Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Beach has not offered up a rogue researcher for some time: the last was mummy maker, Bob Brier, a year ago. Rogue researchers, for the uninitiated are those men and women, with doctorates, who do things that others in their discipline might consider eccentric. To call someone a ‘rogue researchers’ is a sign of the […]

There is a lovely story from a successful scholarship school in New York. When the head was asked how he had managed to keep standards so high at his institution, when other nearby schools had lost their edge, he replied that it was simple. Every time a new instruction from the Department of Educaton or […]

The majority of readers of this blog are from North America and so they might not be aware that historians in Britain are presently fighting each other. The question that is causing all the raucous is how teens should be taught about history: the battlefield is British history but there is clearly here a much […]

What makes a good historian? Beachcombing was wondering about this as part of his preparations for the new term, now just a couple of weeks away. There is, of course, a long shopping list. But when Beach stands in front of his students on the first day of class he is always looking for two […]