byland Abbey in Yorkshire recounts that a local rector who died and was buried near the abbey’s chapter house developed “the habit of going out by night, and one night he put out the eye of his concubine”. His body was dug up and dumped in a local lake – though the oxen pulling the cart carrying the corpse “almost sank through fear”. Stone dead Some suggestively mutilated bodies from later periods have also been discovered. Perhaps the latest and strangest was a victim of the 1665–66 plague who was buried in a London church. He was later found to have a large stone in his mouth – a mode of corpse-killing that was standard in Lutheran Germany at the time but unknown in England. Was he a member of the immigrant mercantile community? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/BAL5864439webready-7cd79c8-e1769698055247.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white engraving showing a man standing facing a skeleton, representing Death." title="Death meets a German mercenary in an engraving. Beliefs in the dangerous dead led to stones being placed in the mouths of corpses to quell them (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> It’s not entirely clear why such beliefs were so rare in late medieval and early modern England at times when they assumed epidemic proportions in some parts of central Europe. For instance, the Black Death plague pandemic of 1347–51 seems to have whipped up corpse fears in Greece and Serbia – so why did it have no such effect in England? It may be because the people of England now widely believed in the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which offered a different framework for conceptualising the dead who had not quite moved on. Another factor could be the English enthusiasm for persecuting witches at points in the 16th and 17th centuries. Except in a few locations – Scotland and Moravia, for example – witch-killing and corpse-killing tended to occupy different spaces in early modern Europe, and seem to have provided alternative outlets for the same anxieties. European beliefs in the dangerous dead were never the same again after a series of lurid corpse-killings in Serbia in 1725–32 were widely reported for the first time in the western press. These reports brought with them a new word – vampire – that quickly drove out all synonyms. From that moment, folklore and fiction became inextricably entwined. Sensational novelists embroidered what they read, and their own readers in turn assimilated their work into popular beliefs. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871–72 novella Carmilla sensitively reworked the idea of a loving but predatory dead female derived ultimately from ancient Chinese tradition. But it was of course Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) that imposed an indelible – if highly misleading – image of the ‘European vampire’, overlaying and ultimately obliterating the last traces of genuine English popular belief. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/RJGAYDwebready-0963212-e1769700002267.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white engraving of a woman creeping towards a person laying in a bed, with her arm reached out towards them" title="An illustration from the 1871–72 Gothic novella Carmilla shows the eponymous bloodsucker approaching her victim. Sheridan Le Fanu’s tale drew on ancient stories of predatory dead women (Image by Alamy)" /> Remarkably, the idea of turning a potentially dangerous corpse upside-down survived a decade or two longer. In rural Devonshire sometime around the turn of the 20th century, a farmer was recorded telling the tale of a wicked local woman who had recently died “cussin’ and dam’in”, and whose coffin had been turned over. “Her ’ont be troublesome then, ’cause if her do begin to diggy her can on’y diggy downwards,” he claimed. The grim finale to this particular English superstition was acted out during the First World War, after a slim English youth had killed a “huge, scowling” German soldier. “Later,” an officer observed, “I found our men burying him most carefully – face downwards. You know why. If he began digging his way out, he would only go deeper.” Epidemics of the undead Five periods when fears of living corpses terrified societies around the world Ancient Mesopotamia: eternal non-sleeping Fears of the dead plagued inhabitants of the neo-Assyrian empire in the near east between c911 and c605 BC. An inscription (left) in the tomb of eighth-century BC queen Yabâ of Nineveh curses any robber by imposing “eternal non-sleeping on his corpse and ghost”. And an omen text of the mid-seventh century BC describes what will happen if one sees “a dead person restrained with cloths, uprising, complaining”. The silence of earlier and later sources suggests