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The US 'voodoo' scare: why 19th-century racists spread fake news about Haiti
From sexual orgies to Satan incarnated as a snake, lurid depictions of ‘voodoo’ in North America long titillated and shocked readers. As David G Cox explains, they were also wielded as justifications for racist oppression during the social and political upheavals of the 19th-century US
On 2 January 1893, the black American abolitionist and reformer Frederick Douglass delivered a lecture on Haiti to an audience in Chicago. It was widely alleged, he reflected, that the Caribbean republic was riddled with “voodooism, fetishism, serpent worship and cannibalism”, and that “little children are fatted for slaughter and offered as sacrifices to their voodoo deities”. Such claims, Douglass declared, were false. He told his listeners that, while serving as US minister (effectively, ambassador) to Haiti between 1889 and 1891, he found no evidence of ritual sacrifice, despite diligent investigation. By the time Douglass spoke in Chicago, the idea of Haitian ‘voodoo’ as a murderous cult was lodged in the American public consciousness. As he noted, the features of this myth would have been familiar to many. According to scores of white writers at the turn of the 20th century, ‘voodoo’ was an imported African religion devoted to the worship of Satan incarnated as a snake. ‘Voodoo’ ceremonies, it was claimed, consisted of frenzied dances, sexual orgies and the ritual sacrifice of animals or humans followed by the consumption of their bodies or blood. The priests and priestesses of this imaginary faith were said to be the real rulers of Haiti, holding all its citizens – from presidents to peasants – in the grip of terror. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-556636225webready-f31fffd-e1765183494712.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a black man dressed in a suit with a small bow tie. He has short hair and a thick moustache" title="Ebenezer Bassett denounced claims that the black-led Caribbean nation was a hotbed of ‘voodoo’ cannibalism and human sacrifice (Image by Getty Images)" /> In 1901, claims about Haitian ‘voodoo’ coalesced in a widely reprinted newspaper report on the “demoniacal orgies” of this purported “devil’s cult”. Supposedly reproducing the findings of the famous American geologist and traveller Robert Hill, the author of the piece claimed not only that “large numbers of young children are offered up annually in Haiti as sacrifices to the Great Yellow Snake” but also that “mothers frequently dedicate their infants at birth to this purpose”. The article provoked an incredulous response from Ebenezer Bassett who, as US minister to Haiti between 1869 and 1877, was the first black American diplomat. Having lived there for more than a decade, and speaking fluent French, Bassett – like Douglass – could claim authority on the question of Haitian religion. As Bassett knew, “the whole story about cannibalism in Haiti is no more than a myth which, like other myths, has gained credence by persistent repetition”. Casting doubt on the veracity of the report, he noted that Robert Hill had refuted the existence of Haitian cannibalism in his recent Caribbean travel narrative, and that the claims of the article were “in full accord with – it is better not to say that they are probably based upon – Sir Spenser St John’s book”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-152197629webready-4da9320-e1765183520674.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two stone figures, tied together by a metal chain around their necks" title="Chained bocio (protective figures) of the Vodun religion of the Fon people of southern Benin. The chains are symbolic both of slavery and of Gu, the vodu (spirit) of iron and war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Lurid inventions Spenser St John was a British diplomat and former chargé d’affaires in Haiti, and the book in question was Hayti, or, The Black Republic. First published in 1884, it made a deep impression on US journalism, providing the blueprint for a plethora of articles that, though claiming originality, did little more than summarise, in increasingly lurid terms, its lengthy chapter on “Vaudoux Worship and Cannibalism”. Up to this point, I have placed ‘voodoo’ in quotation marks, not only to suggest that it was a figment of white imaginations but also to differentiate it from Vodou, the African-derived religion genuinely practised by Haitians. Much of this religion can be traced to west and west-central Africa. It contains elements of the religions practised during the era of slavery by the Aja and Fon peoples of the Bight of Benin (vodu is the Fon word for spirit), as well as of others from the kingdom of Kongo. Read more | Frederick Douglass escaped enslavement in 1838 – but here's why he was still far from true freedom However, Vodou was not, as 19th-century white commentators claimed, a direct African import. It was a product of the New World melting pot – a dynamic blend of the religions of enslaved Africans and the Christianity of their European enslavers. In this respect, Vodou has much in common with other black diasporic religions including Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé and Jamaican Obeah. Like those, Vodou helped people of African origin survive the brutality of Atlantic slavery. In the Victorian age, white people on both sides of the Atlantic ignored the vibrant realities of Vodou, dwelling instead on its demonic imagined double: ‘voodoo’. Why were they so keen to defame Haitian religion? Frederick Douglass had the answer. “Haiti is black,” he declared in Chicago, “and we [Americans] have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.” Between 1791 and 1804, enslaved and free people of colour rose against the French colonial government of Saint-Domingue. The revolution resulted in the abolition of slavery and independence for the colony. Renamed Haiti, it became the world’s only black republic. Desperate to demonstrate that people of African descent were incapable of self-government, white supremacists spent the next century defaming Haiti, presenting it – in the words of Douglass – as a “very hell of horrors”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/webready-9c7ef73-e1765183675345.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" title="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" /> As the 20th century approached, the idea that the world could be divided into races whose members shared the same essential traits was widely accepted. Thus, to opponents of black freedom in the US, Haitian ‘voodoo’ became proof that, without white control, black Americans would degenerate to savagery. As Douglass reflected, the black American could “never part with his identity and race”, meaning that the denial of Haitian civilisation was a denial of the “possibilities of the negro race generally”. This backlash against black freedom explains why ‘voodoo’ first entered the American popular consciousness during the 1860s and 1870s, just as a series of constitutional amendments secured the abolition of slavery, along with the establishment of black citizenship and the enfranchisement of black men. As the author of an 1866 article in the Memphis Appeal proclaimed, ‘voodoo’ was “beginning to take hold among the negroes. Free them from the check which was once held over them, they have unlimited control over their baser passions, and now and then it bursts out, and proves that the worship of their barbaric fathers still runs in the blood of the Americanised negro.” Deluge of discourse Initially, Americans writing about ‘voodoo’ focused on Louisiana and, particularly, New Orleans. A former French colony, Louisiana had a sizeable French-speaking population well into the 19th century. In the 1790s and early 19th century, this population had been bolstered by the arrival of up to 25,000 refugees from the Haitian Revolution, well over half of whom were enslaved. It is thus unsurprising that a reference to “an African deity called Vaudoo” appeared in a New Orleans newspaper as early as 1820. However, from the 1880s onwards, thanks to Spenser St John, attention turned to ‘voodoo’ in Haiti. The press was swiftly saturated with reports depicting the Caribbean republic as a “land of blood” – with articles bearing headlines such as: “Haiti, a Brooding Nightmare of Savagery, Bloodshed, Cannibalism”. It is tempting to see this deluge of discourse as a reflection of US imperial designs on Haiti, which it occupied between 1915 and 1934. However, at the turn of the 20th century, Haitian ‘voodoo’ was most often invoked by white-supremacist Democrats who argued that Jim Crow laws and regulations – which, enacted from the late 19th century, disenfranchised black Americans and enforced their segregation from white people – were necessary to prevent similar savagery at home. The peak of interest in Haitian ‘voodoo’ coincided with legal efforts to destroy the black vote in the South. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, and ending with Georgia in 1906, southern legislatures drew up new state constitutions containing a plethora of voting restrictions. These were intended to disenfranchise black Americans without contravening the 15th Amendment of 1870, which made it unconstitutional to deprive the vote on the basis of race. In the halls of Congress, Democrats, including the Mississippi senator Hernando Money, cited the work of St John as supposed proof that the black American was no more than a “veneered savage”. To the architects of Jim Crow, ‘voodoo’ was an ideological weapon. Depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ worship, a potent brew of sex and violence, helped to sell newspapers in an age of sensationalist journalism. At the same time, they reinforced racist notions that everybody of African descent was inherently bestial, criminal and hypersexual. Depictions of orgiastic worship chimed with the myth that white women were in constant danger of the black ‘beast rapist’, which was used to justify Jim Crow and fuel violence against black Americans. Read more | The Haitian Revolution: the enslaved Africans who rose up against France In a 1914 speech to Congress, the notoriously racist Mississippi senator James Vardaman made the connection explicit. St John, he claimed, had presented a “disgusting story of the worship of the voodoo and cannibalism, which he says is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic”. Frequently portraying black worshippers as beasts and demons, the language used in depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ was dehumanising in the extreme. Written portrayals were sometimes accompanied by lurid illustrations, such as A Voodoo Sacrifice, published in the Los Angeles Herald in 1905. A depiction of child sacrifice, the illustration included a worshipper with grotesquely ape-like features as well as a reptilian figure fixing the newspaper reader with an accusatory gaze, suggesting that she or he was an unwelcome witness to secret black rites. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1426141403webready-352c952-e1765183778614.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a white man, wearing a white shirt and black cowboy hat, looking towards the right" title="Mississippi senator James Vardaman, who in 1914 told Congress that in Haiti “cannibalism… is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fears of black resistance While ostensibly justifying Jim Crow, American depictions of Haitian Vodou betrayed acute white fears of black resistance. African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices played a part in almost every slave uprising in North America and the Caribbean. In 1822, protective charms were allegedly distributed among those involved in South Carolina’s Denmark Vesey conspiracy, named after a free black man convicted of planning a major uprising of enslaved people. In Jamaica a little over 60 years earlier, the use of similar charms during the massive slave insurrection known as Tacky’s Revolt prompted a British crackdown on Obeah. For late 19th-century white Europeans and Americans, however, the dangerous character of black religion was most associated with the Haitian Revolution. By the end of the century, the idea had been enshrined in Haitian mythology that the revolution began with a Vodou ceremony in a forest named Bois-Caïman, during which a pig was sacrificed and a blood oath sworn. Though Vodou certainly galvanised the Haitian Revolution, the reality of the Bois-Caïman ceremony has been debated by scholars, some of whom question the sources upon which the story is based. White supremacists, however, had no interest in questions of historical accuracy, instead portraying Vodou as a death cult bent upon the annihilation of the white race. This accusation chimed with the widespread view that political equality in the US would lead to race war. In 1908, the San Antonio Light published what it claimed was a genuine Vodou chant invoking racial extermination, but which was almost certainly the product of a journalist’s fevered imagination. O-he! Papa Damba! Down with whites and with mulattoes! Burn them, shoot them, drown their women! Help your blacks, your poor black children Circulated by those seeking to justify Jim Crow, tales of ‘voodoo’ sacrifice and cannibalism were shot through with white anxiety. These sanguinary stories may have facilitated a kind of psychological displacement. In other words, real white violence against African Americans was projected as imaginary black murder in the service of Satan. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/AKG9430442webready-9ba2b82-e1765183804180.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a group of people seated on the ground of a cemetery, with large black and red trees arching over the top of them" title="A Vodou scene in Haiti, by renowned artist Hector Hyppolite. Lurid reports in US newspapers of ‘voodoo’ ceremonies were cited as proof that white control was necessary to prevent black Americans from degenerating into savagery (Image by AKG)" /> In the turn-of-the-20th-century South, racial violence assumed unimaginable dimensions in the form of spectacle lynching: black Americans were tortured and murdered before white crowds that could number in the thousands. According to statistics compiled by the NAACP (the civil rights organisation founded in 1909 as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), at least 1,902 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1910. The affinities between these all-too-real rituals and fictional ‘voodoo’ ceremonies seem more than superficial, especially if we note – as many historians have – the religious symbolism and sacrificial dimensions of spectacle lynching. Read more | Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregation This reign of racial terror troubled many white people, undermining their sense that they stood at the summit of human civilisation. Condemning the 1904 lynching of Luther Holbert of Mississippi, one newspaper editor wrote that “[t]he negroes, in their most bestial state of voodooism, could be guilty of nothing more savage and brutal.” The editor’s conclusion deliberately inverted the racist language of Democratic politicians such as Hernando Money. “The white man is given to much boasting,” that journalist reflected, “but in many instances he is but a thinly veneered savage.” ‘Voodoo’ gripped the public imagination because, while fuelling the violence upon which Jim Crow was built, it allowed many white Americans to imagine that it was not themselves but others who lived in a “land of blood”. David G Cox is a lecturer in modern American history at the University of Southampton. His research for this article was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Michael Wood on the rise and fall of Asian empires
