The above image is of fossilised snake remains in sedimentary rock laid-down well over 100 million years ago. However it seems that after the last Great Extinction of geological time, which caused the demise of the dinosaur dominated world, about 58 million years ago the species of snake and their populations multiplied. The above title is […]

The fourth theme of the current WEA class at Barton, History of not very nice things, is Technological Change. Of course many would argue that this is not a ‘not very nice thing’, but rather an opportunity, a challenge but my line of thought is that rapid technological change can undermine society. Firstly I am

Late yesterday afternoon visited Pearson Park, Beverley Road, Hull to take some pictures to support my current main research project ‘History of Hull Parks and Cemeteries’. This was the first of Hull’s public parks and in many ways set a yardstick by which the provisions for later ones were funded. Created on land in the 1860s, then

Poverty, the third topic in my W.E.A. short course entitled History of not very nice things, is to take place this evening. Have some discussion points for early in the session e.g. is poverty relative?, what defines a state of poverty? and then intend to work back in time rather than forward. Starting with Child

This second unit for the WEA evening class ‘History of not very nice things’ highlighted two interesting lines of thought; that the physical processes at work in the centre of the Sun whereby hydrogen is converted to helium by continuous nuclear fusion is the very process that enables life in that heat and light produced are,

As stated in the last blog Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled ‘witch-finder general’ of the 1640s was one of the ‘horror episodes’ for the current evening class. Hopkins (1620-1647) was the fourth son of a puritan church minister from Essex. Between 1643 and 1647 (during the chaos of the First Civil War) he oversaw the ‘discovery’