that this may have been an epidemic generated by the violence and trauma of imperial expansion in the provinces. Early 18th-century Serbia: dawn of Dracula In the western Balkans after 1700, the central European tradition of dangerous-dead beliefs converged with a Caucasian one. This highly coloured mixture of fantasies reached an epidemic scale on the violent, unstable military frontier between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Cases in 1725–26 and again in the 1730s came to the attention of the Habsburg authorities, whose reports created a Europe-wide sensation. The details were actually rather atypical – for example, in their emphasis on bloodsucking – but inspired a series of fictional works culminating in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. 16th-century Saxony: rise of the chomping dead Devastated by plague and destabilised by the Lutheran Reformation, after 1540 the German electorate of Saxony suffered the strange visitation of the ‘chomping dead’. It was widely believed that some corpses lay in their graves noisily eating their own shrouds, and that they spread plague among the living. This idea had older roots, but it reached epidemic levels in this traumatised society. The remedy was to open the grave to check for shroud-eating and, if evidence mandated action, to behead the corpse with a spade. Martin Luther himself spoke out against the belief, but it endured for several decades before dying away naturally around 1600. 19th-century New England: a war on organs As tuberculosis swept the US between the 1780s and 1890s, the strange idea developed that internal organs of buried victims were spreading the disease. Between 1784 and 1892, at least 70 exhumations are known to have been undertaken in New England, mostly involving turning the corpse face-down, extracting the heart, liver and lungs, and occasionally burning the body. At Altoona, Pennsylvania in 1949, the exhumation of a soldier to burn his uniform represents the last known ‘corpse-killing’ in any non-Balkan and non-Aegean western society. Independent Haiti: zombie slaves In the 19th and 20th centuries, many Haitians believed that some apparently ‘dead’ people had actually been poisoned by sorcerers to induce a death-like trance. The ‘corpses’ were then reputedly stolen from their graves, revived and made to work on sugar plantations. Famously, Clairvius Narcisse (1922–94), who claimed to have escaped from such a plantation, was photographed sitting on his own tomb (above). This strangest of variants – walking ‘corpses’ that had never died – had roots in African beliefs, but developed a unique twist in this fragile republic with its tragic origins, where the unquiet dead were enslaved. Professor John Blair is emeritus fellow in medieval history at Queen’s College, University of Oxford. His latest book is Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World (Princeton University Press, 2025) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
It was an "extravaganza of brutality": how the Vikings menaced the Mediterranean
Killing, burning, pillaging, enslaving. Even when heading to sunnier climes, Viking raiders deployed the same tactics that they had used along the shores of northern and western Europe, reveals Thomas Williams
The poor citizens of Al-Jazira al-Khadra never knew what hit them. In 859, an unfamiliar fleet sailed into the bay separating this Muslim settlement – which later evolved into the city of Algeciras, now in southern Spain – from Gibraltar. Making landfall nearby, the alien ships disgorged their fearsome crews: Vikings. In a sequence of events terrifyingly familiar to victims in more northerly parts of Europe, these formidable marauders wreaked havoc. They occupied the city, burned the mosque, ravaged the countryside – and then moved on to the next target, and the next. The campaign later known as the ‘Great Raid’ was well and truly underway – part of a chapter in Norse history that’s less known today, but no less bloody. Stone cold killers The Vikings of our imagination are emphatically creatures of the north – avatars of cold climes and bleak weather, manifestations of ice and snow made flesh and steel. Dragon-prowed ships slice through the frigid waters of steep-sided fjords swathed in midnight-green pine forests. Fur-clad adventurers hunt walrus amid the crashing icebergs of the northernmost seas. Giants haunt the ice-capped mountains in an unreal world of midnight sun and northern lights. We are used to reading tales of Viking rampages through lands both near and far from home: around the Baltic coastline, in Britain and Ireland, in what’s now northern France, Russia, even Canada. But none of these places seem so different from Scandinavia, in climate at least; indeed, some boast similar extremes of latitude. Even in the most temperate of these places, a sharp north-easterly or a rare winter snowstorm may come and go without raising an eyebrow. Likewise Vikings in times past. But, like the ice, it can feel jarring to find Vikings in places where we feel instinctively they don’t quite belong. Like Mallorca, southern France, even Egypt. