Page 95 - All About History - Issue 54-17
P. 95

History Answers





          What was
          England

          called in
          Arthurian
          times?

          Putra Nathanson
          King Arthur is a legendary figure and
          no one has found any hard evidence
          that he actually existed as a ruler.
          However, the Historia Brittonum,
          written some time in the 11th century
          and attributed to Nennius, places
          him in the late 5th or early 6th
          century. This is after the Angles had
          arrived in Britain, but the term ‘Engla
          londe’ – translating to ‘Land of the
          Angles’ – doesn’t appear until Bede’s
          Ecclesiastical History Of The English
          People in the 9th century. Before
          then, any monarch claiming to have
          unified the various smaller kingdoms
          would have referred to the land
          collectively in the same way
          that the Romans had before him:
          ‘the Britains’.
           Even if Arthur existed, he certainly
           didn’t wear the armour shown in
           this 14th century tapestry


                                                                Is it true that no two democracies
                                                                have ever declared war on
                                                                each other?

                                                                Jules Vinter
                                                                It’s generally true, but that’s
                                                                mostly just a consequence
                                                                of the fact that states are less
                                                                likely to be democratic the
                                                                further back you look through
                                                                history. There are also some
                                                                counterexamples. For
                                                                example, the 1999 Kargil
                                                                War was fought between
                                                                India and Pakistan,
                                                                both of which were
                                                                democracies at the time.
                                                                Ecuador also declared   Meet Gunnhild, a Viking witch
                                                                war on Peru in 1941 and   queen slandered by the Sagas
          Indian army soldiers fire                             again in 1995, when both
          towards the Pakistan border                           were democratic.    historyanswers.co.uk
          near Kargil in Kashmir




         1944                            1950                   1960                                   1969

         O  Operation Valkyrie fails     O   Soviet spy found guilty   O  First female prime minister   O  The Eagle lands on the moon
           German Army officer Claus       American laboratory chemist   After the Prime Minister of Ceylon   After the landing computer
           von Stauffenberg plants a       Harry Gold pleads guilty to   (now Sri Lanka) is assassinated by a   begins rebooting itself
           bomb next to Hitler at a        spying for the Soviet Union and   Buddhist monk, his wife, Sirimavo   repeatedly due to a software
           field HQ as part of Operation   passing information about the   Bandaranaike, enters politics and   error, Neil Armstrong takes over
           Valkyrie. The bomb explodes,    US Manhattan Project to build   becomes the world’s first elected   manual control and touches
           but Hitler is partly shielded   an atomic bomb. He is later   female head of government as     down with just 25 seconds of
           by a table leg and survives.    sentenced to 30 years in prison.  prime minister herself.      fuel remaining.      © Getty Images

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