"Emperor Jahangir and Shah Abbas literally bestride the world like colossi", writes Michael Wood
Watching the recent spectacle of those latter-day emperors President Xi of China and India’s Narendra Modi hugging each other at the summit in Tianjin, my mind cast back to an earlier image of a pan-Asian summit. There’s a wonderful painting from 1618 of the Mughal emperor Jahangir embracing Shah Abbas of Iran – one of several such pictures painted for the Indian ruler. These heads of two superpowers were in fact not bosom buddies but intense geopolitical rivals, especially in the Kandahar region of south-west Afghanistan, then under Mughal control. Framed by a huge golden halo, in an image of peace, one stands on a lamb, the other on a lion, both on a globe whose surface extends from the strait of Gibraltar to the South China Sea: they literally bestride the world like colossi. In the foreground of the map, a product of the new science of cartography, are shown north Africa, India and south-east Asia, with the Nile, the Ganges and the Yangtze accurately depicted. The painting is allegorical; the hoped-for meeting never actually took place. But the timing, and the details, have much to tell us. In the painting, western Europe lies, unseen, over the horizon. Yet at that moment the small, aggressive maritime powers on the edge of the Eurasian landmass were already extending their influence and carving up the New World – and were now threatening the old powers in the Asiatic heartland of civilisation. The Spanish had begun colonisation of the Philippines in 1565, the Portuguese leased Macao in 1557, the English East India Company was founded in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company was established two years later. Elizabeth I had earlier sent an ambassador to Jahangir’s father, Akbar, to negotiate trade links. In another painting, Jahangir greets a Sufi mystic in the presence of the Ottoman Sultan and King James VI & I – not an imaginary likeness but one taken from a portrait brought to India by the ambassador Thomas Roe in 1616. In an uncanny touch by the painter, James stares coolly out of the picture, straight at the viewer, as if to say: “Our time has come.” And it had. Read more | Gulbadan Begum: the Mughal Jane Austen The Mughal artist Abu al-Hasan, who painted that magnificent picture of Jahangir and Abbas, cannot have imagined that his world – the world stretching from the Mediterranean to the Yellow Sea, created by the great Asiatic civilisations – was about to be shaken to its core by the violent energies, the inventiveness and the sheer ambition of the Europeans. Jahangir never got his summit with Shah Abbas. Nor did he meet the ailing Wanli Emperor, who was destined to die a couple of years later in Beijing. Since then, the turning of the wheel of history has been astounding: empires, world wars, the colonisation of entire continents, the triumph of capitalism – changes so huge that it is hardly possible to take them all in. The world has been remade in our likeness. And now, in 2025, President Xi hosts a summit calling for an alternative world order – “a more just and equitable global governance system”. We may not like President Xi’s choice of friends, but such is the realpolitik of our age. And to be sure, some would say that the American empire has accumulated enough misdeeds of its own to merit a reaction. Xi, in particular – an avid reader of history books (the Chinese translation of Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads reportedly among them) believes in the destiny of China. He thinks that China’s time has come, after the ‘Century of Humiliation’ at the hands of western powers. Eighty years on from the Second World War, Xi now says that China’s rise to global leadership is “unstoppable”. So back to these images of empire: Jahangir and Abbas, Modi and Xi. Some would say that they represent wish fulfilment: a rebuke to what President Xi’s baleful friend Putin calls “outdated Eurocentric and Euro-Atlantic models”. But behind the hugs and the photo ops, behind that amazing piece of diplomatic grandstanding in the giant military parade in Beijing celebrating China’s role in the Second World War, perhaps there is more than that: a vision of the future, uncomfortable though it may be to us in the west. As for Jahangir’s globe, the painting was a dream. But there are few images from the past that more powerfully distil what might have been. And now, as Shakespeare put it, “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges”. This column was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Fake news and the Dreyfus affair: the media-fuelled scandal that divided France
The wrongful conviction for treason of a Jewish army captain in France in the late 19th century exposed antisemitism and virulent nationalism – but also, as Mike Rapport reveals, sparked a flood of ‘fake news’ that presaged the worst of the modern media landscape
In the oppressive heat of his cell in the Mont-Valérien military prison west of Paris on 31 August 1898, Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry wrote a despairing letter to his wife, drank half a bottle of rum, and killed himself. This desperate act was a pivotal moment in one of the best-known causes celebres in modern history: the Dreyfus Affair. The story of Henry’s suicide, following his arrest for forging a document in the controversial case, was co-opted by the nationalist rightwing media as part of a tidal wave of coverage that threatened to destabilise French democracy and public trust in the Republic. The background is well known today. In September 1894, Henry, a counter-espionage officer, had uncovered evidence of a mole within French military intelligence. A cleaner working in the German embassy (and in Henry’s pay) had found a memorandum, since dubbed the ‘bordereau’, written by an officer in the French General Staff revealing military secrets. The handwriting was identified as that of Alfred Dreyfus, an army captain then working in the War Ministry, who was arrested, court-martialled, publicly degraded and hauled off to solitary confinement on the notoriously harsh penal colony of Devil’s Island, off French Guiana. But the army had the wrong man. Contradictions and irregularities in the case soon began to appear. In August 1896, the new head of military intelligence, Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart, was examining more papers stolen from the German embassy. The handwriting on one was identical to that in the bordereau used to convict Dreyfus – but the signature was that of Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a dissipated, debt-ridden, disreputable officer who had been selling secrets to the Germans for two years. Dreyfus, Picquart realised, was innocent. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/BAL1756949-CMYKWeb-Ready-2c9d689.jpg" width="3683" height="2456" alt="An engraving shows a man lying dead on the floor, while a police officer kneels over him. Another police officer stands by his head, and two more officers are entering the room in the background" title="An engraving depicts the discovery of the suicide of Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry following his arrest for forging a letter incriminating Dreyfus. Some thought his crime justifiable (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Ignoring the errors Even after this discovery, Dreyfus remained incarcerated for years longer because government officials, the army and large segments of public opinion refused to accept that a terrible error had been made. In part this was a result of the desire to maintain national security by authorities who were keen to avoid demoralising the army just as France secured a military alliance with the Russian empire, and amid heightened tensions with Germany following its annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine region from France in 1871. But it was also due to the fact that Dreyfus was from Alsace, and Jewish – at a time when a virulent strain of antisemitism based on ‘scientific’ racism had emerged, and as antisemites of different political persuasions associated Jews with either socialism or capitalism. Read more | Fake news and Nazis: Richard J Evans on the spectre of conspiracies These motives also played on a deeper division that had riven French society since 1789. There were those who, like Dreyfus himself, embraced the principles of the Revolution and its legacy as embodied in the Third Republic, founded in 1870. These included secularism, parliamentary democracy, civil equality and a world view exulting in science and human reason. Adherents of this strong current within French political culture generally became ‘Dreyfusards’ who supported the officer’s innocence. Their opponents saw 1789 as a fatal breach with France’s true historical destiny: Catholic, hierarchical and monarchical. More recently, this traditional conservatism had been joined by a new form of rightwing ideology promising social reform but which was also nationalist, authoritarian, antisemitic. Many of those with such views became ‘anti-Dreyfusard’, opposed to revisiting the case. These flames were stoked by a virulently partisan newspaper press that played a pivotal role in the battle for public opinion. Print media had experienced a boom stimulated by more rapid communications, the introduction of photographs into newspapers, an expansion in advertising, and new forms of printing technology that made periodicals quicker and cheaper to produce and more widely available. At that time, France had a particularly vibrant press. Free, compulsory and universal primary education for boys and girls from the early 1880s encouraged literacy, and a press law enacted in 1881 lifted almost all restrictions on what could be published, although this was rolled back in 1893 and 1894 after a spate of anarchist bombings. Journalists and publishers could be sued for slander, but cases were rarely successful. Between 1881 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the number of periodical titles mushroomed by 250 per cent. These publications included broadsheets and tabloid newspapers representing the whole range of political opinions from the radical left to the extreme right. Yet within this vibrant ecosystem of print lurked a danger that remains familiar in our age of social media, online news and artificial intelligence. It was all too easy to spread what we now call ‘fake news’ – misinformation (falsehoods spread unintentionally), disinformation (fabrications aimed at manipulating readers politically and socially) and malinformation (deception based on some truth, but twisted in such a way as to deceive). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-1404448124cmykWeb-Ready-a0c4306.jpg" width="2374" height="1582" alt="A black and white photograph of a man wearing military uniform, including a hat with "74" written on the front. He has a large, heavy moustache" title="Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the officer who really wrote the treasonous memorandum attributed to Dreyfus. He was acquitted by a tribunal in 1898 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fake news During the Dreyfus Affair, the newspaper press was infused with ‘fake news’. Not for the last time, the episode exposed the friction between free speech on the one hand and, on the other hand, the challenges that arise when people of bad faith abuse that freedom, spreading falsehoods to manipulate public opinion, demonise certain groups of people, or undermine faith in the rule of law and democratic government. The Dreyfus case sparked a truly explosive public controversy after Walsin Esterhazy was finally tried – and acquitted with unseemly haste – by a military court in January 1898. On 13 January, novelist Émile Zola published J’Accuse…!, an open letter to the president of the Republic, in L’Aurore newspaper. He accused the government and army of committing a gross injustice and of conspiring to cover up the truth. He specifically highlighted and decried the antisemitism, militarism and authoritarianism behind the falsehoods: “It is a crime to lead public opinion astray,” Zola wrote, “to manipulate it for a death-dealing purpose and pervert it to the point of delirium. It is a crime to poison the minds of the humble, ordinary people, to whip reactionary and intolerant passions into a frenzy while sheltering behind the odious bastion of antisemitism… It is a crime to play on patriotism to further the aims of hatred.