The Dispatch Edition #1 – Shipwrecks, The Armistice & Haunted Museums

Week beginning November 18, 2024

Nov 21, 2024

Welcome to The Dispatch

Hello,

Jordan here. I’m the Creative Director at Unseen Histories and if you’re reading this, it’s because you signed up for a newsletter through our website unseenhistories.com (or our previous incarnation at dynamichrome.com).

That newsletter is now The Dispatch, our free email roundup of long-form pieces, previews, interviews, pictures and more published on Unseen Histories; curated in one place for you to read at your leisure.

For compliancy, if you don’t wish to hear from us again, you can find an unsubscribe link at the bottom every email, but I hope you’ll find The Dispatch a welcome addition to your inbox – we’ve got a fantastic first edition below.

– Jordan

Headlines

The latest from Unseen Histories –

Etching depicts a ship torn against rocks in a gale and sinking.

The Wreck of the Royal Charter

Peter Moore takes us back to 1859 when hundreds of people were lost in a disastrous shipwreck.

Jordan’s pick:
In our continuing series First Draft, Unseen Histories’ editor Peter Moore has raided the newspaper archives to revisit significant events of their day, and how the news was broken. The sinking of the Royal Charter was a tragedy only eclipsed by the Titanic five decades later; and, for the first time, Unseen Histories traces the actual route taken by the ship before its eventual doom off the coast of Anglesey.

Painting from 1812 illustrates the Battle of Chiclana in Spain, showing the British army division in red fighting agains the French in blue.

The 1812 Constitution of Cádiz

Helen Crisp and Jules Stewart take us back to a revolutionary moment in European history.

Painting from 1847 depicts three women and a child of the Quapaw tribe walking along a bayou. Lead figure holds a musket.

Winner of the Cundill History Prize

Native Nations Historian Kathleen DuVal is awarded one of the most prestigious history prizes.

Books

Our selection of anticipated new history books released over the month ahead –

Graphic shows strips of various book covers arranged in a single, rainbow composition.

New History Books for November 2024

From South America to Castile, Handel to Wallis Simpson.

Image shows the front cover to Her Lotus Year, by Paul French. Black and gold border framing a portrait of Wallis Simpson, a white woman in Chinese dress posing next to a statue. Text at the top reads, ‘China, the Roaring Twenties and the making of Wallis Simpson.

Jordan’s pick: Her Lotus Year by Paul French (Elliott & Thompson Limited, 2024)
Sino scholar Paul French returns with an account of a year in the early life of Wallis Simpson (née Bessie Wallis Warfield), the American socialite vilified by the British press as the cause of King Edward VIII’s abdication of the throne in 1936. Her Lotus Year examines the life of Simpson in the previous decade, then wed to her second husband Ernest Simpson during his posting in Hong Kong, before fleeing to Shanghai (and later, Peking) to escape his alcoholism. Simpson’s privileged status as a ‘Navy wife’ allowed her to courier sensitive documents for the US Foreign Service across Communist China in a time when bandits ripped up telegraph poles and sabotaged railway tracks.

Buy it on Bookshop.org

You can support Unseen Histories by purchasing the book via the link, from which we will receive a small commission. Thank you for your support.

Back-page

Stories from the Unseen Histories’ archives –

Colour photograph shows the stone Arch of Cabanes in Valencia. Brown grass and a blue sky.

Stones of Empire

Catherine Fletcher reflects upon travellers' tales and political spaces as she follows Europe's Roman roads.

Painting from 1785 depicts Sarah Siddons, a white woman wearing a black hat and an elaborate blue dress. Red backdrop.

The most famous actress in the Georgian world

On her retirement the television producer Jo Willett set out to write a biography of Sarah Siddons.

Etching depicts The British Museum, London: a gallery of Greek, Roman and Egyptian sculptures, with visitors admiring a copyist's work, 1800s.

Interview: Is the British Museum Haunted?

Writer Noah Angell on the ghosts of the British Museum.

Jordan’s pick:
I actually met Noah nearly a decade ago browsing Eventbrite for things to do. Among the MLM seminars in hotel conference rooms across London, I saw an entry for a Ghost Tour of the British Museum. I signed up (of course) and been on the tour more than once, since. In the years since we became friends, I was delighted to learn that Ghost Tours of the British Museum had morphed into Ghosts of the British Museum: A True Story of Colonial Loot and Restless Objects (Hachette, 2024), a book described by New York Times bestselling author Dr Lindsey Fitzharris as a 'heady cocktail of history and folklore that leaves a haunting aftertaste.'

Buy it on Bookshop.org

You can support Unseen Histories by purchasing the book via the link, from which we will receive a small commission. Thank you for your support.

Viewfinder

Our picks from the public archives, remastered –

Colorized photograph from 1918 shows a group of wounded American soldiers posing on Parliament Square in London on an overcast November day. An American flag is draped over the red bus behind them. Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament in the background.

Parliament Square, November 1918

The Armistice: a strange and uncertain peace

Jordan’s pick:
This colorization is based on a glass plate gifted by the American Red Cross, depicting recovering U.S. soldiers sightseeing at Armistice. The group is posing in front of a London General Omnibus Company B-Type bus on the western side of Parliament Square: with Westminster Hall, the Palace of Westminster and Big Ben behind them. This shot in particular was just spectacular and I knew I had to do it. It happily coincided with filming for France’s national television station TF1, so we shot the segment on location between groups of tourists. The view remains largely unchanged.

Buy an Art Print

You can support Unseen Histories by purchasing an Archival Giclée Art Print via our webstore. Thank you for your support.

A restored, high resolution version of the above image can also be found on our Unsplash account, which can be downloaded and shared, for free.

Op-ed

More from around the web –

“Ormond and Patterson said that while they had known about the letter for “many years,” confirming that the flowers had once been a hue of purple required removing the popular work from public display.”

– Hyperallergic, Van Gogh’s “Irises” Were Never Supposed to Be Blue

Their plan had been to break Warwick’s chains, and when the king was away from London, to escape the Tower, board a ship, and take the earl across the sea. Cleymond was key to spreading the plot, as he had some degree of movement in the Tower and was able to exchange details between Warbeck and Warwick.

– Nathen Amin, The Tragic Demise of Edward of Warwick

“Pierri had an astounding faculty for making the public believe what he said and caused to be written,” wrote a Sporting Life correspondent in their obituary for “one of the greatest personalities”, the man “who created the professional wrestling boom”, “the hippodromer”, who “achieved many triumphs”. The fellow “did more harm to genuine wrestling in this country than any man who ever lived”.

– Sarah Elizabeth Cox, Miss May, Maybe? Pinning Down Juno, The 6ft 2 Lady Wrestler

“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”

― Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (R. and J. Dodsley, W. Johnston, 1759)

Thanks for reading The Dispatch. Edition #2 will be published week beginning December 2, 2024. You can read all editions in our archive.

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