Those Who Fail to Learn From History, yada yada yada…..

This is, of course, absolute nonsense. Nobody ever learns from history, which is why humanity goes on producing monstrous people who do monstrous things to, mostly, people who don’t deserve it.

It’s hard to look through human history and find an historical event after which humankind has sighed a collective sigh of communal togetherness and agreed “Well…. let’s never do that again, shall we?”

If anything, humanity comes to some sort of uneasy conclusion with itself and then slinks off into the shadows with the tacit agreement that we’ll all see each other again, same time, same place, in a decade or so to do it all over again.

This does, however, have the spin-off effect that humanity generates an awful lot of potentially very interesting history as it saunters along, not learning anything. And I’ve been writing about, teaching and pretending to learn from history, like everyone else, all of my life.

So welcome then to a regular series of potentially interesting articles about human history. We’ll look behind the scenes at some of humankind’s greatest moments, some of their worst, some of the bits you might already know about and some you won’t.

Everything here, whilst professionally researched, will be presented, to the best of my abilities, in a manner that is entertaining, funny, sad and sometimes all of those things at once. Don’t expect a perfectly pitched academic essay, do expect rude words.

I’m a professional historian who has worked for the past 30 years mostly in the area of Roman history and Romano-British history in particular, although the subject matters I write about here are not limited to those subjects. If it’s potentially interesting, and I can make it entertaining and accurate, I will write about it.

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