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/CreditCopyright--Museo-San-Isidoro-de-Leon-Derechos-reservadosFRT2114webready-75aa086-e1768832592182.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A cylindrical wooden box with ornate patterns carved into it" title="An elaborately carved box made from reindeer horn around the turn of the 11th century and discovered in Spain, hinting at Viking contact there (Image by Museo San Isidoro de León-Derechos reservados)" /> Of course, summer does come to the north. Vikings didn’t spend the whole year swaddled in bearskins. Still, like many of us, the inhabitants of those northerly climes might well have dreamed wistfully of a sun-soaked break in the Med – not least those hardy souls beyond the Arctic Circle who endured weeks of crushing midwinter darkness. We don’t know exactly what sparked the Great Raid of 859–60, but we have a fair idea of at least some of what transpired. The expedition was supposedly led by Björn Ironside, son of the larger-than-life Ragnar Loðbrok (‘Hairy pants’), and Hastein, who was later involved in campaigns in Brittany, the Loire Valley and King Alfred’s Britain. Having entered the Mediterranean and started as they meant to go in Al-Jazira al-Khadra, the Viking fleet next hit the kingdom of Nakur (or Nekor) on the north African coastline. There, in the words of one Asturian chronicler, they killed “a vast number of Muslims” and captured many others for ransom or for sale as slaves. The raiders headed back north via the Balearics, molesting Murcia, Mallorca, Menorca and, perhaps, Ibiza and Formentera. Touching down on what’s now the Côte d’Azur, they pillaged their way through Perpignan, Narbonne, Nîmes, Arles and Valence. After a winter spent in the Camargue, the Vikings moved on to Italy, where they sacked Pisa. Thereafter, things get a little muddled. One far-fetched narrative has them aiming for Rome but getting confused, instead plundering the small port of Luni (a surprising mistake, given that Rome was far inland and to the south, and still possibly the largest and most architecturally impressive city in western Europe). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Greekfire-public-domain-CMYK-64ac2bc-e1768832114133.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration showing two black boats filled with men facing each other, with the group on the left shooting fire towards the ones on the right" title="A 12th-century manuscript illustration shows the use of ‘Greek fire’, an incendiary weapon wielded by Andalusian forces against Viking attackers to devastating effect" /> Whatever the truth of that tale, from Italy the fleet seems to have moved on to the eastern Mediterranean, and regions under the sway of the Byzantine empire. One chronicler even places Viking ships at Alexandria, near the mouth of the Nile. We do know that the campaign nearly ended in disaster – for the Vikings. En route home through the Straits of Gibraltar (or, as it was known in Old Norse, Nǫrvasund, ‘Narrow Sound’), longships were intercepted by the formidable galley fleet of Muslim al-Andalus under the command of Qarqashish ibn Shakruh and the admiral Khashkhash. Andalusian forces decimated Viking crews with arrows and incinerated ships with bursts of ‘Greek fire’ – the nautical napalm of the early medieval world – belched across the water. The Andalusians sailed close enough to engage the Vikings hand-to-hand across the ships’ bows: Khashkhash himself “fought them from the prow of his ship until he met a martyr’s death, may God have mercy on him”. Only a handful of Viking ships escaped the maelstrom – but those men who survived had gathered tales enough to fill many a long Nordic night. Read more | Forget the longships: this is the overlooked story of how the Vikings dominated eastern Europe Capital ideas The Great Raid was one of the largest, most dramatic and best remembered of the Viking adventures in the south, but it was far from the only such excursion. The sources rarely explain what inspired individual expeditions but, broadly speaking, adventures to such distant lands were animated by the same impulses that drove the Vikings to sail waters closer to home. The main driver of raiding – and, indeed, military employment overseas – was the acquisition of capital. This was both economic, in the shape of plunder and extorted wealth, and social, in the form of fame and prestige. Both could be leveraged to gain political power