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-90758187cmykWeb-Ready-51ffbc8.jpg" width="2642" height="1761" alt="A yellow newspaper page with the headline "J'accuse!" written across the top" title="Émile Zola’s open letter to the president of the Republic, accusing the army and government of a cover-up in the Dreyfus Affair, exposed deep rifts in French society (Image by Getty Images)" /> Following Zola’s outburst, the Dreyfus Affair erupted into a full-scale public storm. Except on rare occasions, newspapers tended to reinforce the beliefs of their readership rather than challenge them with facts. Giving readers what they wanted to hear was partly driven by economics: the conservative Le Figaro, for example, had stopped publishing Zola’s articles towards the end of 1897 after he openly embraced the Dreyfusard cause, which hurt sales of the newspaper. Yet much of the fake news had an even more insidious purpose. Anti-Dreyfusard papers fuelled nationalist prejudices by targeting Jews; claimed to be defending the ‘honour’ of the army; and railed against the ‘unpatriotic’ manoeuvres of the Dreyfusards – all as a means of galvanising support for the assorted authoritarians, monarchists, nationalists and antisemites who loathed the Republic. It was not that the Dreyfusards were innocent of spreading fake news. Although much of what Zola wrote in J’Accuse…! turned out to be accurate, he did not get everything right, as he himself appeared to admit when he finished by saying that he would willingly submit to prosecution for defamation under the 1881 Press Law. Zola did, in fact, face prosecution in 1898, avoiding imprisonment only by slipping away in June to England and living there in exile for a year. Read more | “A tidal wave of digital material will overwhelm recordkeeping institutions”: the future of history Even some leftwing Dreyfusard newspapers tended to casually use the antisemitic trope of the Jew as capitalist to explain popular hostility against Jews. Anti-Dreyfusard publications saw Jews, socialists and leftwing republicans as a ‘Syndicate of Treason’ (as the vitriolic journalist Henri Rochefort put it). However, the Dreyfusard press was prone to sharing conspiracy theories of its own, seeing its opponents as part of an interwoven plot involving the Catholic church and the nationalists, aiming to destroy the Republic and the inheritance of 1789. Yet the anti-Dreyfusard press had most of the running: of the 55 dailies published at the time, only eight came out as Dreyfusard from February 1898, almost all of them with relatively low circulation numbers. The media was dominated by anti-Dreyfusard titles, which had an almost open field in which to bombard readers with a swirl of half-truths and outright lies, stoking prejudices and stirring up fears. Forgiveable forgery One of the most egregious moments came in the wake of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry’s death. After his colleague, Picquart, had exposed Esterhazy as the real traitor in 1896, Henry had tried to bolster the case against Dreyfus by forging a letter that ‘proved’ his guilt, introducing it into the dossier of evidence. The ruse was successful until, as the pressure mounted over the course of 1898, the government investigated and discovered that forgery, leading to Henry’s arrest and suicide. For anti-Dreyfusard journalists, Henry’s crime was forgiveable: it was ‘patriotic’ because it served a higher cause – the security of the nation. Dreyfus was guilty anyway, they claimed; and even if he were innocent, those who sought to clear his name were traitors working for Germany. The virulently nationalist La Patrie accused Zola of doing untold harm to the army: “And since that day, the damage has surged in like a torrent, roared like a tempest. Who has not recognised in this tactic the workings of Bismarckian [ie German] politics?” The idea that Henry was a martyr to the cause of patriotism gained traction when the explicitly and graphically antisemitic La Libre Parole opened a subscription for the Lieutenant-Colonel’s widow, Berthe, which received no fewer than 25,000 donations. The newspaper published the many antisemitic and anti-republican messages sent along with the money. La Libre Parole means ‘Free Speech’, making it a case study for how prejudice and anti-democratic forces cloak themselves in the very freedoms that they seek to destroy or to deny to others. The Dreyfus case was – rightly or wrongly – seen as connected with both national security and the country’s future, so both sides entrenched themselves deeply within their positions. The more that the problems with Dreyfus’s conviction trickled out, the more the anti-Dreyfusards reinvigorated strategies that rested less on facts than on what is today called ‘gaslighting’ and on deflection, both of which involved stoking prejudices and demeaning opponents. Gaslighting, by which the perpetrator seeks to cast doubt on the truth, was deployed by Édouard Drumont, editor of La Libre Parole, who in June 1898 assured his readers that Dreyfusards were merely “a clutch of cosmopolitans who always talk of pieces of paper and documents but never prove anything” – the term ‘cosmopolitan’ being a dog-whistle term denoting unpatriotic or Jewish people. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/RV185-14cmykWeb-Ready-bfe91fd.jpg" width="2464" height="1643" alt="The top image shows a man in a suit with a moustache sitting at a desk and looking to the right. The bottom image shows a bearded man wearing glasses attached to a string, looking directly into the camera" title="Nationalist writer Maurice Barrès (top) entreated readers to consider national security above the facts of the miscarriage of justice, in contrast with the moral arguments of Dreyfusard Émile Zola (Images by TopFoto and Getty Images)" /> Nationalist writer Maurice Barrès made a more sophisticated use of gaslighting. Nothing in the Dreyfus Affair was demonstrably true, he argued in Le Journal in February 1898, so “how do you intend… to undertake to solve the problem when you do not have all the data?” he demanded of the Dreyfusards. Barrès’ purpose was to cast doubt on the significance of the few facts that were, at that point, already public knowledge. He took this further by suggesting that there are some truths that are “foreign to individual reason”, and that national circumstances and interests were the true barometer of what was just and true. “It is necessary to judge things in the relative,” Barrès argued, opening the way for his readership to be secure in their prejudices – because for them the army’s honour and national security were more important than the facts of any miscarriage of justice. Anti-Dreyfusard newspapers tried in various ways to deflect their readers’ attention away from the question of the convicted man’s innocence and onto other targets. This was a strategy behind the argument that Henry’s forgery was ‘patriotic’: his crime was minor compared to the real danger, which would be the victory of the Dreyfusards, who were no better than traitors. La Patrie proclaimed in September 1898: “Let us leave those cosmopolitans from Frankfurt to howl with joy over the tomb of that modest child of French soil [Henry]… Let us turn away with disgust from the spectacle of the odious triumph of the worst enemies of the army and of the country.” In that one sentence, the newspaper connected the Dreyfusards with treason, with Germany and Jews (‘cosmopolitans’), and with the ignominy of defeat – ‘Frankfurt’ being a reference to the humiliating peace treaty with Germany at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. Demeaning caricatures At the same time, the anti-Dreyfusard press demeaned their opponents, caricaturing them as effeminate wimps, sexually sterile and highly strung, and contrasted them with the muscular, virile masculinity of the army officers whom they were accused of attacking. Zola was frequently depicted with simian characteristics: hairy, fat, thick-lipped. Dreyfus and other Jewish figures were ascribed the whole range of antisemitic tropes. La Libre Parole compared the ‘French’ femininity of Henry’s widow, Berthe, with the Jewish Dreyfusard Joseph Reinach, who was “puffy, swarthy, sweaty, stomach bulging”. For some, it did not even matter that Dreyfus was innocent: he was Jewish, so for the nationalists the greater ‘truth’ was that he could never be French. The process of gaslighting and deflection combined to stoke prejudices and popular fears, fogging out the original question of Dreyfus’s innocence. Read more | How Napoleon (almost) destroyed the French Revolution Yet a denouement was eventually reached. In February 1899, President Félix Faure – who opposed reopening Dreyfus’s case – died of a brain haemorrhage. He was succeeded by a Dreyfusard, Émile Loubet, whose election by parliament prompted an unsuccessful coup attempt by the Ligue des Patriotes and the Ligue antisémitique, who provided the street muscle of the anti-Dreyfusard movement. In June, the appeals court quashed Dreyfus’s conviction and ordered a retrial, which took place in August and September 1899 in Rennes – Paris being deemed too dangerous. Shockingly, the military tribunal again found the captain guilty. President Loubet issued a formal pardon, but Dreyfus was not officially cleared until 1906. He returned to the army, serving with merit in the First World War. The Dreyfus Affair showed how, when the stakes were high and when divisions ran deep, a torrent of half-truths, lies, deflection, the stoking of fear and prejudices, and appeals to ‘patriotism’ made it difficult for citizens to make informed decisions. It also demonstrated that many citizens were content to have their prejudices reaffirmed rather than critically examined. This is why Barrès’ argument that the nation had needs that were above reason and truth was so corrosive to democratic politics. The principle that truth, justice and legality could be judged only according to national interests allowed readers to indulge in a kind of relativism that justified falsehoods and injustice in pursuit of a conception of France that excluded groups who were the bogeymen of the nationalist right: Jews, foreigners, Protestants, Freemasons, socialists and others. It also exposed the spiky question that every democracy faces when freedom of expression becomes a means of undermining confidence and trust in its institutions: how to defend itself without infringing the very liberties that are its essence. Ultimately, the lesson of the Dreyfus Affair is that, in an age of mass media, citizens not only need to be equipped to make the honest effort to assess critically their sources of information and to examine their positions with verifiable evidence: they have to be willing to do so. In December 1898, L’Aurore understood that this was essential to the survival of democracy: “It is for citizens to inform themselves, to think, to use their will; it is for them to reform their morals, to no longer let themselves be taken for fools or as things to be juggled with and to emancipate themselves, not by force, but by ideas.” We need, the newspaper concluded, to “enlighten [our] brains, not slice them open!” Mike Rapport is reader in modern European history at the University of Glasgow This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
After Franco: Spain's miraculous transition to democracy
The nation’s transition from dictatorship to democracy in the late 1970s surely counts as one of modern Europe’s most remarkable stories. On the 50th anniversary of General Franco’s death, Paul Preston explores how pluralism arose from the ashes of tyranny
When General Francisco Franco died on 20 November 1975 – 39 years after the start of the brutal civil war that brought him to power – the prospect of a bloodless transition to democracy in Spain appeared vanishingly small. Franco had prepared a rigid framework to guarantee the permanence of the dictatorship over which he had ruled with an iron fist for almost four decades. Spain teetered on the edge of bloodshed and chaos, with powerful groups at the political extremes ferociously opposed to compromise. And so, as El Caudillo (‘The Leader’) was buried in the vast Valley of the Fallen memorial just outside Madrid – acclaimed by tens of thousands of blue-shirted supporters – few commentators would have predicted a future of pluralism and relative peace. Yet that’s exactly what was achieved. That the Spanish people were, over the next 10 years, able to negotiate a perilous path towards democracy through the minefields laid by Franco himself – and the ambushes set by terrorists of both right and left – counts as an extraordinary achievement. Even from a distance of 50 years, it surely ranks among modern Europe’s most remarkable stories. So how did it happen? Blurring the past To answer that question we must rewind to the end of the Second World War. Terror had underpinned Franco’s regime from the moment he was propelled to power at the end of the 1930s. But defeat for the Axis powers in 1945 shattered his initial plans for a fascist future – one in which Europe was dominated by authoritarian regimes. Franco realised that he needed to end Spain’s international ostracism in the postwar period and be incorporated into the western community. To achieve that, a new approach was required. And so, to blur the Spanish dictator’s Axis past, a scheme was devised by his crony, naval captain Luis Carrero Blanco, to perpetuate the regime behind a monarchist facade. The Law of Succession of 26 July 1947 established Spain as a kingdom with Franco as its head of state. Franco would govern as regent until prevented by death or incapacity – and he had the right to nominate his own royal successor. The dictator didn’t name that successor immediately. In fact, it wasn’t until July 1969 that Franco announced to the world the identity of the man who would become head of state following his death. That man was Juan Carlos – grandson of Alfonso XIII, king of Spain from 1886 to 1931. This would not be a restoration of the legitimate royal family but the installation of a monarchy created by the Falangists – the far-right nationalist political group fronted by Franco. Juan Carlos would be compelled to uphold the fundamental laws of the regime, and could be removed if he strayed from them. As such, he was very much at the regime’s mercy. And yet, though no one knew it at the time, he would show the courage and vision to lead Spain’s transition to a democratic future. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-515401714webready-f4ef08c.jpg" width="3891" height="2594" alt="General Franco (right) in Madrid with Juan Carlos. The dictator’s nominated successor “would show the courage and vision to lead Spain’s transition to a democratic future“ (Image by Getty Images)" title="General Franco (right) in Madrid with Juan Carlos. The dictator’s nominated successor “would show the courage and vision to lead Spain’s transition to a democratic future“ (Image by Getty Images)" /> In the late 1960s, that future lay some way off. Franco was still very much alive. By now, the dictator had delegated day-to-day administration of the regime to Carrero Blanco, an appointment that, rather than consolidate the regime, merely accelerated its disintegration. Facing an inexorable rise in working-class and student dissent and the armed opposition of the Basque separatist terrorist organisation, ETA, Carrero intensified repression, employing neo-Nazi organisations, off-duty policemen and civil guards to do his dirty work. It was a strategy that poisoned relations with the Basques, the clergy and workers, and fomented disquiet among the most perceptive elements of the regime. Read more | "If you represent Pinochet in this case, I will divorce you”: the sensational trial of the Chilean dictator It also made him a target for assassination. On 20 December 1973, Carrero was blown up in Madrid by a bomb planted by four ETA operatives. Things got little better under his successor, Carlos Arias Navarro. In fact, an early trickle of defections under Carrero turned into a flood from 1974. With their country blighted by military interventionism, the virulence of the extreme right, violence in the Basque Country, obsolete industries and uneven development, moderates among the ranks of both the regime and the opposition were rapidly reaching the conclusion that only negotiation could prevent a bloodbath. Franco’s invading army Yet those seeking compromise in the wake of Franco’s death in November 1975 were confronted with seemingly insuperable obstacles – chief among them that, under Franco, Spain was governed as if it were a territory conquered by an invading army. The civil war had been provoked and fought by a coalition of rightwing forces to defend their sectoral interests against the reforming ambitions of the democratic Second Republic. Landowners, industrialists and bankers wanted to safeguard their economic privileges; the army to defend the centralised organisation of the Spanish state; and the church to retain its cultural hegemony. Each contributed to Franco’s war effort, financially, militarily or ideologically. