Should the finger of blame be pointed at the marmot for the global spread of the plague?
When it comes to the Black Death, rats are usually cast as the villains of the piece – and with good reason. After all, it was most likely thanks to them that the plague (
Yersinia pestis) was reintroduced to Europe. Though there has been some debate about how and where the original infection occurred, there is little doubt that Italian traders caught the disease from rat fleas in Black Sea ports before taking it back to Messina aboard Genoese galleys in October 1347. Granted, rats were probably not solely responsible for the speed with which the pestilence spread in the weeks that followed. In 2018, researchers from the universities of Ferrara and Oslo demonstrated that human fleas and lice played at least as important a role in transmission between people. But because rats can tolerate higher concentrations of the bacillus in their blood, and tend to live in close proximity to humans, th
Marmots and the Origins of the Black Death
historytoday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from historytoday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Portrait of the Author as a Historian: Imre Kertész
Struggling to make sense of the Holocaust, one Hungarian novelist came to the startling realisation that the 20th century’s darkest moment might not yield any lessons for posterity.
In April 1945 Imre Kertész was liberated from Buchenwald concentration camp. Not yet 16 years old, he had been transferred there after narrowly escaping death at Auschwitz the previous year and had endured months of cruel mistreatment at the Nazis’ hands.
Though still weak and malnourished, Kertész eagerly made his way back to his native Budapest. But when he arrived, he struggled to adapt to his new life there. Although much was familiar, the city felt alien. The streets were not as he remembered; buildings had been made unrecognisable by shellfire; even the people seemed different. He already knew that his father had died in captivity and he soon found that many of his other relations had disappeared, too. There were still some frie
It took millennia to find out.
‘In the High and Far off Times, the Elephant … had no trunk,’ wrote Rudyard Kipling. ‘He had just a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side.’ But there was one elephant’s child who was more curious than the rest. He wanted to know what the crocodile had for dinner. Since no one would tell him, he went down to the banks of the Limpopo to find out for himself. When he bent down to see, the crocodile bit his nose – and pulled until it was ‘nearly five feet long’. That, Kipling smiled, was how the elephant got its trunk. It’s a silly story, of course; but like all good tales, it contains a kernel of truth – or rather, the husk of a puzzle.
Panettone, Italy’s Favourite Christmas Cake
Rich enough to appeal to lords and dukes, the success of panettone is down to its festive, egalitarian simplicity.
Ever since I was a little boy, I’ve always loved Christmas stories. I can’t count how many times I have read Charles Dickens’
A Christmas Carol and Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Match Girl’. I’m also fond of Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’. But my favourite has to be Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s ‘La gioia e la legge’ (‘Joy and the Law’).Set in Milan in the early 1950s, this unsung classic of Italian literature is the tale of Girolamo, a downtrodden clerk at the Big-Name Production Company. All through December, he has been dreading Christmas. He is behind with the bills and, even with his bonus, he knows he won’t be able to buy his children much food – let alone presents. But he is in luck. Just before the holidays begin, his boss names him
vimarsana © 2020. All Rights Reserved.