Yet again, very little of relevance to our interests.

However, I certainly did not know that on 20 June 1631 ‘Algerian pirates sack an Irish village’. (p.8) This very brief  note in the Anniversaries section notes that ‘many of the corsairs were not north African…even their leader, the dreaded Murat Reis, who ruled his own tiny state in modern-day Morocco, was actually a Dutch privateer.’

There are 7 pages of: ‘Issue 200. Britain’s top historians answer History’s Big Questions.’  Jerry Brotton, one fifteen historians participating,  in response to the question ‘What is the biggest misconception in your field?’  raises an issue with some relevance to us: ‘Many people studying the Tudors believe the period is defined by what happened exclusively within the British Isles and, occasionally, influences from Europe…This is a misconception that misses out exchanges with other cultures. Most importantly, it disregards the exchanges with the Islamic world that took place especially during Elizabeth I’s reign, which had a significant bearing on her foreign policy and domestic economy….’ (His book is This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World.

Main articles:  

Antony Beevor, ’Hitler’s greatest mistake’.

Kevin Butcher, ‘Th4 First British Empire: In the third century AD, Britain was the epicentre of a massive rebellion that shook the Roman Empire to its core’.

Dominic Sandbrook, ‘There was more to the 80s than Maggie: The Iron Lady casts a long shadow but the decade she symbolises was shaped by immense forced far beyond her control’.

In a brief article, ‘History under attack’, Professor Peter Stone ‘offers his opinion on how we can prevent losses of historical treasures in the future’.  ‘In 2015 the UK government announced the creation of a Cultural Protection Fund. We need to make sure that this funding is spent in a strategic, coherent way.  I hope the government will deliver on its commitment to ratify the Hague.’  Convention’. This was drawn up in 1954: ‘Convention of the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict’; there are ‘two protocols, 1954 and 1999’ (no explanation of what these are). The USA signed in 2009; but Britain has not.

Again, there are no Black troops in the ‘Our First World War Eyewitness accounts’.

Lisa Peschel, ‘The Holocaust on Stage’.

Tracy Borman, ‘The Tudors behind closed doors’.

Then we reach the listing of the ‘BBC History Magazine’s History Weekends’, in Winchester in October and York in November. Jerry Brotton, mentioned above, is  one of the thirty five speakers.  And incredibly, there is a ‘Black’ face! Guess who? David Olusoga.  (At least the BBC recognises one ‘Black’ historian! Olusoga will outline the history of ‘Black people…part of the British story… African soldiers at Hadrian’s Wall….  )

…………………….

Will the BBC ever learn?

Did you watch Dan Cruickshank’s ‘At Home with the British’ last week on BBC4? I watched it as it was about terrace houses in Toxteth in Liverpool. That is where Pastor Daniels Ekarté , whom I researched many many years ago, lived.  The film began with a very light-skinned ‘Black woman showing Cruickshank around her modernised/restored terrace house, which she really likes. Cruickshank does not ask about her ancestry or how long she has lived in that area. He walks around streets of terrace houses and talks of the Irish immigrants who settled in Liverpool, and about the Welsh who had come to build the many hundreds of terrace houses required as Liverpool grew. But, unless I missed it,  no mention of the fortune Liverpool made from the trade in enslaved Africans.  The Black population, according to Cruickshank is from the 1980s – clearly he has read nothing about Ekarté  - he would also have learned  much about Toxteth.