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-463210205webready-2e54d5b.jpg" width="2772" height="1848" alt="A black and white photograph showing men in suits sitting around a long table. In front of each man is a folder of papers" title="Juan Carlos presides at the first cabinet meeting after Franco’s death, December 1975. His inbox would soon include terrorism, industrial unrest, and an army that simmered with discontent (Image by Getty Images)" /> The regime’s long-term survival was facilitated by total control of the media and of what passed for an education system to implement a national brainwashing that fomented fear of the return of the ‘reds’. After the civil war, these diverse forces of Francoism remained united by fear and by networks of corruption. Hardline Francoism was entrenched in the army, the police and the Civil Guard. However, for those such as Juan Carlos seeking an alternative future for Spain, there were glimmers of opportunity. Mass demonstrations revealed an overwhelming popular urge for democracy. Juan Carlos knew that important sectors of Spanish capitalism saw the political apparatus of Francoism as an obstacle to growth. In opting boldly for progress, he would be following the advice of British, European and American leaders. Read more | How Italian dictator Benito Mussolini became the first face of fascism While Juan Carlos may have been the most high-profile figure in Spain’s post-Franco reform project, he was far from the only politician seeking to transform the nation. In fact, the brains behind the operation can be said to be Juan Carlos’s one-time tutor, Torcuato Fernández-Miranda, an expert in Francoist constitutional law. As president of the Cortes (Spain’s parliament, which would have to ratify any reform scheme) and of the Council of the Kingdom (which had to endorse prime ministers), Fernández-Miranda would facilitate the ‘legal’ reform that was to be the real basis of the transition. Fernández-Miranda also played a key role in the elevation, in the summer of 1976, to prime minister of the young liberal Falangist Adolfo Suárez. Albeit impelled down the road to democratisation by popular pressure (1976 saw violence, enormous demonstrations and industrial strikes sweep the country) Suárez would be the perfect man for the historic task of steering democratic reform through the Francoist institutions. It was he, more than any other figure, who convinced other politicians that the reform project was serious. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2TCY57Wwebready-04bbc53.jpg" width="5751" height="3834" alt="A black and white photograph showing two men with slicked back hair standing on either side of a microphone" title="Juan Carlos’s one-time tutor, Torcuato Fernández-Miranda (right, in 1969), introduced the legal reforms that facilitated Spain’s move to democracy (Image by Alamy)" /> As for Juan Carlos, his contribution lay firstly in persuading major figures to join Suárez’s cabinet. Secondly, by dint of constant journeys throughout Spain he generated support for reform and rode out the storm of opprobrium provoked by his nomination of Falangists like Suárez. Above all, by appearing in the uniform of commander-in-chief, and through his private meetings with officers, he neutralised the high command of the army and restrained military hostility to the democratic process. In the autumn of 1976, with great skill, Suárez managed to steer Fernández-Miranda’s astute reform project through the Francoist institutions. In mid-November, it was approved in the Cortes by a huge majority of its members, the largely unelected procuradores. Suárez later called it a collective suicide by the “procuradores del harakiri”. Juan Carlos made a considerable effort to make contact with members of the opposition to convince them of the need for moderation. This was rewarded on 15 December when the referendum on political reform saw the project approved by a majority of more than 90 per cent. The opposition’s calls for abstention were ignored by the leftwing rank-and-file – a telling manifestation of popular readiness to make sacrifices to secure the basic framework of democracy. The referendum was a victory for Suárez but also for the mass pressure throughout 1976 that had pushed the government towards democratisation. A SYMBOL OF RECONCILIATION How an amnesty helped Spain confront its past, and its future On 15 June 1977 something remarkable occurred across Spain: people went to the polls in free elections for the first time since 1936. With Adolfo Suárez’s UCD party securing victory, the complex process of building a democracy could now begin. Yet how was this to be achieved without plunging Spain back into dictatorship or the horrors of another civil war? The widespread consensus was that sacrifices would have to be made – and that meant an amnesty. On 14 October, that amnesty passed through Spain’s parliament, the Cortes, into law. This hugely consequential piece of legislation effectively stated that acts of terrorism in opposition to the Franco dictatorship – which meant the sporadic guerrilla warfare of the 1940s and ETA terrorism – and the crimes against human rights in its defence, could not be subject to judicial proceedings. As such, it wiped the slate clean and rested on a tacit, collective agreement of the great majority of the Spanish people to renounce any settling of accounts with Franco’s regime. The public pressure for such an amnesty had been building for months – the previous year, 80,000 people had taken to the streets of Barcelona on successive Sundays to call for one. Yet the passing of the legislation was not without controversy. In early October, Suárez had met with representatives of all parties and warned them that the army, the banks and, to a lesser extent, the church had voiced their objections to an amnesty for political prisoners. That’s why the law that passed through parliament excluded both army officers who had fought for the Republic during the civil war and those involved in the Unión Militar Democrática, a pressure group of liberal officers punished for trying to ensure that the army would not block democratic transformation. Given the numerical discrepancy between the relatively few people involved in acts of violence against the regime and the many involved in its brutal imposition, the law required democratic forces to make a major sacrifice. It was also accompanied by the systematic destruction of the archives of the Franco regime’s repressive apparatus. Yet despite these issues, the amnesty – backed by a near-unanimous vote – seemed to symbolise reconciliation in a country that had been plagued by violence, bitterness and bloodshed for decades. As the basis of the ‘pact of oblivion’ (pacto del olvido) instituted across the political spectrum following Franco’s death, it would be one of the pillars of the transition to democracy. The trump card With elections scheduled for June, Suárez needed to create a party. Convinced that his best chance of success lay with a centre party, Suárez cobbled together the Unión de Centro Democrático by exploiting the need of many small centre right parties for alliances. His trump card was government control of Radio-Television Española and of local administrative machinery. UCD fused five main groups, each in turn composed of several others, all desperate to be part of an electorally viable movement. Ideological and ethical considerations took a back seat. Suárez’s skilful use of the media was rewarded with victory. UCD won 165 seats in the new Cortes, followed by the Socialist PSOE (who enjoyed considerable international support) with 118. The Communist Party of Spain and rightwing Alianza Popular trailed way behind with 20 and 16 seats respectively. But an essential part of the progress towards the elections also posed the greatest obstacle to the long-term consolidation of democracy. The legalisation of the Communist Party on 9 April confirmed the military’s conviction that its job was less to defend Spain from external enemies and more to safeguard Franco’s civil war victory. This wasn’t the only threat to the nascent democracy. From 1977 until 1982, on a monthly basis, Juan Carlos had to impose his authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces on officers outraged because Suárez’s minister of defence, General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, manoeuvred liberal officers into, and reactionaries out of, key positions. The situation was worsened by the relentless provocation of ETA’s attacks on officers. The response of the ultras within the army was golpismo – conspiracy to restore the dictatorship. At frequent receptions for senior officers at his Zarzuela Palace and on tense visits to garrisons, Juan Carlos argued powerfully for unity and discipline. Nevertheless, the crisis intensified and in late 1980 a plot was hatched to launch a military coup. The ex-secretary general of the royal household, General Alfonso Armada, persuaded other generals, most notably the Captain-General of Valencia, the ultra Jaime Milans del Bosch, that he had royal approval to instigate regime change. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-515557430webready-e05d150.jpg" width="3356" height="2237" alt="A black and white photograph showing a man in military uniform standing at a pulpit in parliament, holding one arm in the air and a gun in the other hand" title="Antonio Tejero draws his pistol inside the Spanish parliament. The attempted coup of February 1981 constituted the greatest threat to Spain’s nascent democracy (Image by Getty Images)" /> At the end of January 1981, facing a revolt from within his own party as his popularity crumbled, Suárez resigned as prime minister. This left the king as the most visible guarantor of democracy but his meetings with Armada enabled the latter to give the impression of royal collusion in what was being plotted – and on 23 February, the plotters struck. Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero seized the entire Spanish political elite as they attended the Cortes investiture of a new cabinet under Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, while Milans del Bosch ordered tanks into the streets of Valencia. Read more | The bombing of Guernica: who was responsible? Alone with his immediate staff, the king courageously headed the operation to dismantle the coup. In the course of a tense night, he appeared on television insisting that he would uphold the constitution. He telephoned Milans, effectively informing him that he would have to kill him in order to succeed: “I swear to you that I will neither abdicate nor leave Spain.” His intervention effectively ended the putsch. By the end of the month, the conspirators were in prison. Plots to kill a king In October 1982, the Socialists won a substantial victory in a new round of elections. From this moment forward, Juan Carlos no longer had to be called out as a ‘fireman’, and could act more as a constitutional head of state. The twin problems of Basque terrorism and military subversion remained, and there were ETA plots to assassinate Juan Carlos in 1985, 1986, 1995 and 1997. What’s more, the king still had to walk the tightrope of keeping both left and right onside – persuading the opposition that he would play a role in democratisation, while maintaining the support of Francoists by seeming to respect the constitutional laws on which, until 1977, his ‘legitimacy’ rested. In this, it certainly helped that the king was a naturally affable type. A telling example derives from the period in 1978 when the new democratic constitution was being elaborated by a parliamentary commission, or Ponencia. There was a reception for the haughty French president Giscard d’Estaing, who was visiting Madrid. At one point, Juan Carlos sidled over to Miquel Roca i Junyent, a member of the Ponencia, and whispered: “Don’t you think he looks more like a king than I do?” Looks can be deceptive, of course. And from the nightmare that threatened to envelop Spain following Franco’s death, the self-deprecating monarch and his colleagues had achieved something remarkable: they had successfully harnessed a people’s collective determination never to face civil war and dictatorship again. SURVIVING FRANCO A timeline of the 40-year battle for the soul of Spain 1936–39 Nationalist forces headed by General Franco overthrow the Second Republic in the Spanish Civil War. Franco establishes a dictatorship that will endure until the 1970s. 26 July 1947 The Law of Succession establishes Spain as a kingdom with Franco as head of state. Franco has the right to nominate his successor. July 1969 Franco announces the identity of his successor: Juan Carlos, grandson of King Alfonso XIII. 20 December 1973 Franco’s prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco is assassinated by ETA. 20 November 1975 Franco dies. Juan Carlos becomes king and head of state. 5 July 1976 Adolfo Suárez becomes prime minister. Later that year, the Spanish parliament overwhelmingly approves his reform project. 15 June 1977 Suárez’s UCD party secures victory in Spain’s first free elections since 1936. 14 October 1977 An amnesty passes into law effectively stating that crimes committed in support of, or opposition to, Franco’s regime could not be subject to judicial proceedings. 23 February 1981 Rightwing army officers attempt a coup. After Juan Carlos tells them that he will neither abdicate nor leave Spain, the perpetrators are placed behind bars. Paul Preston is a historian of the Spanish Civil War. His most recent book is Perfidious Albion: Britain and the Spanish Civil War (Clapton, 2024) This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Who should decide the stories museums tell?
