History Today Reviews Feed

• National Gallery: Uganda

  An ethnically diverse country of kingdoms. 

• The Map: The Moon, 1647

  The Map: The Moon, 1647

  By Kate Wiles

  A 17th century map by the founder of lunar topography Johananes Hevelius.

  Johannes Hevelius (1611-87) followed in his father’s footsteps as a brewer, while also acting as a councillor and the mayor of his hometown, Danzig (Gdańsk). Indulging his interest in astronomy, learnt under the tutelage of the astronomer Peter Krüger, in 1641 he built an observatory on the roof of his house, called Sternenburg: ‘Star Castle’.He ground his own lenses and built telescopes for it, including one 46m (150ft)-long Keplerian telescope with a wood and wire tube.He published his results in Selenographia (1647), the first selenographical atlas – a work dedicated entirely to the moon – with 111 plates and engravings, which he had drawn and engraved himself. These engravings showed the moon in every phase and included one composite map of all the features of the moon’s surface shown as if lit from the same direction. This became the model for all later lunar maps. His were the most accurate surveys of the moon to date and his work was key to our understanding of libration and longitude. Today he is remembered as the founder of lunar topography. A large crater on the edge of the Ocean of Storms bears his name.Kate Wiles
• On the Spot: Caroline Dodds Pennock

  On the Spot: Caroline Dodds Pennock

  By History Today

  We ask leading historians 20 questions on why their research matters, one book everyone should read and their views on the Tudors...

  [[{"fid":"30901","view_mode":"float_right","fields":{"format":"float_right","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Caroline Dodds Pennock"},"type":"media","link_text":null,"attributes":{"title":"Caroline Dodds Pennock","class":"media-element file-float-right"}}]]Why are you an Aztec historian? I had a childhood fascination with the Aztecs and I just never grew out of it.What’s the most important lesson history has taught you?That people can hold very different values, and do things which may seem incomprehensible, but still, in many ways, be just like us.Which history book has had the greatest influence on you?Timothy Brook’s Vermeer’s Hat is the recent book I most wish I’d written.What book in your field should everyone read?Aztecs: An Interpretation, by Inga Clendinnen.Which moment would you most like to go back to? I’d love to know how and when Cortés managed to capture Moctezuma.Which historian has had the greatest influence on you?It’s got to be Inga Clendinnen again. She had a great gift for hearing the silent voices of history.Which person in history would you most like to have met?Pocahontas.How many languages do you speak?Okay Spanish, rusty German, dodgy French. I read all of them much better (plus some Nahuatl and Latin). What’s the point of counterfactualism?To annoy historians.What’s the most exciting field in history today?I would say this, because it is my current research, but there is amazing work going on about Native American travellers. It is totally changing the way we think about indigenous people.What historical topic have you changed your mind on?How we can use oral history.Which genre of history do you like least?Economic history isn’t really my cup of tea.Is there an important historical text you have not read?Loads! But one particularly shameful gap is Fukuyama’s The End of History.What’s your favourite archive?Not an archive, a source: the Florentine Codex.What’s the best museum?For my field, the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Otherwise, the Philadelphia Museum of Art.Tudors or Stuarts?Neither.Normans or Anglo-Saxons?Anglo-Saxons.Rome or Athens?Rome.Cromwell or Charles I?Neither have much to recommend them, but I suppose I’d better say Cromwell, since I was a fellow at the college where his head is buried!Braudel or Gibbon?Braudel.Caroline Dodds Pennock is Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture (Palgrave, 2008).
• CSI: China

  The 19th and 20th centuries saw a revolution in Chinese forensic science, when traditional techniques were replaced by new methods from the West. Today, the world confronts another moment of transformation in forensic science.
   

• Famine and Scarcity in Late Medieval and Early Modern England: The Regulation of Grain Marketing, 1256-1631

  Famine years – when the grain harvest failed and hunger stalked the land – were an all-too-frequent event in England before the nineteenth-century...