Vanilla, once an expensive ingredient, usurped rosewater as a pantry staple.
Source: The Downfall of Rosewater, Once America’s Favorite Flavor – Atlas Obscura
Crusades
We must not only fight “Fake News”: we must fight Fake History too. – www.seanmunger.com
The evil twin brother of “fake news” is “fake history”–and it can have a much more lasting and devastating impact.
Source: We must not only fight “Fake News”: we must fight Fake History too. – www.seanmunger.com
The Children’s Crusade | Crusader History
The Children’s Crusade
In the year 1212, tens of thousands children, put down their ploughs, carts, the flocks they tended, claiming it be God’s will, and joined the Children’s Crusade to the Holy Land. In May of 1212, a…
The Familiar and the Fresh | History Today | Richard the Lionhearted
Originally posted on History Today
Richard I of England, called the Lionheart, seized the island of Cyprus in the summer of 1191. Almost 700 years later, in 1878, Cyprus came under English, or British, rule once more. Between 1951 and 1954 the great Byzantinist Steven Runciman published his three-volume narrative, A History of the Crusades, achieving both scholarly acclaim and enormous sales. Following this, Runciman’s old friend, Peter Quennell, a founding editor of History Today, commissioned him to write a profile of Richard for the magazine, then in its fifth year.
Runciman, who had passed a convalescent VE Day on Cyprus relaxing beneath the castle of Kyrenia, had remained well-informed about Cypriot affairs because of his friendship with the Greek poet and diplomat George Seferiades, or Seferis, who was torn between admiration for British culture and unwavering support for Cypriot independence. From Seferis, Runciman would be one of the first Britons to hear of the foundation of the Cypriot terrorist organisation, EOKA, with its solemn oath ‘to free Cyprus from the British yoke’, in the same month that his article appeared in History Today.
Runciman’s profile of Richard is to some degree extracted from The Kingdom of Acre (1954), the third volume of A History of the Crusades, and condenses what was the most familiar and dramatic part of the story to…
The Knights Templar and Hospitaller
THE CRUSADES: A POLITICALLY INCORRECT VIEW
A fascinating perspective on the origins of Muslim aggression.
First Night History 