Increasingly, museums are being challenged on how they select, display and interpret their collections. Six historians explain how these institutions can adapt to suit 21st-century audiences
“If museums truly want to be inclusive, they should tell the full life history of every object in their collection” – Justin M Jacobs It has become fashionable today for critics of major western museums to call for a ‘reckoning’ or ‘coming to terms’ with the imperialist and racist histories of some institutions. This approach is rooted in the idea that, every time a museum chooses to tell a particular story, this story inevitably reflects the unconscious biases of the curators who tell it. There’s much to recommend this approach – but there’s also a problem. Too often, institutions simply replace the bygone voices of long-dead white men with the present-day voices of people descended from the communities or nations that originally produced the artefact on display. But is this really a more inclusive approach? Scholars who study the history of artefacts in museums are acutely aware that nearly every object on display has served different functions and had a different symbolic value down the years. In addition, many diverse peoples have owned or interacted with these objects. It follows that choosing to tell only a single story closely associated with present-day ideological agendas does a great disservice to the museum-going public. Take the Parthenon (or Elgin) Marbles, for instance. Over the course of the past 2,000 years, they have played an integral role in embodying the political power and cultural beliefs of the ancient Athenians, Romans, Christians, Muslims, British and modern Greeks. Yet according to current intellectual fashions and political sympathies, only one of these stories is deemed legitimate: that promoted by the modern Greeks. This, of course, is merely a reflection of the unconscious bias of our own day and age, which consistently promotes the alleged authenticity of nation states that didn’t even exist prior to the modern era. This is the very antithesis of an inclusive approach. If museums truly want to be inclusive, they should tell the full life history and evolving symbolisms of every object in their collection – even when these stories don’t reflect the ideological trends of the present moment. Justin M Jacobs is a professor of history at American University in Washington, DC, and the author of Plunder? How Museums Got Their Treasures (Reaktion Books, 2024) “There is something colonial about leaving decisions on displays to only those who can afford to work in museums” – Christienna Fryar Few institutions teach more people about the past than museums. Historians may wish otherwise, but more people pop into a museum or National Trust property on a day out than read the latest scholarship. It’s their importance that has made the question of who decides what stories museums tell so vexed in recent years. These questions are necessary, because museums are colonial institutions. They flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries as repositories for the so-called curiosities European collectors had purloined from territories abroad. Museums in the west still claim to be the best protectors of treasures that countries of origin want back. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/J4X823-CMYK-80ca370.jpg" width="3286" height="2190" alt="A painting showing a group of people crouched down in a large forested area, poised to attack" title="A painting shows members of the Maroon community of formerly enslaved Africans during an ambush in Jamaica, 1795. Christienna Fryar argues that museums should cover their story more (Image by Alamy)" /> Then there’s the matter of who works in museums. Entry-level museum jobs are often poorly paid and based in expensive cities – not very attractive to people whose families cannot subsidise their lives. There is also something colonial about leaving decisions on displays to only those who can afford to work in museums and who received traditional university educations. Museums must work more consciously, consistently and collaboratively with descendant historians (those who research people they descend from), curators, artists and storytellers. Many institutions now cite co-production as a key value, but employing these experts and paying them appropriately is as important as working with local volunteer groups to design exhibitions. Descendant experts often use family histories and community knowledge to tell stories ignored by traditional scholarship. Read more | "Museums are magical places": Kavita Puri on a new initiative encouraging close encounters with history Take the history of enslavement. Too often, the focus in Britain is on the goods that circulated the Atlantic basin in the so-called ‘Triangular Trade’ (often sidestepping the brutality of the trade in humans) and the money that changed hands. But what about the swamps and the mountains where fugitives from slavery established Maroon communities? Museums are also responsible for telling these stories of survival, daring, skill, environmental know-how and community. Christienna Fryar is a historian of Britain and the Caribbean, and CEO of the Liverpool charity Mary Seacole House “In the 21st century, there need to be multiple stories in and about the museum – and multiple storytellers” – Adam Mosley The origins of today’s museums lie in pre-modern princely and scholarly collections. Historically, the collectors – along with the curators they employed and those who followed them – exerted considerable power over the museum as a space in which the world was represented and knowledge was produced. Curators still play a key role in choosing and shaping the stories their institutions are best positioned to tell. Many are enormously knowledgeable about the objects in their care, and it would be a tragedy to disregard their expertise, or that of academics, when using heritage collections to illuminate past, present and future. However, most curators and scholars know that they cannot and should not monopolise the generation of stories. It would be futile, in any case, for curators – let alone politicians – to attempt to dictate absolutely the message conveyed in any exhibition. Visitors bring with them their own memories, insights and perspectives. Their knowledge can supplement or correct that of ‘experts’. They may connect with displays emotionally in unexpected ways. They have stories of their own to tell about what they find in a museum. Increasingly, museums work in partnership with the public to tell new stories with their collections, to give a voice to those historically under-represented and excluded, and to unlock the meaning of their holdings for diverse audiences. Histories get rewritten in the museum, just as they do in universities. Sometimes these fresh interpretations can cause discomfort to those who would prefer museums to retell familiar stories. New perspectives can also challenge the very grounds on which a museum claims the right to hold particular objects. The ways in which museums are responding to these kinds of dialogues constitutes an evolving story in itself – one concerned with whose views matter and how to deal with problematic legacies from the past. In the 21st century, there need to be multiple stories in and about the museum – and multiple storytellers, too. Single-voice stories are no longer sufficient. Adam Mosley is an associate professor in history at Swansea University “Two-thirds of curators in the UK are women – but museum leadership is still largely an old boys’ club” – Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth Henry Cole, the first director of the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) from 1857, once declared that museums should be a “schoolroom for everyone”. But that begs a question: who sets the curriculum? Who is making the decisions on which stories museums tell, and why? Is it the curatorial team, senior management, external funding bodies or the gift shop? And what is the demographic of these groups? Although two-thirds of museum curators in the UK are women, museum leadership is still largely an old boys’ club. Recent reports by Art Fund and the Museum X project have shown that cultural diversity across the sector is at an all-time low. Can we ever truly diversify the stories that museums tell without first achieving greater diversity in the museum workforce? Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "A UK museum that tells the long, rich history of migration is long overdue" My own research focuses on art collectors, particularly the agency of women, non-binary and trans people. This topic is being explored across more museums thanks to schemes such as Katy Hessel’s audio series Museums Without Men. The National Gallery, too, is conducting research into female benefactors, noting the fact that only 27 out of its 2,300 paintings are by women. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/MP38ER-CMYK-a676a50.jpg" width="1899" height="1266" alt="A 1782 self-portrait by French artist Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun – one of only 27 works by women among the National Gallery’s 2,300 paintings (Image by Alamy)" title="A 1782 self-portrait by French artist Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun – one of only 27 works by women among the National Gallery’s 2,300 paintings (Image by Alamy)" /> It’s 140 years since Lady Charlotte Schreiber, one of the greatest Victorian collectors, split her trove of 5,000 objects between the V&A and the British Museum. Charlotte was determined that the artworks she spent decades researching should become the property of the nation. Honouring the spirit of that act of generosity, surely we have a duty to be in dialogue with the public and to keep them at the forefront of the stories that museums choose to tell? I believe that the future lies in collaboration and co-creation through public engagement. Museums are most successful when they reach out and establish meaningful dialogues with local communities, artists, academics, PhD students, schoolchildren, youth groups and more. Museums should be places of curiosity, creativity and connection that are always changing and evolving – just like the stories they should tell. Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth is a senior lecturer in the history of art at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of Lady Charlotte Schreiber (Lund Humphries, 2025) “Museums need to be alert to the risk of a fragmentation of culture and history” – Jeremy Black Museums should inform, educate, inspire, entertain and preserve – but this says nothing about how best to do this. Which objects in the permanent holding should be shown? How should museums drum up interest? How should holdings be curated, and how best explained? What temporary exhibitions should be commissioned? How should collaborations be organised? Who should be guest curators? What role should the public or government play? In 2024, Birmingham Museums established a Citizens’ Jury. This summer, the National Gallery announced the launch of NG Citizens – the first time a UK gallery or museum has set up a national citizens’ assembly. These bodies will presumably question the aesthetic judgment of curators. There will be lapses and controversies. Nevertheless, it is always good for an institution to find out what its potential audience wants. Of course, not everyone is happy about such initiatives, but their legitimacy is difficult to deny in a democracy. The National Gallery has a clue in the name: it is supposed to be national. More generally, developing processes that promote and support public involvement puts institutions in a solid position when defending the way they present their collections, put on and organise exhibitions or justify funding applications. An institution is harder to criticise if a cross-section of the population has advised it. In pursuing such public involvement, it is necessary to avoid ‘pillarisation’ – a term borrowed from the Dutch verzuiling, which describes a society in which different groups have their own distinct social institutions and organisations. Apply this to museums and there’s a risk of different interest groups, however defined and represented, putting on exhibitions or organising collections to reflect what they prefer. Museums need to be alert to the risk of a fragmentation of culture and history, which can in turn create an endless spiral of groups spawning sub-groups, and museums becoming mired in controversy. Yet, though democratic processes of consultation pose many problems, the alternatives are worse. Jeremy Black is a historian, formerly a professor at the University of Exeter, and the author of more than 180 books “Ideas once thought impossible, such as the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece, are now frequently discussed” – Mirjam S Brusius For a long time, museums have suggested that each object has just one official story – the one written on its label. Large institutions such as the British Museum often present themselves as neutral spaces that show the world simultaneously from ‘nowhere and everywhere’. Yet this approach rarely acknowledges how these objects were collected, nor how museums reshape the objects’ presentation to fit particular narratives. So who really speaks through the labels we see in museums? Is it a team of curators, one individual or the institution as a whole? And why do labels usually rely on expert voices instead of including personal accounts by those who used these objects, or the histories of how the objects entered the collection in the first place? These questions feel especially urgent today. Museums are under growing pressure to confront their colonial legacies, to consider returning certain objects, and to tell stories that include more perspectives. Ideas once thought impossible – such as the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece – are now frequently discussed. Still, while demands for repatriation have been voiced for decades, many communities remain unheard, many stories untold. Read more | The Bayeux Tapestry is finally coming home to Britain – and you can see it next year It is time for museums to rethink how they frame their collections. This means creating space for voices from the global south where many of these objects originated, and acknowledging their cultural and historical significance beyond western narratives. We have an opportunity today to reimagine these institutions as spaces for dialogue, reflection and accountability. One way forward is through even more participatory approaches, involving both visitors and source communities in shaping museum narratives. New tools – digital platforms, interactive displays, labels that offer multiple perspectives – can help objects tell more than one story. This approach could not only enrich our understanding of the past but also transform museums into more inclusive, honest and engaging spaces. Mirjam S Brusius is a historian and one of the initiators of 100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object (100histories100worlds.org)
Michael Wood on China's immense suffering in the Second World War
"China suffered horrendous losses, second only to the Soviet Union", writes Michael Wood
The Second World War still plays a massive role in our national mythology in Britain. But if I were to ask you: “Who was the fourth ally?” I imagine that most readers would have to think twice. The answer is China. China fought the entire war – and longer – and suffered horrendous losses, second only to the Soviet Union. Frank Capra’s Why We Fight documentaries, which included a 1944 film called The Battle of China, saw the war with Japan as part of “the struggle of freedom against slavery, civilisation against barbarism”. Films in the series close with the hope that a victory for the democracies – Republican China in the 1930s, don’t forget, had been a fledgling democracy – will bring about “the utter defeat of the war machines of Germany and Japan”. Today, history is a big deal in China. Since 1949, the Chinese view of modern history has centred on the ‘century of humiliation’ following the First Opium War (1839–42), when foreign powers carved up the country. But more recently, the Second World War has assumed a powerful new role in Chinese nationalism. There’s a museum to the war in Beijing, the Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and a harrowing memorial to the 1937–38 Nanjing Massacre. At the China Modern History Museum in Nanjing, you can dress up in nationalist Kuomintang or communist uniforms and have your photo taken in wartime dioramas. The Chinese view of the conflict has shifted towards showing the country as a heroic participant in a war that was moral and just. The Chinese had been engaged in hostilities with Japan since 1931, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria. The conflict proper lasted from July 1937 until 2 September 1945 – the 80th anniversary of the conflict’s end is being marked this year. So the Second World War effectively started earlier, and lasted longer, here than in Europe. And without China, the course of the wider war might have been very different. Read more | Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life The Chinese lost a million soldiers, but civilian deaths numbered somewhere between 10 and 15 million, maybe more. Hitherto enemies, the Kuomintang and the communists both resisted the invader, but afterwards fought a deadly civil war that was won by the communists, whom the war had turned into a national liberation movement. (Mao later claimed that the communists might never have won victory without the Japanese.) So China played a leading role in the creation of our postwar world. As one of the four victorious powers, they should have been able to articulate their own vision of east Asia. The problem, of course, was that in 1949 China became a communist country – and in the Cold War, communism was an enemy of the so-called ‘Free World’. The Chinese Communist Party was not formally recognised as the country’s government by the US till 1979. Read more | Why were these British Second World War burials draped with Nazi flags? There are many incredible stories of wartime China. One involves a young British hero, who is also being celebrated on the 80th anniversary this year. George Hogg was an adventurer who, in January 1938 – shortly after the Nanjing Massacre began – travelled to Shanghai. He helped a New Zealand nurse, Kathleen Hall, smuggle medicine and food to the communist resistance. Witnessing first-hand the brutality of the Japanese imperial army towards the Chinese people, on impulse he decided to stay and help – a story he told in his book I See a New China, published in 1944 and adapted into the film The Children of Huang Shi in 2008, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers. In Hogg’s most famous adventure, he saved 60 Chinese boys orphaned during the war and led them west to Gansu, mostly on foot – 700 miles through dangerous passes, on snow-covered mountain roads. In the end he commandeered six trucks to complete the journey to Shandan county where he created a safe haven for war orphans, founding a school that still exists. Hogg died in Gansu on 22 July 1945 after contracting tetanus. His tomb in Shandan has a traditional Chinese grave stele with four lines of a poem Hogg loved: Into Battle, by the First World War poet Julian Grenfell, who was killed on the western front in 1915, the year of Hogg’s birth. Recently there has been huge interest in China about the Briton who selflessly gave his life for the Chinese people. Just one story – but what a story. So, as China commemorates the anniversary of the end of the Second World War in September, should we not invite our Chinese friends to join us in the rituals at the Cenotaph, to lay a wreath on behalf of our forgotten ally? It would be high time. This article was first published in the October 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
When was the White House built – and why is it white?