back home. Stories of awe-inspiring deeds, and possession of the wherewithal to reward and retain a warband, provided the basis for power in early medieval Scandinavia. Viking exploits around the storied and wealthy Mediterranean rim had the potential to provide generous helpings of both. Sometimes they could provide a springboard to the pinnacle of power and fame. When Harald Hardrada (more on whom later) returned to Scandinavia via what’s now Russia after a brutal mid-career sojourn in the employment of the Byzantine emperor, the poet Valgard of Voll said that: Harald, you launched your vessel Laden with a cargo of riches Freighted with hard-won honour And gleaming gold […] Through storm and gale, great king, You sailed your plunging vessel; And as the sea-spray was thinning You sighted at least Sigtuna. Inside a year, Harald was king of Norway. First fleet It was some 15 years before the Great Raid, and half a century after the pioneering attack on Lindisfarne, that Vikings first sailed into the Atlantic and steered determinedly south. The first known sortie to the Iberian peninsula was made in 844. The 54 ships that undertook that journey blazed a trail that others – the Great Raid included – would follow and greatly extend over centuries to come. Setting out from Brittany, the Viking fleet harried the Atlantic coast of Iberia, landing at A Coruña and launching raids inland, but ultimately came to grief at the hands of Asturian stone-throwers and the stalwart resistance of the Christian king Ramiro I. Thwarted there, the remaining Vikings cut their losses and headed south towards the Muslim emirate of al-Andalus. Their first stop was Lisbon, where they tarried for a couple of weeks to resupply their ships and terrorise the locals. Sailing on, the fleet sailed up the Guadalquivir river to menace the great city of Seville. Many of the inhabitants fled at the approach of the Norsemen, the reputation of these exotic marauders having preceded them. What followed was an extravaganza of brutality that was grimly familiar in Britain, Ireland and France, but which was terrifyingly novel in southern Iberia. Viking raiders disembarked from their ships to pillage and despoil the Andalusian countryside, slaughtering men, kidnapping women and children, and burning settlements. Seville itself was largely ransacked, only the walls of the inner citadel halting the attackers. Terrified citizens huddling for refuge within the great mosque of Ibn Abbas were massacred. Eventually, the emir, Abd al-Rahman II, got his act together. He mustered an army that confronted the Viking warband at an unidentified place recorded as Talyata where, according to the sources, 1,000 Viking warriors (or Majūs, ‘fire-worshippers’, as they are referred to in Arabic writing) were slain. Some 400 Norsemen were captured and executed in spectacular ways – decapitated or strung up on palm trees. According to the later source Ibn Idhari, Abd al-Rahman sent “the heads of the general, and of 200 of the noblest Viking warriors” to the tribes under Andalusian dominion in Africa. It was a warning and a reminder that his power, however much it had been tested by this novel threat, remained intact. Though they didn’t make it into the Mediterranean on that occasion, the Vikings had delivered a nasty shock to the Andalusians. As a result, city and coastal defences were strengthened and naval patrols were enhanced – as the returning ships of the Great Raid discovered to their cost on their way home 16 years later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/WIKICredit-Didier-DescouensArsenaleVenice-FirstAncientGreeklionwebready-5971df2-e1768832842209.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a large stone lion, with a brick crenellated wall and black railings behind it" title="Runic inscriptions on the shoulders of this ancient Greek lion, now in Venice but originally in Piraeus, are believed to be 11th-century graffiti inscribed by Norse mercenaries serving in the Byzantine army" /> Suburban terrorists At around the same time that the Vikings of the Great Raid were pillaging their way around the western Med, another group were unleashing violence to the east. This was a sudden irruption of Rus – the adventurers of Scandinavian origin who settled between the eastern Baltic and Black Seas. Later establishing their epicentre in Kyiv, they sparked a long political and economic transformation of predominantly Slavic eastern Europe. In 860, these marauders launched an attack on the suburbs of Constantinople. The earliest account describes the Northmen burning and plundering their way to the walls of the mighty capital of the Byzantine empire, terrifying the inhabitants. Later sources describe the raiders spreading out around the Sea of Marmara south of the city, and pillaging and burning monasteries on the archipelago now known as Princes’ Islands. Capturing 22 of the exiled Patriarch Ignatius’ servants, the Rus took them “aboard their ships and cruelly dismembered them with axes, demonstrating their barbarity”. These attackers were the people whom Patriarch Photios of Constantinople – who lived contemporaneously with the events of 860, though didn’t record them directly – described as “a fierce and barbarous people, worshipping no gods and living in constant strife. Their coming brings destruction and sorrow to those lands they visit.” Sadly for the locals, it wouldn’t be the last time the Rus made their presence felt in the Bosphorus. