The History Hoard

Highlights

Two articles I wrote about historical myths in general, and especially women in history:

History and its myths (28 December 2019)
Gender, sexuality and history (17 January 2019)

More have gathered since then:

What’s in a Name? (11 November 2020) Erasing women writers in the name of uplifting them.
The History Girls: Sword and Scalpel by Karen Maitland (May 2013)

But also:

1,000-year-old skeleton may have been non-binary medieval warrior, say archaeologists (11 August 2021)

And the cherry on top:

Lovers of Modena skeletons holding hands were both men (12 September 2019)

Then there are other kinds of historical myths, too:

There are no white knights (19 March 2021)
6 Fascinating, Mythical Places That Most Likely Never Existed (8 January 2018)
The truth about Easter Island: a sustainable society has been falsely blamed for its own demise (12 October 2017)

In other news, I once researched historical pirate flags for a story. Ended up not using the information, but it's very cool, a complex visual language:

And speaking of historical pirates:

Nautical Slang in Common Usage

More generally, history can be very useful to fantasy writers:

Or simply cool:

African samurai: The legacy of a black warrior in feudal Japan (19 May 2019)

But mostly it's complicated, and often marred by colonialism:

How the north ended up on top of the map (February 2014)
The Bowl, The Ram And The Folded Map: Navigating The Complicated World (3 January 2014)

Otherwise, history has the advantage of being divisible by eras somewhat.

Antiquity

Scientists solve the mystery of the Etruscans' origins (28 September 2021)
Europe’s oldest map shows tiny Bronze Age kingdom (3 September 2021)
New evidence supports idea that America's first civilization was made up of 'sophisticated' engineers (2 September 2021)
Ancient Proto-math Found In Babylonian Tablet (4 August 2021)
The whitewashing of Rome (25 June 2021) White supremacists fetishise ancient Rome – but antiquity was more diverse and polychromatic than racists will admit
Antarctica was likely discovered 1,100 years before Westerners 'found' it (15 June 2021) Polynesians may have discovered Antarctica in the early 600s.
Ancient Native Americans were among the world’s first coppersmiths (19 March 2021)
Archaeologists uncover ancient street food shop in Pompeii (26 December 2020)
How To Get Away with Murder: Contradictions in Roman law left incurable headaches for its judges. (9 September 2020)
In the land of Kush (19 August 2020)
Earliest evidence for humans in the Americas (22 July 2020)
A Silk Road Renaissance (July 2020): Excavations in Tajikistan have unveiled a city of merchant princes that flourished from the fifth to the eighth century A.D.
Ancient Egyptian coffins and mystery of ‘black goo’ (20 May 2020)
Combat experiments reveal fighting techniques of Bronze-Age warriors (27 April 2020)
Graduate Student Discovers One of World’s Oldest Swords in Mislabeled Monastery Display (16 March 2020)
This 7,000-year-old well is the oldest wooden structure ever discovered, archeologists say (17 February 2020)
30 curse tablets found in Athenian well (6 February 2020)
Eat Like The Ancient Babylonians: Researchers Cook Up Nearly 4,000-Year-Old Recipes (16 November 2019)
Scientists find that tin found in Israel from 3,000 years ago comes from Cornwall (22 September 2019)
The discovery of the ancient Greek city of Tenea (15 September 2019)
The Prophetic Demise of an Ancient City (July 2019)
Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (November 2018)
The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture (29 October 2018)
The earliest tomb of a Scythian prince discovered (3 September 2018)
The Hoxne Hoard: How a Mislaid Hammer Led to the Largest Roman Treasure in Britain (4 August 2018)
These may be the world’s first images of dogs—and they’re wearing leashes (November 2017)
Why Roman concrete still stands strong while modern version decays (4 July 2017)
Hattusa: The Ancient Capital of The Hittites (June 2017)
Roman Roads (3 June 2017)
‘We Couldn’t Believe Our Eyes’: A Lost World of Shipwrecks Is Found (12 November 2016)
Ancient Egyptian works to be published together in English for first time (23 August 2016)
Amazon Warriors' Names Revealed Amid "Gibberish" on Ancient Greek Vases (September 2014)
A Man Renovating His Home Discovered A Tunnel... To A Massive Underground City (24 August 2014)
Deciphered Roman Soldier’s Papyrus to Family Complains: ‘You Never Wrote Back to Me’ (19 March 2014)
This 1,600-Year-Old Goblet Shows that the Romans Were Nanotechnology Pioneers (September 2013)
Ancient Mayan pyramid destroyed for road fill (14 May 2013)
'Entire streets' of Roman London uncovered in the City (9 April 2013)
Greeks, Romans wiped their asses with pottery discs (21 January 2013)
Lead Poisoning in Rome - The Skeletal Evidence (January 2012)
Dacian-Roman Emperors - Romanian History and Culture