How much do you know about the history of the White House in Washington, DC, which has been home to all US presidents since John Adams in 1800?
Inscribed on the stone fireplace of the State Dining Room of the White House are the words: “I pray to Heaven bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.” The blessing, which was engraved there in 1945, came from a letter written by John Adams to his wife Abigail in 1800. He was the second man to be president of the United States, but the first to reside in the world-famous home of the presidency at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, in Washington, DC. A decade earlier, there had been no such place as Washington, DC, on the Potomac River. Founded by the Residence Act of 1790, the new capital would be a modern metropolis laid out in a grid system and with grand boulevards and public spaces everywhere. In the short term, though, it was not a promising place to live: if not hectic with the constant building works, there was nothing around but forests and some wetlands, where sanitation was poor and conditions were cold to freezing. Still, this would be the home of the president. George Washington, the first man elected to the office, personally chose the site for what would be the White House along with city planner Pierre Charles L’Enfant, and launched a competition for the building’s design. When was the White House built? Construction of the White House got underway with the laying of the cornerstone on 13 October 1792. But the the so-called ‘Presidential Palace' would not be finished until after Washington had left office. Even by 1800, when Adams moved in, the building was far from complete. It would be added to, repaired and extended many times throughout the years, not least when it had to be reconstructed following the War of 1812. The photogenic South Portico was added in 1824, followed by the North Portico, completed in 1830. The West Wing was added in 1902 and within, in 1909, the first iteration of the Oval Office. The East Wing was developed in 1942 – it is the focus of a sweeping renovation by President Trump that will see a 90,000-square-foot ballroom added to the building. The White House currently boasts a total of 132 rooms. White House facts: seven things you need to know Here, White House historian Lindsay M Chervinsky explains everything you need to know about the home of the US president… Why is the White House called the White House? The home of the President of the United States is called the White House in reference to its covering with lime-based whitewash to protect the porous sandstone it is built from. By President Jimmy Carter’s administration (1977–81), the paint was so thick that visitors couldn’t see the carving details above the windows and doors, or any of the beautiful molding. The White House underwent a significant external renovation to strip the many layers of paint, which took 20 years and wasn’t completed until President Bill Clinton’s administration (1993–2001). When finished, over 45 coats of paint had been removed from the exterior walls. Read more: American history myths: 7 things people get wrong Who built the White House? The White House was designed by Irish-born architect, James Hoban – whose vision of a neoclassical mansion in the Palladian style won him Washington's competition – but it was built by hundreds of workers, including enslaved people. Over the next eight years, a mix of free African-American and white wage labourers, enslaved workers, and skilled craftsmen built the White House. They worked in a variety of positions, including basic labourers, overseers, sawyers, carpenters, stone workers, and bricklayers. Some of the enslaved workers were owned by the city commissioners charged with overseeing the project, or by Hoban himself. The vast majority, however, were hired out from their owners in Washington, DC, as well as Virginia, and Maryland, who then pocketed the enslaved peoples’ wages. The construction crews were often shuttled back and forth between the White House and the Capitol building sites (which were also built using enslaved labour), depending on which location needed labour or had available materials at any given moment. Was the White House set on fire by the British? Yes. In August 1814, British forces marched into Washington, DC and burned all public buildings in retaliation for the destruction of York [now Toronto, Canada], the year prior. After enjoying a lavish meal laid out by First Lady Dolley Madison, the British forces set fire to the White House. Urban legend suggests that a rain storm arrived and saved the White House. The truth, however, is that the rain actually made the damage worse. While the wet weather saved the surrounding buildings from catching fire, it nearly destroyed the walls of the White House. The stone walls were incredibly hot from the fire and the cold rain caused them to shrink rapidly and crack. Congress quickly appointed a commission to investigate the damage and rebuild the White House. The investigators discovered that almost everything inside had been destroyed except for a few pots and pans in the basement kitchens, but their report concealed the extent of the damage to get the rebuilding process started immediately. Read more: Why does the United States of America celebrate Independence Day on 4 July? Some officials wanted to move the capital to a more developed city – like Philadelphia, New York, or Charleston – because lodging, food, and entertainment options were still quite limited in DC. Furthermore, representatives from states far away from DC, like New Hampshire or Georgia, wanted to shorten their travelling time. They saw the destruction of the White House as an opportunity to move the capital. Eager to maintain a historic link with the earlier presidents, Presidents James Madison and James Monroe rushed to rebuild the White House exactly as before. They even hired the same architect, James Hoban, to complete the renovation. Boston Tea Party: Igniting a Revolution Member exclusive | Discover the causes, tensions, and violent origins of the Boston Tea Party. Join leading experts as they explain the key players involved in the plan – and why tea was so important to the story. Listen to all episodes now Many animals have lived at the White House Most people are familiar with the dogs that have lived in the White House – such as Bo and Sunny Obama, or President George W Bush and First Lady Laura Bush’s Scottish terriers, Barney and Miss Beazley. But there have been a menagerie of animals that have called the grounds home. President Woodrow Wilson welcomed a herd of sheep to the South Lawn and they donated their wool to the Red Cross to create uniforms for soldiers during the First World War. One particularly adventuresome ram named Hi caused a bit of trouble when he repeatedly broke into the Oval Office. John F Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, had a pet pony named Macaroni; First Lady Grace Coolidge had a raccoon named Rebecca; and President William H Taft had a cow, Pauline Wayne, which roamed in front of the Old Executive Office Building. Perhaps best of all, Alice Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter) had a garter snake named Emily Spinach that she carried around in her purse and pulled out as a conversation piece at parties. Anne Boleyn’s lapdog and John Quincy Adams’s alligator: 10 famous people in history and their bizarre pets The White House is bigger than you might think it is While the building appears to be two stories from the street, there are actually six floors. There are three floors above ground (the State Floor and two floors for the residence), and three floors below ground. While much of the State Floor and residence layout has remained the same since its construction, many other areas of the White House have changed dramatically. When you enter the White House today, you would probably enter on the Ground Floor, or the first of the basement floors. Until 1901, this floor was primarily a work space. Instead of the China Room, the Vermeil Room, the Library, and the Diplomatic Reception Room, there would have been a kitchen, a laundry room, a storage space for food and dishware, and sleeping spaces for the enslaved or free servants. The basement was notoriously damp and frequently infested with vermin and rodents. Read more: Life after the White House: what the US presidents did next There are other spaces that have been lost to history as well. The White House had a series of stables to house the president’s horses, carriages, coachmen, and grooms. The final and most elaborate stable was converted into a garage in 1909. The attic has also undergone many renovations. In its early years, it was used for storage, sleeping quarters for free or enslaved servants, and a hiding place for the presidents’ children. In 1913 First Lady Ellen Wilson added guestrooms and a painting studio for her own private use. During the Coolidge administration, engineers discovered problems with the roof structure. They installed a sunroom (now the solarium), larger guest and service rooms, and a new steel and concrete roof. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/11/WhiteHouseFloorPlanGettyImages-640477071-b94d8bf-e1761584579153.jpg" width="1500" height="1002" alt="Floor Plan of the second storey of the White House" title="A 1901 drawing by FD Owen of the floor plan of the second story in the White House, which was originally deisgned by architect James Hoban in 1792 (Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)" /> The White House grounds were once open to anyone When President John Adams moved into the White House on 1 November 1800, there was no fence or gate, and the grounds were open to pedestrians. President Thomas Jefferson added a fence that enclosed the grounds, but they remained open for common use. In 1873, President Ulysses S Grant began closing the grounds at sunset for additional security and in 1893, President Grover Cleveland closed the South Grounds, typically the first family’s garden, after strangers tried to take a picture of his young daughter, Esther. The North and South Grounds were closed permanently during Calvin Coolidge’s presidency at the recommendation of the United States Secret Service. The president’s cabinet hasn’t always had a home at the White House Every president has consulted a cabinet since President George Washington convened the first full cabinet meeting on 26 November 1791. While President John Adams was the first to live in the White House, President Thomas Jefferson was the first to meet with his cabinet in the White House and gathered the department secretaries in his private study on the first floor (now the State Dining Room). By the time of the Civil War, the president’s study had moved to the second floor and Abraham Lincoln met with the secretaries in his office in the south-east corner of the second floor (now the Lincoln Bedroom). Read more: American presidents: 9 things you (probably) didn’t know Theodore Roosevelt built the West Wing to provide more work space for his staff, and to give his large family more room on the second floor of the original building. In 1909, President Taft expanded the West Wing, added the Oval Office, and an official Cabinet room. The Oval Office was moved to its present location during President Franklin D Roosevelt’s presidency. Since then, most cabinets have used the Cabinet room for official cabinet meetings and elected to meet with individual department secretaries in the Oval Office. Lindsay M Chervinsky, PhD is White House Historian at the White House Historical Association, a non-profit dedicated to preserving and sharing the history of the White House. She is the author of The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution
5 things you (probably) didn't know about the Tudors
Ruth Goodman, who teaches our new HistoryExtra Academy course on Tudor life, shares five insights about the dynasty’s legacy
1. The Tudors brought peace and prosperity to England Bringing peace was probably the most important thing the Tudors did for us. The British countryside is littered with the sites of medieval battles – places where opposing forces stomped over crops, burned barns and rounded up people’s sons. For centuries, rival aristocrats made and broke alliances, and killed those who got in their way. Henry Tudor took the throne in exactly this way at Bosworth in 1485, when he persuaded a number of warlords to desert their king, Richard III. But there it stopped. Intrigue and power politics were thenceforth undertaken by more covert means. Everyone became a bit safer, the day-to-day became a bit more predictable, and lots of people got a little bit richer. Less war meant that more crops made it to market, more young men were available for work, and there was less damage done to buildings, less thievery with menaces and safer travel. In turn, this meant more trade and a greater willingness to invest. The peace the Tudors brought to their lands benefited all – rich and poor alike. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-540735906webready-614eaac.jpg" width="5572" height="3714" alt="An engraving shows Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester during the Reformation, presenting an English translation of the Bible to Henry VIII (Image by Getty Images)" title="An engraving shows Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester during the Reformation, presenting an English translation of the Bible to Henry VIII (Image by Getty Images)" /> 2. Henry VIII was a reluctant reformer When the Tudors came to power, the Catholic church was already struggling to maintain its grip upon the minds and souls of Europe. New ideas about the nature of God and the state of Christianity were circulating. So when Henry VIII lost patience with the pope, there were plenty of people delighted by the opportunity to rethink England’s official religious position. Read more | Tudor England had no standing army, but this humble hobby kept its people ready for war Henry himself seems to have been happy to leave the religion as was. He just wanted the power and money the pope had been leveraging from his kingdom. He was quickly convinced, though, that he should also have the money and assets of the monasteries. A significant number of influential and vocal people wanted much more, however, pushing for a ‘purer’ form of Christianity that did away with priests entirely and abandoned the rituals and traditions of Catholicism. Others, of course, wholeheartedly defended the time-honoured form of faith. The result was a fracturing of society. Hundreds, both Protestant and Catholic, were executed for refusing to change their form of faith and follow the state-sponsored format – one that changed radically several times. But for all the death and fear, the upset and soul-searching, a new freedom of thought also emerged. