History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
Sir Humphry Davy pleads with Britain’s scientists not to be bought by Napoleon’s gold.
Soon after Napoleon Bonaparte embarked on his quest for a united Europe in 1803, Sir Humphry Davy gave a lecture in which he urged Britain’s scientists to support their country’s sovereignty and commercial freedom, rather than sell out their country in the expectation of funding from Napoleon’s Europe.
Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens took his wartime protest straight to the top.
In 1941, the Germans invaded Greece, plunging the country into a four-year nightmare of fear, persecution and famine. As elsewhere in Europe, Jews were targeted, but even in the midst of starvation and suspicion the Greeks hid them, found them food, and tried to frustrate the deportations to the camps of Germany and Poland.
A maths prodigy from Madras became so wrapped up in his sums that he forgot to pass his examinations.
In 1914, a young Indian mathematician with no formal qualifications came to England. Some thought his scribbled theorems were a pastiche of half-understood fragments, or even that he was a fraud, but others sensed they were gazing into the depths of one of the most mysterious mathematical minds they had known.
Adam Smith argued that the Bengal Famine of 1769 would have been much less of a tragedy under a free trade policy.
The Bengal Famine of 1769 was a humanitarian catastrophe and an ugly blot on Britain’s colonial record. Scottish economist Adam Smith, a severe critic of colonial greed and the East India Company, believed that it would have been no more than a manageable food-shortage had the Company pursued a policy of free trade.
The Governor of Bengal accused the East India Company of turning a crisis into a humanitarian catastrophe.
The terrible famine which struck Bengal from 1769 was partly a freak of nature, but Warren Hastings, Governor of Bengal, blamed a culture of corruption and negligence in the East India Company for making the effects far worse than they needed to be, and was not prepared to turn a blind eye.
Anglo-Saxon abbot Elfric tentatively likened the new-born Jesus to an egg.
In a Sermon for Christmas Day, Anglo-Saxon abbot Elfric of Eynsham likened the new-born baby in the manger to an egg. His purpose was serious: he wanted his congregation to understand that Jesus Christ was the incarnate Son, Word and Wisdom of God, not merely a prophet or good man that God loved like a son.