For the last few years, when the vacation and holiday seasons come around and the news stories start to dry up, I've looked back in time to previous centuries to find something newsworthy. Today, please join me on a whistle stop tour 400 years back in time to the year 1609 ....

The Renaissance is in full swing. While Galileo demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers and Cornelius Drebbel invents the thermostat, Johannes Kepler is busy publishing his first two laws of planetary motion. Meanwhile Henry Hudson is off adventuring, becoming the first European to see Delaware Bay and the Hudson River. Not far away, seven ships arrive at the Jamestown colony reporting the sad demise of their flagship, the Sea Venture, wrecked off the coast of the uninhabited island of Bermuda. The survivors, including writer William Strachey, eventually reach Virginia ten months later in two small ships they built while marooned on the island. Strachey's account of the wreck is believed to be the inspiration for Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610-11).

Talking of Shakespeare, the bard is in good voice in 1609, publishing two books of poetry: The Sonnets (mostly written before 1600) and A Lover's Complaint; and two plays: Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Troilus and Cressida. His contemporaries, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson, are also busy publishing their own works. Elsewhere, in Naples, the outlawed (for killing a man in a brawl) painter, Michelangelo Merisi da Carravagio, completes at least four great works including The Raising of Lazarus, and Salome With The Head of John The Baptist. Carravagio dies the following year but his work will inspire some of the next generation of painters including Rubens and Rembrandt.

While Europe savors its first sips of tea courtesy of the Dutch East India Company, and the people of Strasbourg (Alsace) and Augsburg (Bavaria) enjoy the first regularly published newspapers in Europe, the Spanish Inquisition moves into high gear with the Basque witch trials. Meanwhile, somewhere in England, teenage songwriter Thomas Ravenscroft publishes a little ditty that, four hundred years later, I would hazard to guess, can be recited in its modern form by more people than any of Shakespeare's verses!

Three Blinde Mice,
Three Blinde Mice,
Dame Iulian,
Dame Iulian,
the Miller and his merry olde Wife,
shee scrapte her tripe licke thou the knife

Davina Morgan-Witts - BookBrowse Editor

More "This Year in History"

Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

Each year, as the holiday season comes around and news becomes thin on the ground, we look back into history for a snapshot of the news in centuries past .....

Literary highlights (from a modern perspective) published in 1908, one hundred years ago, include The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame; War of the Classes and The Iron Heel by Jack London; Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery; The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck by Beatrix Potter; A Modern Utopia and The War in the Air by H G Wells; My Double Life by Sarah Bernhardt; The Man Who Was Thursday and All Things Considered by G K Chesterton;  A Room With a View by E M Forster; Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum; and the births of Ian Fleming and Louis L'Amour.  The Nobel Prize for Literature was won by German philosopher Rudolf Christoph Eucken.

Meanwhile, on the wider stage:

In the USA, a ball signifying New Year's Day dropped in Times Square for the first time; Harvard University established the Harvard Business School; Robert Perry set off for the North Pole; Henry Ford produced his first Model T automobile; the Office of the Chief Examiner (forerunner to the FBI) was established; and Mother's Day was observed for the first time in a Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia. Not to be confused with Mothering Sunday in the UK, Mother's Day was intended as day of memorial and a call to unite women against war. The first service in 1908, and the 1914 Presidential proclamation, were the result of social activist Julia Ward Howe's 1870 Mother's Day Proclamation.

In Europe: A long-distance radio message was sent from the Eiffel Tower for the first time; Frenchman Henri Farman piloted the first passenger flight; Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became the first woman in England to be elected mayor; British suffragettes began a campaign for female suffrage; Englishman Robert Baden-Powell began the Boy Scout movement; the Young Turk Revolution began in the Ottoman Empire; and the Bosnian Crisis began after the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Elsewhere, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were reported killed in Bolivia; Andrew Fisher became 5th Prime Minister of Australia; Emperor Pu Yi ascended the Chinese throne at age 2; and Leopold II of Belgium was forced to make reforms in the Congo, his personal colony.

Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

Each year, as the holiday season comes around and news becomes thin on the ground, we look back into history for a snapshot of the news in centuries past. This time we travel to 1808:

In the USA, the Theatre St Philip opened in New Orleans.  In Germany, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published the first part of Faust. In Britain, the first Royal Opera House in Covent Garden was destroyed by fire and Sir Walter Scott published Marmion, an epic poem about the Battle of Flodden Field.  In France, Francois Marie Charles Fourier (credited by modern scholars with originating the word feminisme) argued in his Theory of the Four Movements that the extension of the liberty of women was the general principle of all social progress, though he disdained 'equal rights'. Followers of Fourier would go on to establish about 30 socialist colonies based on his principles in various parts of the USA.

Meanwhile, on the wider stage: The US Congress prohibited the importation of slaves; Sierra Leone became a British colony; the Spanish rose up against the French occupation in Madrid; Napoleon annexed Tuscany; James Madison was elected president of the USA, and a future US president, Andrew Johnson, was born.

Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

Each year, as the holiday season comes around and news becomes thin on the ground, we look back into history for a snapshot of the news in centuries past .....

1708 was a rather dull year for literature, at least from the perspective of modern-day readers looking for works by authors still well known today, but it was an important year for three historians who used their retirement to produce notable works:

The first volume of Theologian Joseph Bingham's 10 volume Antiquities of the Christian Church was published; on its completion in 1722 it provided an exhaustive and methodical account of the antiquities of the Christian Church.

Theater critic and theologian Jeremy Collier published the first volume of his Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain - which, while controversial, became widely used.

Theater prompter John Downes published his history of the Restoration stage, Roscius Anglicanus, which is still considered a valuable resource.

Meanwhile, on the wider stage, Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs, sat on the throne of the newly formed Great Britain (England and Scotland having been joined by the Acts of Union the previous year); the allies, led by John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, won a decisive victory in the War of the Spanish Succession at the Battle of Oudenaarde (in what is now Belgium); Johann Sebastian Bach was appointed a chamber musician and organist at the German court; and a native American attack in Massachusetts killed 16 settlers.

This year in history for '08 can be found by clicking the tag at the top of this entry. This year in history for '07 is stored in BookBrowse's "News" section. For example, 1707.

Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

Each year, as the holiday season comes around and the news stories start to dry up, we look back into history for a snapshot of the news in centuries past. This year, we start in 1608 ....

While the early settlers at Jamestown struggled for survival, London was a hive of dramatic endeavor:

Ben Jonson's The Masque of Beauty and The Hue and Cry After Cupid were both published and performed for the first time. Thomas Heywood published The Rape of Lucrece; Thomas Middleton published The Family of Love, A Mad World, My Masters and A Trick to Catch the Old One; and William Shakespeare published King Lear - to name but a few.

Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer, Thomas Dekker, was also in fine voice, publishing two tracts: The Dead Term and The Bellman of London; and considering that he claimed credit for 240 plays during his 60-year lifetime, it seems likely that he turned out a few plays as well.

Although not notable until many years after his birth, prose writer and poet John Milton, best known for Paradise Lost, was born at the close of the year in December 1608.

Previous year's of "This Year in History" can be found in BookBrowse's News section, e.g. 1907.