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-463916919webready-ea853dd.jpg" width="3432" height="2288" alt="A painting showing a person, holding the page of a book which sits on a table" title="During the Tudor era, literacy grew, in part because Protestantism emphasised reading the Bible rather than the word of God being mediated by a priest (Image by Getty Images)" /> 3. The Tudor era brought a rise in literacy A few years before Henry Tudor took the throne, in 1476, William Caxton printed his first book on English soil. As printing presses became established and the price of books plummeted, reading became affordable to many more people. There was also more choice. Alongside religious texts, books of popular stories, advice manuals, joke books, medical texts and scandal sheets were published. At the same time, there was a new religious pressure for Britons to learn to read. The Protestant faith required its adherents to stop relying on priests and to read the Bible for themselves. This applied to everyone: shepherds and ploughmen as well as nobles and merchants – even women. Teaching people to read became a new religious duty and literacy rates started to climb. Read more | What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century 4. They drove the expansion of industry The Tudor monarchs – Elizabeth, in particular – were very keen to kickstart new industries and update old ones. In order to do this, specialist workers from Europe were encouraged to resettle on these shores. Some came as refugees fleeing religious persecution in France and the Low Countries, bringing new textile-making skills. Others were purely economic migrants with mining expertise or knowledge of new glassblowing and brass-founding techniques. The strategy worked – and these new arrivals provided the core of know-how and experience around which English industry could grow. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain 5. The health of the nation improved Rates of fatal illness fell during the Tudor period – though this was the result of sheer luck, as certain major diseases mutated into less virulent forms. When a new, often lethal form of the plague arrived in England in 1348 – the Black Death – it killed around a third of the population, suddenly and catastrophically. Plague returned to Britain many times over the centuries that followed but, by the start of the Tudor era, the outbreaks were becoming smaller and more people were surviving. Meanwhile, another major killer known as the sweating sickness – a mysterious disease causing rapidly developing symptoms including shivers, headaches, dizziness, pains and, soon afterwards, sweating and commonly death – came and went. The first epidemic broke out in 1485, just as the Tudor era was beginning, and the last came in 1551, after which it apparently vanished completely. With both of these big killers in retreat, the population began to grow. Ruth Goodman is a social and domestic historian and broadcaster. Her books include How to Be a Tudor (Viking, 2015) This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine Want to step even further into the world of the Tudors? In her brand-new HistoryExtra Academy series, Ruth Goodman takes you inside everyday life in the 16th century — from food and fashion to faith, work, and even love and marriage. The first three episodes are available now on the HistoryExtra app, with more to come soon. Start watching today Want to ask Ruth a question? Join our live virtual Q&A on 19 November. Find out more here
"Violence and American politics have gone hand in hand right from the beginning": a history of political violence
Following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July 2024, Matt Elton spoke to historian Adam IP Smith about the history of violent attacks on US leaders. In this interview, first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine, Smith discussed the political and social repercussions of such assaults across the decades
Matt Elton: Assassinations, and attempted assassinations, have occurred around the world throughout history. But is there a particularly American aspect to this story of political violence? Adam IP Smith: I think there is. Political violence is hardly unique to the US, sadly, so we must be careful about ascribing American exceptionalism to what we saw at Donald Trump’s rally [in Pennsylvania on 13 July 2024]. There is nevertheless an American political tradition into which this specific kind of gun violence – the attempted assassination of leading political figures, especially presidents and presidential candidates – fits. On the podcast | Adam IP Smith on assassinations that shaped US history As a historian, do you think it’s a stretch to suggest that the violence that shaped the founding of the modern nation may have paved the way for later political violence in the US? Certainly the political polarisation and the potential for political violence we’re seeing today form part of a recurrent pattern in US history. There are several reasons, but maybe the core one is that there’s long been a fundamental disagreement within the US about who constitutes the legitimate American nation. That has led to a fear, genuinely held by significant numbers of people involved in the political process, that the stakes are so high because if their political enemies win then everything will be lost – that their freedom, the republic, even their own place in society will be jeopardised. That’s partly because, from the beginning, the president of the United States has held many of the powers held by monarchs – in some respects, even greater powers. George Washington had more influence over the government of the US than George III had over the government in London, for instance. So the monarchical style of the US head of state puts a huge amount of pressure on that role, which needs to feel like the embodiment of America at that particular moment in time. The first US president targeted was Andrew Jackson in 1835 – an episode that’s less familiar to many in the UK than later attempts. Why is that? The reason may be just that it was unsuccessful: the gun wielded by the would-be assassin malfunctioned. If Jackson had been shot on the steps of the Capitol, then we would know about it. Jackson already had a bullet lodged in him from an earlier duel, one of several he’d fought (in one of which, some 30 years earlier, he’d killed a man). So Jackson himself was no stranger to gun violence. He was a deeply controversial and polarising figure – and, perhaps not irrelevantly to this conversation, the president to whom those advancing Trump’s agenda have most wanted to compare Trump. Read more | 50 assassinations that changed the world Jackson was kind of an outsider – the original ‘drain the Washington swamp’ candidate. He first ran to become president in 1824, but failed due to what he called a “corrupt bargain”, and argued that the election had been stolen from him. He ran again in 1828 and won convincingly, defeating John Quincy Adams, who was the last of the old guard. In fact, Jackson was a wealthy slave holder in Tennessee – he wasn’t some hard-scrabble guy anymore – but he had literally been born in a log cabin and had worked his way up. Like Trump – indeed, like Trump’s new running mate, JD Vance, and many other big figures in American political history – he was of Scots Protestant Irish descent. The tradition that Jackson, Trump and Vance have tried to embody is one of rugged individualism, of standing up for yourself. It’s a kind of frontier mythos – the idea that in the end you have nothing to rely on but your wits and your bravery and your courage, and it’s all about you and your family. Jackson was both a perpetrator and a victim of gun violence. So in a way, if he had have been shot, it wouldn’t have fundamentally changed the image of him. It would almost have seemed fitting for him to die in that way, such was the nature of the romance built up around him. Some presidential assassinations had repercussions not just in the US but on the world stage. What examples are particularly illuminating in terms of that wider picture? The global impact of these events is one way of measuring the significance of the US in people’s imaginations. News of Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 reached Britain a week or so after the event, having been carried by the fastest ship to the west coast of Ireland, then transmitted by telegraph from there to London. Clearly, the assassination of a head of state was dramatic enough, but so much more so because it occurred after the end of the American Civil War. Lincoln was a man who was imagined to have freed America’s enslaved people, and who’d worked his way up, with no formal education – a kind of working-class hero. So big public meetings were held in Hyde Park in London, and in cities all around the world, reflecting a genuine sense of shock and trauma. Just over 16 years later, President James A Garfield was shot. He didn’t die immediately, but lingered on for several months. By then, the transatlantic telegraph system had become effective, so his was the first US presidential assassination to be experienced in real time by Europeans and indeed by Americans around the rest of the country. Because it was an ongoing story, with bulletins issued from the president’s house, it was dragged out over a long period of time and became a global news phenomenon – as did the assassination of President William McKinley 20 years later. The assassination of John F Kennedy on 22 November 1963 was the first to be filmed, with footage taken by a bystander, Abraham Zapruder, made public some years after the shooting. As with so much about America, the world took notice – because everything about the US seems to take place on this massive, consequential scale. Various conspiracy theories surround Kennedy’s assassination. Is that fact linked to the international shock and the global scale of such events? It’s really difficult for people to accept that events that have huge consequences may have had tiny causes. In the case of the Kennedy assassination, the idea that the life of this charismatic, glamorous young president – a hugely consequential figure in the context of the Cold War – could be cut short, that the US and the world could be robbed of his life and his leadership, struck people as a deeply upsetting, outrageous blow. So the idea that the cause of that blow could be one disaffected man, Lee Harvey Oswald, just didn’t compute. The natural tendency is to think: well, something else is at work here. This must be the Cubans, the Russians, or maybe – and of course this became one of the most prominent Kennedy conspiracy theories – we’ve somehow done this to ourselves as Americans. Maybe it’s the FBI or some sinister group within what some on the right now call the ‘Deep State’. That reinforces a recurrent fear and anxiety in American politics: we cannot hold this thing together because there are those among us, potentially millions and millions of them, who are fundamentally opposed to what we are trying to do as real Americans, defenders of the revolution, lovers of freedom, or whatever it might be. That might be a sinister cadre in the ‘Deep State’; it might be millions of MAGA Trump supporters; it might be the ‘liberal elite’ supporting Kamala Harris – whatever it is, at any given moment the stakes feel so high. So people look for conspiratorial, big picture explanations. What were the impacts of the attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan? On 30 March 1981, Ronald Reagan was approaching his limousine after delivering a speech in Washington DC when he was shot by John Hinckley Jr. The president was rushed by the secret service to a hospital, where he underwent surgery; the bullet was removed and he recovered. It was obviously a very dramatic and distressing moment – and one that Reagan brilliantly turned to his advantage. Stories circulated that as he was on the operating table, just before the anaesthetic took effect, he looked at the doctors and, with his trademark chuckle, said: “I hope you guys are all Republicans.” One of the doctors reportedly responded: “Today, Mr President, we’re all Republicans” – which of course was a great line to spin out. When he was giving a speech a few years later, a balloon popped nearby – and, without missing a beat, Reagan said: “Missed me.” Reagan was a great showman, like Donald Trump is a great showman, and he made great political capital out of this attempt on his life and the sangfroid with which he’d responded. Do you think that there is a direct relationship between political discourse and political violence, and are there examples that demonstrate that point? In a way, this gets to the heart of the problem. Is there a direct relationship? No. Is there a relationship? Yes, there surely must be. So does this explain what the shooter was doing in Pennsylvania on 13 July? In this case, of course, we will probably never know his motivations. However, plenty of Republicans have said that this shooting was a direct consequence of Democrats warning that Donald Trump is an authoritarian, a fascist and so on, and that if he becomes president, American democracy is on the line. Therefore, by implication, he must be stopped at all costs. Does it more broadly explain not just why this happened but why there was an attack on [former speaker of the House of Representatives] Nancy Pelosi’s husband; why there was an attempted kidnapping of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer; why two congressmen have been shot in the past 10 or 15 years; why we see a lot of violence around the edges of political rallies; why we see pushing and shoving of press representatives; why we see frequent threats of violence to American politicians? At the moment, American politics is intensely polarised. It’s partisan in a way that is just not true in Britain at the moment, and wasn’t true in the US through the 1960s and even into the nineties, but that has been true in the US in the past. I think that, though there is no direct relationship between political violence and polarisation, it’s clear that when you have a highly polarised polity, when people are driven to the point of believing that so much is at stake if the other side wins, then it’s not really so surprising when these kinds of attacks happen. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt on Trump, President Biden said: “The idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of.” Do you think that the US has a problem with recognising the violence in its history? The idea that this is somehow sort of un-American is palpably ridiculous. Violence and American politics have gone hand in hand right from the beginning, and some of this – perhaps quite a lot of it – is not just to do with the polarisation of politics, which is periodic, but to do with the massive availability of guns. In a country where there are more guns than there are people, where it’s extraordinarily easy to get hold of firearms, clearly this kind of assassination attempt is far more likely than it otherwise would be. Adam IP Smith is Edward Orsborn professor of United States politics & political history at the University of Oxford. He is also the host of The Last Best Hope? podcast This article first appeared in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Why you should avoid hair-pulling, and cannibalism, at royal banquets
