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Mike discusses his approach to reading and writing history:
Mike Dash from Hire Intelligence on Vimeo.
A Blast From The Past
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.
Award winning blog!
Why previews & links?
As of July 2011, A Blast From the Past has been picked up by the Smithsonian for its new history blog, Past Imperfect. So I now get paid to write – meaning much more content – and sell rights to my material. The deal is that I can post entries here 90 days after they appear at Past Imperfect; while we're waiting, there'll be summaries, and links to the full article on the Smithsonian's site.They said it…
"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-
Recent Posts
- 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
- Blues versus 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
- The king of hard currency
- Three 1950s youths in a medieval plague village
- Moving on up
- “Kipper und wipper”: rogue traders, rogue princes, rogue nuns and the German financial meltdown of 1621-23
- The Old Man of the Lake
- “They don’t like it up ‘em…” Revisiting the sordid deaths of Edmund Ironside, Edward II and James I of Scotland
- Natives of the Red Dragon
- An abandoned lifeboat at world’s end
- Some experiments with severed heads
- Hey, I won…
- A Russian prince on a Wichita road gang
- The Shogun’s reluctant ambassadors
- Truth, beauty and Pancho Villa
- A matter of life and death
- The loneliest shop in the world
- Erotic secrets of Lord Byron’s tomb
- Naked as nature intended? Catherine Crowe in Edinburgh, February 1854
- The Emperor’s electric chair
- The chupatty movement
- The miniature coffins found on Arthur’s Seat
- Lord Dacre’s ghost
- The Monster of Glamis: a first draft
- The Grey Dog of Meoble
- A prison curiosity
- The horrible history of the Ostrich Inn
- Wonderful, terrific and eccentric magazines
- A Scottish spinster at the Battle of Nechtanesmere, 685AD
- Ghosts, witches, vampires, fairies and the law of murder
- Emily Brontë: a fantasy-prone personality
- Curses! Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his astounding death car
- The loss of the Saladin and the search for Walter Powell MP
- The ghost ship and the President
- The strange tale of the Warsaw basilisk
- A word of explanation
Author! Author!
Mike Dash
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