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/PrinceOlegtheProphetridesonshipsputonwheelstoConstantinople2webready-ad9a5ea-e1768832311475.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration showing several groups of men in boats with wheels on the bottom. They are all dressed in red robes with blue hoods" title="Warships of the Kyivan Rus, the eastern European realm settled by Scandinavians, are fitted with wheels to attack Constantinople in 907, as imagined in a 16th-century Russian chronicle" /> In 907, for reasons unstated, the Rus again assaulted Constantinople. The events were recorded in detail by the compilers of the Russian Primary Chronicle; though open to sceptical assessment, their words certainly paint a vivid picture. The attack was led by the Rus warlord Oleg, whose name was recorded as a Slavic form of the Old Norse Helgi, and comprised “Varangians [ie Scandinavians], Slavs, Chuds, Krivichs, Meryans, Polianians, Severians, Derevlians, Radimichs, Croats, Dulebs and Tivercians” – various East Slavic tribes. According to this account, the Rus fleet comprised 2,000 ships, though Greek sources give the rather more credible figure of 350. Having landed outside the city, Oleg disembarked and led his army on another rampage through the suburbs, killing inhabitants, burning houses and razing churches. Prisoners were, so the chronicler recounts, “beheaded, tortured, shot or thrown into the sea”. Read more | "A Viking wedding involved a bed and eight people", plus four other facts about the Vikings you might not know... The most remarkable episode in this otherwise fairly typical account of Viking atrocities was the order that Oleg allegedly gave “to fit the ships with wheels. When a favourable wind rose up, they set sail and bore down upon the city by land.” The residents were, quite understandably, “frightened to see this”. It is difficult to understand how this would have worked in practice, attempted at short notice by a raiding army speaking disparate languages and who, we must assume, had never done such a thing before. The smouldering ruins of the suburbs would also have presented challenging terrain for Oleg’s marauding land-fleet. Whatever the true details of the assault, it’s recorded that the terrified city-dwellers “agreed to pay tribute, provide provisions and grant the Rus the right to trade in Constantinople tax-free”. A Rus-Byzantine treaty was indeed duly signed – and the Old Norse names of the Rus signatories leave no doubt as to their Viking origins. This treaty included provisions granting the Rus access to Constantinopolitan markets, provided they adhered to certain restrictions. They were to use only one designated gate; their numbers in the city were limited to 50 at any one time; they were to be accompanied by Byzantine guardsmen; and their weapons were to be left outside the walls. In return, they received food and an allowance for six months. If the attack had been a coordinated strategy to wring economic concessions for Rus traders in Europe’s greatest marketplace, then Oleg’s campaign – land-ships or no – had been a resounding success. Unruly contractors For all that the Vikings represented a menace, it was clearly preferable to have them working in the service of the Byzantine empire rather than camped belligerently outside the walls of its cities. So, for at least 200 years, Scandinavians were employed as mercenaries, hired to prosecute the empire’s wars in all quarters of the eastern Mediterranean. Northmen who served in this way, known as Varangoi by the Byzantines, were prized for their skills as sailors and fighters, and the empire’s far-flung interests took them all across the greater Byzantine world. From 902, when the first direct reference to Varangians appears in Greek sources, they could be found fighting the empire’s wars in Sicily, Italy, Crete, Croatia, Lebanon, Anatolia and Syria – not to mention Armenia, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Georgia. And they left their mark in Constantinople: runic inscriptions in the stonework of the Hagia Sophia – the city’s great basilica, now a mosque – seem to be Varangian graffiti. