Timid historians of Wales and heart disease in ancient Egypt

Explaining the timidity of Wales’ historians
Hywel Williams explains why the study of Welsh history need not be as boring as it may seem on the website of The Guardian.

The Holodomor or ‘death by hunger’: the forgotten famine
Modern Russia has still not officially recognised the Holodomor. Gareth Jones was one of two journalists who travelled to the Ukraine and reported back to the West on the suffering which he witnessed first hand. Will the current focus on Jones (his diaries are on display in Cambridge and a documentary was recently released about him last week) bring the narrative away from the political disputes in which it is bound-up? James Marson reports in The Guardian.

Heart Disease in Ancient Egypt
Factors causing heart disease may not just be a by-product of modern times and lifestyles according to the latest research by scientists from the University of California, the Mid America Heart Institute, Wisconsin Heart Hospital and Al Azhar Medical School in Cairo.
The results of the study were published in the November 18th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Read the press release on the website of the University of California.

The only surviving letter written by Lincoln to a child
A letter written by Lincoln to an 8-year-old schoolboy and sent just two week’s after his March 1861 inauguration is being put on sale in Philadelphia for £36,000 by the Raab Collection. When George Patten told his classmates that he had met the president with his father who was a journalist, they mocked him. Lincoln wrote that he ‘did see and talk with master George Evans Patten’.
Read the article in The Times.

India’s Joan of Arc
Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, was one of India’s most famous female rebels against British colonial rule. A letter written in her hand, shortly before the Indian Mutiny of 1857, to the governor general of the East India Company, Lord Dalhousie, has recently been discovered in the archives of the British Library. The letter is part of the Bowring Collection named after the British civil servant Lewin Bentham Bowring, who was working in India at the time and gathered an extensive collection of documents relating to the maharajas. Read the article on the website of the BBC.
In Indian Voices from the 1857 Rebellion Joseph Coohill uncovers some Indian accounts of the Indian Mutiny. In 400 years of the East India Company Huw V. Bowen explores the history of the East India Company and asks whether it was one of the ‘most powerful engines’ of state and empire in British history.

Secret Mussolini
Secret Mussolini is published today in Italy by Rizzoli. The new book is based on the diaries of Mussolini’s lover, Claretta Petacci, written between 1932 and 1938. Extracts from the diaries were published on Monday by the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera. Read Alessandra Rizzo’s article from the Associated Press.