Middle Ages

Explore this Fascinating Map of Medieval Europe (25 June 2021)
Vikings May Not Be Who We Thought They Were, DNA Study Finds (18 February 2021)
Lost recipe for medieval blue ink found (20 April 2020)
The Medieval Invention of Toilet Paper (March 2020)
Too Good Looking to Die: How to get saved from an execution in the Middle Ages (December 2019)
On colonialism, imperialism, and ignoring medieval history (26 July 2019)
When Dancing Plagues Struck Medieval Europe (10 January 2019)
Researchers Find Physical Evidence for the Existence of a Female Pope (3 September 2018)
Hussite Wars 1419-1434 - European Wars of Religion (4 March 2018)
‘Allah’ Is Found on Viking Funeral Clothes (14 October 2017)
Lost Dark Ages Fort Found in Scotland (22 January 2017)
Once a magnificent medieval city and home to 200,000 people, the ghost city of Ani is now completely abandoned and has stood empty for centuries (15 August 2016)
Chivalry Isn’t Dead, You Just Don’t Know What the Fuck it is (12 October 2015)
Decoding the Medieval Volvelle (23 July 2015): Made from circles of paper or parchment, the volvelle was part timepiece, part floppy disk, and part crystal ball
A Pocket Guide to Medieval Castle Vocabulary (12 July 2015)
Chain, Chest, Curse: Combating Book Theft in Medieval Times (10 July 2015)
The Medieval Tube Map (December 2014)

Renaissance and early modern

Kickass Women in History: Queen Nanny (13 February 2021)
Thousands of Rare Artifacts Discovered Beneath Tudor Manor’s Attic Floorboards (17 August 2020)
Life in Renaissance England

Victorian era and Gilded Age

The “Scientific” Antifeminists of Victorian England (31 January 2021)
This badass Edinburgh photo shows two ladies in long dresses and hats rock climbing in the 1900s (24 December 2020)
All the servants of a rich Gilded Age household (10 August 2020)
British Archaeologists Discover Huge Stash of Victorian-Era Beer (25 March 2020)
How Britain stole $45 trillion from India (19 December 2018)
How did Victorian Muslims celebrate Christmas? (December 2017)
Clothing from 1600s Shipwreck Shows How the One Percent Lived (May 2016)
Photos reveal 'scandalous' burlesque dancers of the 1890s (13 March 2012)

