Author Archives

Award-winning journalist and digital history specialist - creating historical content for the web.

• War turns into Peace – the 1914 Christmas Truce

  By chris holme on December 16, 2012 • ( 3 )

  British propaganda said the First World War would be over by Christmas 1914. It wasn’t. But peace of a different kind broke out on the Western Front when soldiers on both sides found their common humanity instead of the senseless… Read More ›

• Mountain Midwives – Queens of the Wild Frontier (part two)

  By chris holme on December 5, 2012 • ( 10 )

  

  By 1930 the Frontier Nursing Service had shown that childbirth was safer in a remote area of Kentucky than in most of North America – and even much of Europe. But for its charismatic founder Mary Breckinridge, it was the start… Read More ›

• Mountain Midwives – Queens of the Wild Frontier (part one)

  By chris holme on December 5, 2012 • ( 2 )

  

  There’s a reckoning at the end of every war.  Counting the cost of American dead after World War One caused a few to reflect on a much more disturbing statistic: far more American women had died in childbirth than American… Read More ›

• Civil Service at War – the boys who didn’t come back

  By chris holme on November 9, 2012 • ( 0 )

  

  Government publications are more likely move you to sleep rather than to tears. But not Neil MacLennan’s excellent monograph which you can read here. It tells the stories of the 79 civil servants who appear on the First World War memorials… Read More ›

• What Franco wanted us to see……

  By chris holme on September 5, 2012 • ( 13 )

  

  The small town of Belchite in Aragon was reduced to rubble in the course of one of the bloodiest battles of the Spanish Civil War. First taken by Republican troops on September 6 1937 it was won back by the… Read More ›

• Bright spots for digital history

  By chris holme on September 1, 2012 • ( 0 )

  

  (This post appeared first on the allmediascotland site) Amid all the gloom that hangs over traditional news media, there’s one bright spot from an unlikely source. Digging up old stories and putting them on the web is flourishing. The fancier… Read More ›

• Scotland goes tapestry bonkers

  By chris holme on August 10, 2012 • ( 0 )

  Ah, the joys of writing about history on the web … you post something one day and suddenly the world explodes. This is good because it means history is what it should be – challenging and fun. What’s prompted this… Read More ›

• No doves in Dovecot and Bayeux not a tapestry – shock

  By chris holme on August 2, 2012 • ( 2 )

  

  A new exhibition in Edinburgh celebrates the centenary of the Dovecot tapestry weavers. The idea of hanging your history on the wall started well before 1066, but the Bayeux Tapestry not only made the news for England but still fashions… Read More ›

• Barclays withdraws from Society of Friends

  By chris holme on July 4, 2012 • ( 0 )

  Call me an old sentimental type, but I’m really well disposed to Barclays. As a former customer and employee I view their current misfortunes with a degree of sympathy. OK that was a student job at the Aldridge branch in… Read More ›

• CoI RIP, but Joe and Petunia live on

  By chris holme on June 11, 2012 • ( 0 )

  The Central Office of Information (CoI) passed away on March 31 – virtually unnoticed. It had a long and eventful life  – nearly a century if you include its early years as the Ministry of Information.  Thousands of talented journalists,… Read More ›