England

  • Princess Caraboo of Javasu

    If you are worried that your knowledge of geography is lacking because you don’t know where Javasu is, don’t be concerned.  It’s completely made up.  It is the product of an elaborate fiction of a young woman in 19th century England.  This is the amazing story of a girl who faked her way to royalty and how she almost got away with it. On the evening of April 3, 1817, a strange young woman appeared at the cottage of the local cobbler in the small village of Almondsbury near Bristol.  She indicated to the cobbler’s wife she wanted to sleep there and wandered in uninvited and laid down on the…

  • Eclipses- Historical Harbingers

    If you’ve been anywhere near the news, you would have seen that a solar eclipse happened in the continental United States yesterday.  I have to admit it was a pretty amazing experience as I was lucky enough to be in the path of totality.  As the sky went dark and the crickets started chirping, I thought about what it must have been like for those in the past.  They didn’t have the benefit of NASA and other scientists telling us that this was normal, the Sun would come back and to wear protective glasses.  How did people through the ages deal with eclipses? One of the first references we have…

  • The Peasants Revolt

    The Black Death had swept through England taking out great swaths of the population with terrifying efficiency.  The only silver lining to be found in this great expanse of death is that it left the survivors in the possession of more wealth and power than their forebearers.  Men who had been scratching a living, suddenly became village elites with a bit of money and property as all the other heirs were carried off with plague.  Labor for the harvests was scarce and food was scarcer, so those willing to toil were able to charge a wage and not be tied to land as defined by feudal law.  However, the lords…

  • The Dreadnought Hoax

    The Bloomsbury Group were a band of influential intellectuals who bummed around Bloomsbury, London during the first half of the 20th century.  Some of the members include Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey.  According to historian Ian Ousby, “although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts”.  They also perpetrated one of the biggest pranks in British Military History. I guess they were sitting around bored one afternoon in 1910 when Horace de Vere Cole got the bright idea to see if they could prank the British Navy.  He sent a…

  • Dorothy Lawrence-  The Woman in the Trenches

    History is full of women who disguised themselves and fought along their menfolk for causes they believed in.  A prime example are the women who inspired the legend of Molly Pitcher during the American Revolution.  (For more on this, please see this post:  http://www.historynaked.com/searching-molly-pitcher/ )  According to historian, Elizabeth Shipton, many women made it to the front line as nurses in the trenches or helping those wounded in No Man’s Land.  Some women took up arms and called “she soldiers”, but they had to operate in secret.  Dorothy Lawrence was one of these.  She disguised herself as a man and fought in the trenches along with the men.   Dorothy…