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/dreamstimexl29748298webready-ab8436b-e1768832432639.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a red stone building with several floors, a domed roof and a narrow, pointed tower at each corner" title="Istanbul’s sixth-century Hagia Sophia. Around the time of the Rus attack on the Byzantine capital, Scandinavians were hired as ‘Varangian’ soldiers, leaving runic graffiti in this basilica, now a mosque" /> The Varangian phenomenon was turbo-charged in 988 when Vladimir the Great of Kyiv despatched 6,000 men to Emperor Basil II Porphyrogenitus (the ‘Bulgar Slayer’). The Rus leader issued the revealing advice to “not keep them in the city, for then they will only give you trouble, as they have given me”, finishing with the weary plea to “not let one man come back here again”. Undesirable citizens they may have been, but these eastern Vikings quickly proved their military worth in Basil’s wars. Under pressure from within the imperial military hierarchy and from fractious neighbours in Bulgaria, Syria and Mesopotamia, the emperor was grateful for Vladimir’s assistance. He put his new recruits to immediate and effective employ, and Rus warriors were instrumental in crushing a revolt by the Byzantine general Bardas Phokas in 989. Thereafter, Varangians became increasingly commonplace in the Byzantine military, serving in the imperial bodyguard – though the significance of their contribution may have been exaggerated in some sources. This policy was an extension of a long tradition in the imperial army of employing foreign fighters of diverse origins, from within and without the boundaries of the empire. Read more | Reading the runes: what we can learn about everyday life in the Viking Age A legend in his lifetime No Varangian was more celebrated – particularly by himself – than the future Norwegian king Harald Hardrada (‘Hard Ruler’). British readers will remember Harald best for his part in the events of 1066, when he led a Viking force to defeat – and his own death – at Stamford Bridge at the hands of the English king Harold Godwinson. The demands of that clash exhausted and diverted English forces, easing the path to Norman victory at Hastings a few weeks later, and the subsequent conquest of England by William, Duke of Normandy. A legend in his own lifetime, Harald travelled to the Byzantine imperial court via Kyivan Rus, and distinguished himself in campaigns fought on a number of fronts – most notably in Sicily, but also in the Greek islands and Bulgaria, and possibly north Africa, Syria and Anatolia. The most eye-catching of Harald’s postings was to the Middle East. In verses ascribed to Stuf Thordarson, who supposedly heard it from the lion’s mouth: With courage sharp as a sword-edge The all-triumphant warrior Left Greece to conquer Palestine – An easy task for Harald Tempting though it is to imagine Harald seizing control of the Holy Land with ease 60 years before the knights of the First Crusade achieved the same feat, in truth this is characteristic hyperbole. The future king seems rather to have been engaged in some sort of joint security operation designed to police the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem under the terms of a deal between the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt and Emperor Michael IV. Nevertheless, while he was there Harald took opportunities hitherto open to very few Scandinavians: he bathed his weary bones in the river Jordan and paid his respects to Christ at the Tomb of the Holy Sepulchre. The Viking Age was coming to a close; the Age of the Crusades was near. But, as Harald’s tale shows, the boundary between these two epochs was not as clear-cut or impermeable as modern historiographical terminology implies. When the Norwegian king Sigurd Jórsalfari (‘Jerusalem-farer’) set sail in 1107 in search of adventure in the Holy Land, he followed in the slip-stream of his Viking forebears. He sailed down the coast of Iberia, through the straits of Gibraltar and on via the Balearics, pillaging as he went. The longships that arrived in 1110, and which blockaded the Fatimid controlled Levantine city of Sidon (now in Lebanon) as an ally of the Frankish king Baldwin of Jerusalem, bore all the hallmarks of the Viking fleets that had terrorised the Mediterranean in centuries past. On his return journey, during a pitstop at the old Varangian staging post of Constantinople, the Norwegian king made a gift to Emperor Alexios I Komnenos: “A very ornate dragon-head from the prow of his ship.” Thomas Williams is a historian of the early Middle Ages. His new book God’s Hammer: A History of the Viking Crusade is due out in October 2026 This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine