In 1831 a terrifying new epidemic arrived in London, bringing with it fear and panic—and a sense of urgency about the city's sanitation problems. In the 1700s, Great Britain began transforming into an industrialised nation. By the 1800s, London was the largest city in the world as a result of the social changes brought about by industrialisation, such as mass migration from the countryside to the town. But London was a city overwhelmed by the waste products of its ever-growing population, the majority of whom lived in the squalor of overcrowded slums. Human waste piled up in courtyards and overflowed from basement cesspits into the gutters and waterways. Wellcome Collection (CC BY) Image source for Illustration of London slum with subtitle 'A court for King Cholera' In such conditions diseases were inevitable. Outbreaks of diseases such as typhoid and scarlet fever were common, but the arrival of cholera led to new investigation into sanitation and
Richard J Evans, a leading historian on Nazi Germany, explains why Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party were able to cement control over Germany in 1933… Q: What were Hitler’s motivations? And is it true that he was a history buff? A: Adolf Hitler wasn’t really a history buff. He didn’t care very much about history, because his vision was a racist one in which the essential character of races, such as the Germans or Aryans or the Jews or the Slavs, were essentially unchanging over time. He drew his ideas from a variety of sources: from a version of Social Darwinism that saw society and international relations as a sort of struggle of races for the survival of the fittest; from Arthur de Gobineau, a French theorist who invented the pseudoscientific idea of race theory; from Russian émigrés from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, who brought with them the idea that Bolshevism and communism were creations of the Jewish race; from a certain amount of what’s called ‘geopolitic