And other tips from history to avoid banquets going bad, in advance of King Charles III's state dinner with President Trump this week
There won’t be any cannibalism happening at the state banquet this week in Windsor Castle, in honour of the 47th US president, Donald J Trump. I haven’t seen the menu, but I think that’s a reasonable guess. I also suspect that Prince Harry won’t be in attendance, despite his recent trip to the UK and reconciliatory tête-à-tête with his father, King Charles III. However, if you believe this piece in The Times, while the king and his youngest son might be mending their relationship, Prince William cannot forgive his brother Harry for his apparent betrayal of trust in recent years. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-1147873570-25735a9.jpg" width="1024" height="683" alt="Donald Trump, dressed in a black suit, stands alongside Queen Elizabeth II, Melania Trump, Prince Charles, and Camilla. The women are all dressed in white dresses, and Elizabeth, Charles and Camilla are all wearing blue sashes" title="President Trump and the late Queen Elizabeth II at the last state banquet, during the president’s first term of office (Image by Getty Images)" /> That’s where the cannibalism comes in. Back in the 11th century, two brothers – one of them destined for the throne of England – had a pretty big falling out. It led to an event at a feast that most people would find very hard to forgive. I’m talking about Harold and Tostig Godwinson. Harold, of course, went on to become Harold II of England, after the death of Edward the Confessor in 1066. He had to defend his crown against Tostig, who had joined the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada in an attack on the country from the north. Harold beat Hardrada and Tostig at the battle of Stamford Bridge, and both of the would-be invaders were killed. The root of the brotherly tiff went back a few years before that. In 1063, according to the 12th-century historian Henry of Huntingdon (who is unique in offering us this account, so we ought to be sceptical about its veracity), at the royal hall in Windsor, Tostig grabbed Harold’s hair while he was pouring wine for King Edward. Tostig, apparently, was so embittered that the king thought more highly of Harold that he was unable to “check his hand from his brother’s flowing locks”. Nobody would drink to this Hair-yanking in front of the king is one thing. But it gets worse; a lot worse. Henry of Huntingdon goes on to explain that Tostig flounced out of Windsor in umbrage and went to Hereford, where Harold’s servants were in the process of knocking up another royal banquet. It’s quite a long way from Windsor to Hereford, but in the course of what must have been a few days’ travel, Tostig’s anger had not abated. When he got to Hereford, he dismembered all his brother’s servants, and put their severed heads, legs and arms into all the drink containers. Then he sent a message back to the king saying that there was lots of salted meat waiting for him at Harold’s place. Unsurprisingly, King Edward wasn’t delighted about this act of anticipated anthropophagy, and exiled Tostig. According to Professor Heather Blurton, who has written a book about cannibalism in medieval literature, the whole thing is a symbolic fiction that draws on Greek mythology: “Tostig’s transformation of a royal banquet into a cannibal banquet is densely symbolic. The suggestion of a Thyestian feast rewrites history, casting an unnamed Edward the Confessor as the putative father of two feuding sons whose struggle for power is ultimately futile. In myth, Atreus kills Thyestes’s sons and serves them to him, leaving only their hands and feet, with which he taunts Thyestes. The invocation here of the myth of the House of Atreus, with its cursed history of murder and cannibalism, condemns Harold and Tostig as unworthy heirs to the kingdom. Simultaneously, its narrative intrusion into the prelude to the Norman Conquest of 1066 centres cannibalism as a privileged metaphoric mode for representing invasion and conquest in high medieval England.” Read more | Medieval manners and etiquette: dos and don’ts of the Middle Ages Yikes. So, basically it probably didn’t happen. Nevertheless that is pretty much the worst example of a royal banquet that I could find, with the added contemporary spice of a fraternal spat. As I say, it’s unlikely to offer any sort of model for what is going to happen at the state banquet in Windsor this week. Princes Harry and William won’t be present together, and I very much doubt there will be any hair-pulling, and definitely no cannibalism. The location of this week’s banquet is St George’s Hall in Windsor Castle. It was badly damaged in the fire of 1992 but it’s been restored and still bears the coats of arms of all the past Knights of the Garter. That is the chivalric order created by King Edward III back in 1348. Edward is closely associated with Windsor and spent loads of money doing it up in the 14th century. He was a huge fan of the legends of King Arthur and he was basically trying to reinvent Windsor as a new Camelot. King Arthur was notable as the host for another very bad banquet. It’s recorded in the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Helen Carr goes into the story in forensic detail in this membership-only article, but I’ll briefly remind you of the basics. It’s Christmas, King Arthur is enjoying a hearty festive feast with his knights arranged around the Round Table. Then an uninvited guest barges in – he’s tall, lean and strangely green. Yes, it’s the Green Knight. He bizarrely wants to play a game: a beheading game. Sir Gawain accepts the challenge and promptly decapitates the oddly coloured interloper. That would have been enough to spoil most banquets, but in a surprising plot twist, the body of the knight proceeds to retrieve his head and explain that Gawain will now himself have to submit to being beheaded in a year and a day. So that’s quite a downer for the whole feast, but Gawain’s agreement to seek out the Green Knight and accept his fate is the sort of act of chivalry that Edward III revelled in. Feasting, of course, has been a mainstay of lordly soft power for centuries, millennia probably. It was the duty of a leader to provide for his or her followers, and a great way to do that was by creating opportunities for copious and conspicuous consumption. Certainly in prehistory – and we can’t really talk about royalty here because we cannot know the make-up of their political structures – feasting was a big thing. Just last week, the results of a new survey about eating in the Bronze Age–Iron Age transition came out. It showed that back at the end of the Bronze Age, Britons were having massive food festivals, the like of which weren’t seen again until we get to the Middle Ages. People were travelling considerable distances to get to these huge banquets, and bringing their dinner with them, too. The midden, or rubbish pit, from one such feasting site stretches over FIVE football pitches. Boasting, drinking, amputation – that's some banquet For a really great banquet scene, we need look no further than Beowulf, the 10th or 11th-century story of the sixth-century adventures of the eponymous hero in Scandinavia. In the timber hall of King Hrothgar, Beowulf and his warriors engage in hard drinking, heavy boasting and lengthy tale-telling. The festivities are marred by the angry arrival of the monstrous Grendel, who sneaks in late at night and attacks the place, smashing it up with demonic glee, until Beowulf gets hold of him and literally rips his arm off. Maybe there will be some boasting and some modest drinking when President Trump is entertained by King Charles III in Windsor, but I don’t suppose they will be pinning the severed arm of a nocturnal devil-beast to the wall of St George’s Hall the day after this banquet. One thing we can be sure of is that the food served will be reassuringly expensive, because ostentatious displays of wealth have always been key to a good aristocratic banquet, as Charlotte Palmer explained in a piece about medieval banquets on HistoryExtra (read it here if you’re a member). Take, for example, the feast thrown in 1491 by Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara in northern Italy, for his son’s wedding. No expense was spared in the production of some elaborate sugar sculptures for the guests, but before they could tuck in, the servants threw these delightful treats into their laps. Bit weird. They then brought out a second round of these saccharine creations for everyone to actually eat. The point being, of course, that the duke could afford to literally throw money away. Read more | 10 foods named after famous people from history Singing deer and two-headed horses Maybe the display of wealth won’t be quite so crudely displayed, but I’m sure they will have the good silver out in Windsor this week. And of course, really nowadays, it’s all about the pageantry, because that’s the one thing you simply can’t buy. If you want to know how to really go to town on this front, consider the obscenely over-the-top banquet of 1454, hosted by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy: the Feast of the Pheasant. Will King Charles have organised for his guest to be served, as the duke was, by a two-headed horse ridden by two men sitting back to back, each holding a trumpet, and then by a monster, consisting of a man riding on an elephant? There was also apparently a white stag that sang a tenor accompaniment to a chorister. It’s hard to find deer that can do good harmonies these days, probably not even in the herds that grace Windsor Great Park, but that is the sort of display that I think President Trump would lap up. Assuming magical animals are not available to provide this level of spectacle, the food is going to have to be absolutely top drawer to give the feast the wow factor it needs. I’ve never hosted a banquet, and I don’t suppose I ever will, but Lulu Grimes, managing editor at GoodFood.com, has been to more than her fair share of posh dinners. I asked her what makes the difference: “Banquets are all about illusion. Recipes must be easily replicable hundreds of times, look impressive and taste good. The table must look astonishing, the cutlery intimidating, and the glassware signal an incoming challenge to sobriety. Above all, the meal needs to keep you entertained for a VERY LONG TIME because banquets do drag on (oh my god, the speeches), and you can’t decide who you sit next to. “I know what I’m talking about, I’ve sat and eaten through my fair share of banquets over the past few years; I am the reluctant plus-one for a liveryman of the City of London. There are few institutions more enamoured with banquets than the City, and my goodness, they do pomp and circumstance well. I once sat next to the Serjeant at Arms, who arrived with a special goblet rather than use the array of wine glasses at each setting. One would hope the threat of a bit of casual poisoning is long gone, but why change a bit of ceremonial flashiness now? “Matching menus to occasions is vital. In 2023, His Excellency the President of the Republic of Korea was treated to barbecued quail, an upscale cottage pie, and chocolate mousse – welcome to Britain. Wrestling with a small bird while chatting politely is in a frequent banqueter’s skill set. This year President Macron enjoyed a lemon curd, gin and pastis cocktail (see what they did there), Norfolk chicken and English sparkling wine made by a French champagne house. No ruffling of feathers on either side, all very diplomatic. What with all that cutlery flying around, gastronomic slights are best avoided, an incident-free banquet is a good one.” Read more | Queen Elizabeth's relationships with US presidents Wise words from Lulu there. I assume President Trump will enjoy something as exciting and innovative as that served up for his counterparts from Korea and France. But I also predict that the quantity of food on offer in Windsor Castle this week will be modest by comparison to some of the banquets that we know of from history. In 1575, there was a 19-day banquet served up by Robert Dudley for Queen Elizabeth I at Kenilworth castle. Forty barrels of beer and 16 barrels of wine were consumed, per day, between firework displays. Dudley’s aim was to persuade the queen to marry him. It didn’t work. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and despite not being a man, it ought to have done the trick because Elizabeth famously professed that “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” As Tracy Borman told me in my Life Lessons from History series, Elizabeth’s superpower was procrastination to avoid the attentions of suitors like Dudley, so even a boozy pyrotechnic extravaganza like this wasn’t going to sway the queen. In this banquet, it’s the other way round: the host is the king, and he’s trying to impress the president, and persuade him to give us all those trade deals we want. They only have 48 hours to work the royal magic on Donald Trump, but he does seem remarkably wowed by British pomp and ceremony. So maybe it’ll do the trick – just so long as he keeps the demonic monsters out, avoids decapitation and amputation, goes easy on the hair-pulling, and keeps clear of cannibalism. This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.