On This Day in History [antikvár]

Introduction Anniversaries matter. A child's year (and that of a strange number of adults) revolves around the day on which they were born. Canada Day in Ottawa plunges you into an ocean of patriotic revellers in red and white drinking Canadian beer, while remaining scrupulously polite, under a hot July sun. St Patrick's Day in March is a rather more raucous celebration of Irishness that Hterally turns the Guinness green around the world. 26 January is special in both Australia and India, where it is Australia Day and Republic Day respectively. The former celebrates the arrival of the British, the latter, their departure. Crowds of us in the UK cheer every Bonfire Night as the aummnal darkness echoes with the thump of exploding gunpowder and an umbrella of fireworks fills the sky. Very few of us pause to think about why we are told to 'Remember, remember the fifdi of November'. Why do we still burn effigies of unsuccessful terrorist Guy Fawkes on bonfires all over Britain, four centaries after his foiled mass murder attempt and his own grisly death? On This Day in History is an attempt to explore our past, though these anniversaries, and provide a little more context about the events we choose to remember, and others that we have forgotten. My family live and breathe history. It runs through us like a genetic marker. My aunt is a professor of history, my Welsh grandmother, 'Nain' as we called her, was an oral historian, my mum, dad, siblings, we were all brought up with one eye on the past. My parents were journalists who explained current affairs through a deep understanding of how the world had got there. And then they spent their weekends and hohdays taking us kids to battlefields and castles. (It was a habit their children found deeply irksome, and yet we now in mm inflict It on our children.) I knew growing up that I was immensely lucky: I was born into an economically and emotionally secure family, I was half Canadian with a tribe of wonderful cousins with cooler accents and clothes across the Atiantic, and I 1 '1 ¦¦ I : ¦ ¦ ^ i ; . I IX