A Blast From The Past

by Mike Dash

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Oddities, striking characters and incidents, strange days... this is history with all the interesting bits left in, by the author of Batavia's Graveyard, Tulipomania and The First Family.

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"A Blast From The Past is the most interesting, entertaining, and informative blog on the web. Hats off to you, Mike. Carry on."
John Adcock, Yesterday's Papers

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Recent posts

The Sin-Eaters (a preview)
The Twopenny Hangover
Ask Mike
Dreamtime voyagers: Aboriginal Australians in early modern Makassar
The bodies in the bogs
King, magician, general … slave: Eunus and the First Servile War against Rome
Sorcerers and soulstealers: hair-cutting panics in old China
The Breton Bluebeard
The longest prison sentences ever served: redux
Final straggler: the Japanese soldier who outlasted Hiroo Onoda
Aqua Tofana: slow-poisoning and husband-killing in 17th century Italy
Slavery on the Steppes: Finnish children in the slave markets of medieval Crimea
America’s first highjacking
Queen Victoria’s £5: the strange tale of Turkish aid to Ireland during the Great Famine
The Fayum mummy portraits
A little bit of background: The crucifixion of Prince Klaas
The last secret of the H.L. Hunley
A little bit of background: Envoi
Stoney Jack and the Cheapside Hoard
Friedrich Engels’ Irish muse
Islam’s medieval underworld
The octogenarian who took on the shoguns
The child murder that gave voodoo its bad name
The blood eagle
The secret plot to rescue Napoleon by submarine
In the cave of the witches
Lost in the Taiga
“My little soldier”
The crucifixion of Prince Klaas: Antigua’s disputed slave rebellion of 1736
White gold: how salt made and unmade the Turks and Caicos Islands
Fishmonger’s Hall: how William Crockford beggared the British aristocracy
A visit to the underworld: the unsolved mystery of the tunnels at Baia
The Swedish Meteor: the blazing career and mysterious death of Charles XII
Walking to utopia
The demonization of Empress Wu
The worst job there has ever been
The Villisca Axe Murders 100 years on
Run out of town on an ass: how Queen Victoria (allegedly) struck Bolivia off the map
Hitler and hot jazz
Khrushchev in water wings: on Mao, humiliation, and the origins of the Sino-Soviet split
Closing the pigeon gap
Murder in the Potala
On heroic self-sacrifice
The Blues versus the Greens: how circus factions nearly brought down the Byzantine Empire
Colonel Parker: murderer?
The mysterious Mr. Zedzed, the wickedest man in the world
The Monster of Glamis
Nice things to say about Attila the Hun
Alone against Antarctica
The most terrible tunnel
The Christmas Truce
The great tea race
China’s socialist emperor
On hidden history
Santa Claus Smith
The mystery of the five wounds
History heroes: Marc Bloch
William Shakespeare: gangster
“Above the Senior Wrangler”
An ice cream war
The wizard of Mauritius
In search of Queen Victoria’s voice
Amazons: inside the King of Dahomey’s all-woman army
Gavrilo Princip’s sandwich
Pablo Fanque’s fair
Inside the Great Pyramid
One man against tyranny: Georg Elser’s lone attempt to blow up Hitler
“Tamám Shud”
The last of the Cornish packmen

Most popular right now

The Twopenny Hangover
Aqua Tofana: slow-poisoning and husband-killing in 17th century Italy
Slavery on the Steppes: Finnish children in the slave markets of medieval Crimea
An abandoned lifeboat at world's end
Some experiments with severed heads
In the cave of the witches

Blog philosophy

"You can write something and every sentence in it will be a fact, you can pile up facts, but it won't be true. Inside a fact is another fact, and inside that is another fact. You've got to get the true facts. When I got there, I said to myself, 'I don't give a damn what happens, I am going to take my time.'"
Joseph Mitchell

Envoi

"I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library."
Jorge Luis Borges, Poem of the Gifts.

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