Search Results: Smore than meets ready read

Mary Read, sometimes spelt Reade (b. c. 1690), was an infamous pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1720) active in the Bahamas until her capture by the Jamaican authorities in 1720. As a crew member of the English pirate John Rackham...

Until Sir Arthur Evans unearthed the palace of Knossos, the half-man-half bull killed by Theseus was considered just a popular legend; archaeology changed that perception. King Minos, of Crete, fought hard with his brother to ascend the...

For over three centuries, the ancient Maya flourished in Mesoamerica. They built giant stone pyramids surrounded by dense jungle, used a calendrical system that made many believe that 2012 would be the end of the world, and created a writing...

The AHE team live and breathe history, but we all have our favourite historical periods and authors. We thought it would be fun for each of us to nominate one or two books that we would recommend for the general reader as well as high school...

Medieval People Were More Obscene Than You Think: In the Middle Ages, people were not as disgusted as we are about bad language that had more to do with offending God than using words we think of as impolite or obscene. People did not regard...

Joris van Spilbergen meets the rulers of Ceylon at Kandy in 1602, lithograph, 19th century. Museum voor Land- en Volkenkunde, Rotterdam.

The November 1720 trial notice of John Rackham (aka 'Calico Jack'), Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Issued as part of a pamphlet by the authorities of Jamaica a few days after the trial. All three were found guilty. Rackham was hanged but the two...

A colourised engraved print by Benjamin Cole showing the Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny and the English pirate Mary Read, both active in the Caribbean in 1719-20. (Appeared in an early edition of 'A General History of the Robberies and Murders...

An artist's impression of how the pirate Mary Read (d. 1721) may have looked. Image from the computer game Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag by Ubisoft. © 2013 Ubisoft

An 1846 illustration of the pirate Mary Read (d. 1721) by Alexandre Debelle. (From Histoire des pirates et corsaires de l'Océan et de la Méditerranée depuis leur origine jusqu'à nos jours, P. Christian, Paris, Cavaillès, 1846)