Zoopedia: Shoebill

This week’s animal is a bird that my mum has become enamoured with since she first learnt about it and it is easy to see why. Looking almost prehistoric with an ability to stay almost deathly the shoebill is a strange but fascinating bird too weird to make up. Taxonomy and Evolution It is unsurprising

Zoopedia: Ostriches

The tallest and largest birds in the world this week we are looking at ostriches. Originally thought to be just one species, since 2014 one of the subspecies was reclassified as a separate species now known as the Somali ostrich. We’ll be looking at both species today, and will look at how these giant birds

Zoopedia: Wildebeest

Across the savannahs of eastern and southern Africa one of the most common sights is that of the wildebeest. Famously wildebeest in their hundreds of thousands join with zebra and other antelope in the Great Migration going from the Ngorongoro to the Serengeti and then to the Maasai Mara. In 2017 I was very fortunate

The Making of Today: Slavery, Ghana, and the Royal African Company, April-June 1752

In 1750 the British parliament passed an act which would replace the Royal African Company with the African Company of Merchants. This formally happened in 1752, and I could not find the actual date of when this happened. I found a ledger detailing the African Company of Merchants’s investors from Liverpool which dated from June

The Making of Today: Introduction and the World in 1750

Welcome to the first post for The Making of Today! I specialise in Modern and Contemporary history, so I have wanting for a while to cover world history over this period in the same vein of the great YouTube channels The Great War, Timeghost History, and World War Two. Here we’ll cover the society, economy,

Prisons in Colonial Africa: From the margins of colonial history

This article was first published by Retrospect Journal Prison-abolitionist Angela Davis once discussed how, ‘the prison is considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives’, which makes it simultaneously ‘present in our lives’ and ‘absent from our lives’. Those incarcerated become part of the ‘margins’ of society – a warning about going against

2020 and History

2020 has been an eventful year, and one with many connections to the past. Whether through anniversaries, or events replicating (or outright repeating) themselves we’re going to have a glance at some of the events which have happened over 2020. The Worst Year Ever? For fairly understandable reasons, 2020 has been seen as one of

World History: Decolonisation

Two overarching themes characterised post-war twentieth century: the Cold War and decolonisation. These two events deeply intersected, so it is almost impossible to separate them. Today we’re looking at the process of decolonisation, and the emergence of post-colonial states with all the difficulties which comes with it. Across Africa, Asia, and the Americas new movements

1990s Africa and the Limits of Community

This was first published by Retrospect Journal in their Autumn/Winter 2017 issue, Individuals and Communities. This can be found here. A pro-Biafra protester in the 2000s During the 1990s national and community identities drastically shifted. National resurgence was shown in a variety of ways ranging from the peaceful referendums on Quebec’s independence and the creation of

World History: Colonialism and Imperialism

One of the most influential aspect of history which shaped the present day was the rise of European, and later American and Japanese, empires in Africa and Asia. We briefly looked at colonialism when we discussed Britain in India and the rise of modern capitalism, but today, we will look at this in greater detail – especially the