British History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British History’
The earliest Christians longed to celebrate the resurrection together at Passover, but that was not as easy as it sounds.
To keep Easter together during the Biblical festival of Passover was the shared dream of all the earliest Christian churches. But everyone seemed to have questions about how and when to celebrate the most important feast of the year, and no one seemed to have answers.
King Ecgfrith of Northumbria dismissed repeated warnings about his imperial ambitions.
The location of ‘Nechtansmere’, the Old English name for a crucial battle in 685 between Northumbria and the Picts of Scotland, is uncertain, though it appears to have taken place in mountainous country north of the Tay. Its result, however, could not be more clear: Northumbria would now begin its slow decline.
The seventh-century Bishop of London helped kings and clergy to shine Christian light into the darkness of mere religion.
St Erkenwald, the 7th century Bishop of London, is not particularly well-known today, but he played a prominent role in building up Christian civilisation amidst the violence, ignorance and superstition of Anglo-Saxon England’s pagan kingdoms.
Sixteen-year-old John Wesley Hackworth brought a locomotive over to St Petersburg, and Russia’s railway revolution was ready for the off.
British engineers and a sixteen-year-old boy played a key part in helping Imperial Russia begin her own railway revolution. In one respect, however, Russia failed to learn from the example the United Kingdom set for her: private enterprise.
A long-lived annual of riddles, rhymes and really hard maths aimed specifically at Georgian Britain’s hidden public of clever women.
The 18th century was deluged with popular magazines, almanacks and annuals filled with tidbits, extracts and riddling rhymes, but few could rival John Tipper’s “Ladies’ Diary” for longevity or circulation – or for sheer hard maths.
At fifteen John Dalton was a village schoolmaster in Kendal; at forty he had published the first scientific theory of atoms.
John Dalton (1766-1844) and his contemporary Sir Humphrey Davy could not have been less alike. Davy was a gifted communicator with an international profile; Dalton was tongue-tied and uncomfortable south of Cheshire. But both made historic discoveries, and where Davy left us Faraday, Dalton gave us Joule.