The Habsburg Empire and Italian Nationalism, 1815-66
October 23, 2014
The Habsburg Empire that was finally extinguished in 1918 was made up of numerous nationalities. The national sentiment that developed within the Empire’s various national groupings in the nineteenth century is usually seen as a force for division within that empire, leading first to the independence of Italy between 1859 and 1870, and ultimately to …
Byron in Venice
October 3, 2014
Lord Byron’s reputation as the quintessential romantic hero – brilliant, seductive, cosmopolitan, ironically humorous, and a little dangerous – is well established. In a new article (see link below), David Laven of Nottingham History argues that this persona was very much his own creation. During his stay in Venice between November 1816 and December 1819, …
Rewilding: the Natural History of Wild Boar in Northern Italy
July 17, 2014
Can a landscape be taken “back in time” to a state before agriculture in which natural species of flora and fauna re-emerge spontaneously? This process of “rewilding,” in which animal and plant populations specific to some pre-human past manage themselves through predation and death, has been tried most famously in the unlikely location of the …
Dark Age Climate Change
May 14, 2013
In recent years historians have challenged the idea of the “Dark Ages.” From the Renaissance onwards many writers began to think of this period in European history, roughly from the fall of Rome in the 5th century AD up to the first millennium, as an era of social and cultural disintegration, lawlessness and barbarism. Historians …
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