WW1 / WW2 and inter-war

Alcohol possibly from Prohibition era found in walls of Queen Anne home (15 September 2020)
Seven Indomitable Women of World War II (2 September 2020)
It’s incorrect to say there was no resistance to safety measures around the Blitz (23 July 2020)
Backstage at the Paris Opera House in 1937 📷 (6 March 2020)
We’ll Call her Story a Real-Life “Handmaid’s Tale” (27 November 2019)
Crossword Panic of 1944 (1 June 2019)
How to Explain the Holocaust in One Simple Statistic (2 May 2019)
Zeppelin Attack – The Friends of Bennerley Viaduct (October 2019)
The day Irish and Jewish joined forces against British fascists (26 February 2018)
The nuclear bomb didn't beat Japan — Stalin did (August 2017)
Gustav Wunderwald’s Paintings of Weimar Berlin 📷 (31 May 2017)
Seldom-seen photos show what America looked like in the 1940s…in color (22 August 2016)
Why A German Pilot Escorted An American Bomber To Safety During World War II (27 May 2016)
The Real "No-Go Zone" of France: A Forbidden No Man's Land Poisoned by War (26 May 2015)
Before the Great War, people travelled freely without passports or identification (18 August 2014)
The 1931 Histomap: The entire history of the world distilled into a single map/chart (12 August 2013)
The house that time forgot: Red brick semi is frozen in the 1920s with original decoration, food and furniture untouched for 90 YEARS (12 July 2013)
Check Out These Gorgeous Color Photos From World War II (30 June 2013)
Everything Was Fake but Her Wealth (23 January 2013) Ida Wood, who lived for decades as a recluse in a New York City hotel, would have taken her secrets to the grave—if here sister hadn’t gotten there first

What a Carry On (4 July 2011)
USS Robin – The Victorious U.S. Carrier that Didn’t Exist (16 February 2011)
World War II Marred By Poor Plotting and Unrealistic One-Dimensional Characters (12 July 2010)

Cold War and post-Communist era

In 1982, a 10-year-old American wrote to the head of the U.S.S.R. He wrote back and she became our youngest diplomat (9 December 2018)
Astonishing, rare images of the Vietnam War from the winning side (5 February 2016)
David Galjaard photographs Albanian bunkers in his photo book Concresco. (24 January 2014)
Haunting Photos of a Crumbling Post-Communist World (January 2014)
The Week in Death: The Dictator’s Architect (3 November 2013) Anca Petrescu, the architect who designed the People's Palace, Nicolae Ceauşescu’s monstrous monument to totalitarian kitsch, dead at 64.
National Archives: Searching for the Seventies (March 2013)
How 'Dallas' Won the Cold War (25 April 2008)

America

Colonial Williamsburg is Uncovering America’s Hidden Queer History (11 August 2021)
Thaddeus Kosciusko: The Polish Engineer You Never Heard of who Saved America (9 July 2019)
The Mystery of Florida's Cannonball-Eating Spanish Fort (4 July 2019)
This Tiny Kentucky Town Literally Moved A Mountain In One Of The Largest Engineering Feats In The World (18 January 2019)
The history of Jews, Chinese food, and Christmas, explained by a rabbi (21 December 2018)
Black People in the US Were Enslaved Well into the 1960s (28 February 2018)
Finding North America’s lost medieval city (December 2016)

An expansive photo record of Native American life in the early 1900s (25 November 2015)
Whatever Happened to the Wild Camels of the American West? (6 August 2015)
Haunting chalkboard drawings, frozen in time for 100 years, discovered in Oklahoma school (6 June 2015)

A Trip to West Virginia’s Slave Market in Wheeling (17 January 2015)
A Teenager’s Written Account of the Very First Thanksgiving, 1621 (18 November 2014)

Using Metadata to find Paul Revere (9 June 2013)
Bob Fletcher Dies at 101; Saved Farms of Interned Japanese-Americans (7 June 2013)
What if people told European history like they told Native American history? (9 May 2013)

Islamic world

Cosmopolitanism on the Move: Port Said around 1900 (20 June 2017)
Birdhouses: Miniature mansions of Istanbul (21 October 2016)
Drawing the prophet: Islam’s hidden history of Muhammad images (10 January 2015)
History of the Ottoman Empire: Ottoman Map of the United States in 1803 (16 October 2014)

