History Fiend

The Wars of the Roses were the civil wars fought in England and Wales between the Yorkist and Lancastrian dynasties between 1455 and 1485. Though historians can’t agree on precisely when and where the conflicts concluded, the general consensus is that the Wars of the Roses ended with the battle of Bosworth in 1485, when Henry Tudor (the future Henry VII, the first Tudor king) defeated and killed Richard III... But, argues historian Matthew Lewis, the roots of these dynastic civil wars went deeper and the branches reached further than this 30-year timeframe suggests. Here, writing for  History Extra , Lewis shares 12 lesser-known facts about the Wars of the Roses… 1 Jack Cade’s rebellion rocked the Lancastrians In July 1450, a mysterious man known as Jack Cade led a huge force of common men from Kent into London to protest against the ailing government of  the Lancastrian king Henry VI.  This episode is generally regarded as being outside the bounds of the War...

Perhaps the greatest disaster to ever befall humanity, the pandemic of 1918 is strangely overlooked. Demonstration at the Red Cross Emergency Ambulance Station in Washington, D.C., during the influenza pandemic of 1918 The history of humanity is punctuated with purges. Large numbers of people have died in short periods of time as a result of wars, disease and natural disasters. Once these have passed, it falls to the survivors to count the dead. This is never easy, but it is harder for some kinds of disaster than for others. It may be hardest of all for a pandemic, as Ole Benedictow acknowledged in his 2005 article,  The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe Ever . Natural disasters tend to have a geographical focus and, as in most wars in history, the bulk of the action takes place in circumscribed ‘theatres’. By contrast, in a pandemic – an epidemic that encompasses several countries or continents – those who die do so over a large are...