Anglotopia

Great Events in Colonial American History – British Cultural Influence Series

Colonial Americans were voracious readers of English literature. Despite the challenges of distance, cost, and limited supply, the colonists maintained a literary culture that was thoroughly English in its sources and aspirations. The books that lined colonial she...

Some of these letters were written by sailors to the people they’d left at home. Others were merchants’ reports, or notes between relatives on opposite sides of a war. They never arrived. The ships carrying them were captured at sea by the Royal Navy and British privateers, and their papers were bundled up as evidence for the courts. They have sat in British government archi...

There is a particular kind of email that changes the trajectory of a life. It arrives, usually in late November or early December, and it tells the recipient that they have been selected as a Rhodes Scholar, or a Marshall Scholar, or a Gates Cambridge Scholar. In that moment, everything shifts. Tuition, living costs, travel expenses — all of it is suddenly covered. A place at...

In the midst of World War Two, Nazi Germany successfully lulled the Allied forces into a false sense of security and rapidly captured vital parts of France, encircling the Allied forces. With nowhere to go, and their best forces predisposed, the Germans pushed the Allied forces back to the northern coastline of France.

Desperate to avoid mass casualties, the commander ...

This is Episode 4 of a special six-part Jane Austen series, sponsored throughout by Strictly Jane Austen.

We tend to imagine great writers alone — a solitary genius at a small writing desk, which in Jane Austen’s case is quite literally true; you can still see the little twelve-sided walnut table at Chawton. But nobody becomes Jane Austen alone, an...