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  • Daily History Picture: Rat Catcher November 24, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures
    Daily History Picture: Rat Catcher

    With a gun? London? Anon X writes in: this is not 1930, its rather 1960, and the city is Bern, Switzerland. The street is called “Kreuzgasse“…

    Wesley Ghost #9: Fairy, Witch or Demon? November 24, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Wesley Ghost #9: Fairy, Witch or Demon?

    In previous posts Jeffrey has been explained by this blogger as a product of life in a strictly regulated religious setting, where adolescent girls were yoked to Samuel Wesley’s strict high Anglican ideals. There is a very good chance that this is the key to understanding the poltergeist events and that some sort of poltergeist […]

    Daily History Picture: Prohibition Beauties November 23, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures
    Daily History Picture: Prohibition Beauties

    This has to be a put up? 30 Dec 2015: Nathaniel: According to the this site, the “Lips That Touch Liquor…” photo is “a still from an [Thomas] Edison motion picture produced around 1910”. See the comment posted by Andrea Grimes about halfway down the linked page: So no, apparently not a photo of an actual […]

    Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft November 23, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Persuasions of the Witch's Craft

    ***Thanks to Stephen D for bringing this book to my attention*** Most anthropologists choose an exotic destination and then head off to live with the Kwang or the Baiga for a couple of years, subsequently using the material they gather there for their doctorates. In the 1980s Tanya Marie Luhrmann, instead, headed from Cambridge in […]

    Mine Disaster Premonitions at Morfa November 22, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Mine Disaster Premonitions at Morfa

    10 March 1890 one of the worst mining accidents in British history* took place in Morfa in South Wales. 87 miners were killed. A gas explosion had been set off, probably by an unfastened lamp. Interestingly the local community had had forebodings before the explosion. This article came out almost two months later in the […]

    New History Books: Islamic Paradise and Hell November 21, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures
    New History Books: Islamic Paradise and Hell

    Chrisian Lange, Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions Another one I’ve been looking forward to: parallels between Christian and Islamic hells are fascinating…

    Dealing with Double Agents The British Way November 21, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Dealing with Double Agents The British Way

    From the 1920s to the 1940s Britain had perhaps the best spy agencies in the world: this was particularly true of its foreign spy agency, SIS or MI6. Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and even John Le Carré’s fiction carry the distilled essence (albeit sometimes shifted to later times) of British triumph against Nazi Germany, Imperial […]

    New History Books: Naked in the Woods November 20, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures
    New History Books: Naked in the Woods

    Grundstein, Naked in the Woods Ah, Hippies. Can’t wait for this one…

    Daily History Picture: Snowball Fight Princeton November 20, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures
    Daily History Picture: Snowball Fight Princeton

    Princeton students after a snowball fight: thanks to Wade for this many months ago. 22 Nov 2015: Anon X writes in with this tab that shows that snowball fights did take place. He also points out though that there are many on the net who claim that this was taken after a boxing match. Any […]

    Hating Medieval Cats #4: Waldensian Cats November 20, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval
    Hating Medieval Cats #4: Waldensian Cats

    Another in our description of the cult of hate for medieval cats. The following text is anonymous and appeared in a fourteenth-century hand in MS Cotton Julius D, xi, fol. 84 r. It is short and it entitled Errores Valdensium, the Errors of the Waldensians. The Waldensians, for the uninitiated were a Christian sect that […]

    Daily History Picture: Haile and Anne November 19, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures
    Daily History Picture: Haile and Anne

    Princess Anne (looking beautiful) talking to an ancient Haile Selassie.

    Review: A Trojan Feast November 19, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    Review: A Trojan Feast

    Now here’s an easy question on mythology. Tomorrow at noon you will be taken off to the infernal regions by an underworld spirit. You have twenty four hours to prep from the seventy or eighty volumes of mythology on your shelves. What one lesson do you bring away from your reading before you are taken below? It’s […]

    Daily History Picture: Man Hits Woman (Medieval Style) November 18, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures
    Daily History Picture: Man Hits Woman (Medieval Style)

    Bayeux tapestry is often surprisingly ‘raw’: here a woman is hit by a priest? Typhon to the rescue, 22 nov 2015, After seeing the picture I would have made an uneducated guess, that maybe the woman is a heathen priestess and thus gets slapped by a priest. The structure she is standing in symbolizing some sort […]

    The Wesley Ghost #8: Jeffrey Unmasked November 18, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    The Wesley Ghost #8: Jeffrey Unmasked

    The best candidate for the haunting though has to be Emilia Wesley (aka Emily). What does this attribution rely upon? Well, let’s start with some minor suggestive points. First, she was fourteen at the time of the haunting, a classic poltergeist age. Second, in one of the letters Emily claimed that she gave the polt the […]

    Daily History Picture: Polish Patriot 1920 November 17, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures
    Daily History Picture: Polish Patriot 1920

    Polish soldiers at the front in 1920 as the Red Army approaches