Language

Sequoyah and the Almost-Forgotten History of Cherokee Numerals (18 March 2021)
What the English of Shakespeare, Beowulf, and King Arthur actually sounded like (19 March 2019)
A Brief History of British and Irish Languages (1 March 2019)
The Fairytale Language of the Brothers Grimm (2 May 2018): How the Brothers Grimm went hunting for fairytales, accidentally changed the course of historical linguistics, and kickstarted a new field of scholarship in folklore.
(15 October 2017)
The History Of The English Language In One Chart (1 October 2014)
French as a Mother-Tongue in Medieval England (2001)

Sci-tech

From Idea to Icon: 50 Years of the Floppy Disk (19 July 2021)
The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam (13 July 2021)
The Age of Steam: Introduction (18 February 2021)
The Era of Fragmentation, Part 3: The Statists (17 May 2020)
A history of FLICC: the 5 techniques of science denial (24 March 2020)
TROS: How IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers (November 2019)
IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display (November 2019)
Beware of Cranks (8 October 2019) Misguided attempts to solve impossible mathematical problems.
'World's oldest webcam' to be switched off (20 August 2019)
How the Escalator Forever Changed Our Sense of Space (27 June 2019)
Getting to the Bottom of the Flat Earth (13 June 2019)
Cemetery of Soviet computers (31 January 2019)
Extending Interactivity (24 January 2019)
When a cabinet and an automaton love each other very much… (15 January 2019)
Accounting machines, the IBM 1403, and why printers standardized on 132 columns (January 2019)
Cycloramas: The Virtual Reality of the 19th Century (16 December 2018)
Discovering Interactivity (13 December 2018)
The history of navy strength gin (12 November 2018)
Math + The Mechanics (23 August 2018) The story of the Curta Calculator, a stylish portable mechanical calculator that doesn’t use electricity and has a surprisingly dramatic origin story.
Speak & Spell History: Texas Instruments' Greatest Product (19 June 2018)
The Forgotten '80s Home Robots Trend (14 May 2018)
The Transistor, Part 2: Out Of The Crucible (18 February 2018)
The Vintage Beauty Of Soviet Control Rooms 📷 (9 January 2018)
What Have We Learned from the PDP-11? (4 December 2017)
Fly Through 17th Century London (26 October 2017)
Trackball History: Canada's Earliest Gift to Computing (12 October 2017)
The Little-Known Reason Pencils Are Yellow (24 July 2017)
Lost Generation: The Relay Computers (10 May 2017)
Interesting Photos of Computer Stores in the 1970s and 1980s (October 2016)
The Most Famous Image in the Early History of Computing (28 February 2016)
The History of Text Generation (15 December 2015)
How Soviets used IBM Selectric keyloggers to spy on US diplomats (13 October 2015)
Peripherals Behind The Iron Curtain (13 April 2015)
The SECOND Oldest Tube: London's Lost Pneumatic Railway (12 April 2015)
Rome Reborn: Take a Virtual Tour of Ancient Rome, Circa 320 C.E. (20 March 2015)
A Brief History of the ATM (March 2015)
Home Computers Behind The Iron Curtain (15 December 2014)
The story of Grace Hopper (aka Amazing Grace) (9 December 2014)
Xerox Alto Source Code (21 October 2014)
The revenge of QWERTY (25 June 2014)
271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book (May 2014)
Why Didn't People Smile in Old Portraits? (September 2013)
The Writer Automaton, Switzerland (11 July 2013)
Fact of Fiction? The Legend of the QWERTY Keyboard (3 May 2013)
The Data Center Inside a Cold War Nuclear Bunker (2 May 2013)
A Brief History of Book Vending Machines (2013-03-25)
This Was the First Word Processor Ever Used By a Novelist. It Weighed 200 Pounds and Had to Be Brought in Though the Window (March 2013)
A Victorian Era Pocket Watch Spy Camera (23 February 2013)
The Android of Albertus Magnus (19 January 2013)
The Iron Hand of Gotz Von Berlichingen (March 2008)