The public funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales took place 20 years ago today, on 6 September 1997. I, along with an estimated two billion other people, watched it on television. I cried. I cried because such a caring mother had been taken away from her little boys who loved her so much. I cried… Read more Thinking of Lady Diana
King Henry VIII of England became engaged to Anna of Cleves on September 4, 1539. The union was a failure, but Anna was lucky, inasmuch as the king annulled their marriage without demanding her head for it. The man who had arranged the match, however, was not so fortunate. The man who ran Henry’s government for him, Thomas Cromwell,… Read more Cleves, Cromwell, and Crazysause
Yesterday we loaded the three girls into the car and headed out to the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, on the southern end of St Brides Bay, walking all the way out on the Marloes Peninsula to its tip, Wooltack Point, where you can see Skomer Island. Dear Lord, is the coast of Pembrokeshire picturesque. We… Read more Seal Pups and Meerkat Babies!
Science has proven that nice guys do NOT finish last, but this wasn’t the case for Medieval kings. For monarchs in the Middle Ages it was survival of the fittest — and the fittest were those who were capable of ruthless, blood-curdling violence. It is that hard-core capacity for annihilating the perceived enemy that makes… Read more The Life and Death of Henry V
In October of 2004, National Geographic published an article by Joel K. Bourne, Jr. entitled Gone With The Water that warned what would happen should a hurricane hit New Orleans. The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the… Read more A Perfect Storm: The Submerged Cities at the Nexus of Climate Change, Political Ideology, and Coastal Development
William Wilberforce, the spearhead and focal point of the English abolitionists, as well as one of my favorite historical personages, was born in Hull, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, on 24 August 1759. He was the only son of Robert Wilberforce, whose family had become wealthy thanks to maritime trade with Baltic countries,… Read more William Wilberforce, a Truly Great Man
Again, I exaggerate. The Tinkinswood burial chamber (Welsh: Siambr Gladdu Tinkinswood), which also known as Castell Carreg, Llech-y-Filiast and Maes-y-Filiast, is a few miles away from me here in the Vale of Glamorgan. It is, however, quite near the St Lythan’s burial chamber and the cave at Goldsland Wood, Wenvoe, where Neolithic human remains have been… Read more The OTHER Megalithic Dolmen in My Neighborhood
NB: I was wrong about there having not be an excavation at St Lythan’s burial chamber. You can read about it here: https://tinkinswoodarchaeology.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/final-dig-diary-for-st-lythans/ I am exaggerating slightly when I say there is a megalithic dolmen in my neighborhood. In reality, the St Lythans burial chamber (in Welsh: Siambr Gladdu Llwyneliddon) is few miles away from my… Read more The Megalithic Dolmen in My Neighborhood
On 18 August 1783 sometime between 21:15 and 21:30 an unusually bright bolide was seen over Britain. This became know as the 1783 Great Meteor and was an intense topic of discussion in the early scientific publication, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Analysis indicates that the meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere somewhere over the… Read more The Great Meteor of 1783
One of the most enduring effects of the French and American Revolution in England was the governmental crackdown on ‘radicalism’, which was typically considered anything remotely resembling a call for sociopolitical reform. The government didn’t want a bunch of poor workers meeting and talking about inequality. The next thing you knew the poors would be… Read more The Peterloo Massacre