Welcome to our summer newsletter.
We start with two important essays we’ve published by emeritus professor Kevin Fernlund, lately of the University of Missouri, on two controversial aspects of pre-Columbian American history. The first, entitled ‘Land Acknowledgment Fails to Acknowledge the Facts’ concerns the common practice in many institutions in the Anglosphere of recognising indigenous peoples as the first and true custodians of the land. But much of the land in the Americas, especially in what is now North America, was very thinly populated and very largely unsettled before contact with European settlers. Claims that it belonged to the indigenous and was stolen by Europeans need much more careful treatment.
Professor Fernlund’s second essay on ‘The Myth of Millions. Rethinking Hispaniola Before Columbus’ considers new evidence, drawn from genetic data and genomics, which has led to significant downward revisions of the size of the population in the pre-Columbian Americas, and a better understanding of the drastic impact of disease on the native population. Rather than a ‘hemispheric holocaust’ of large, thriving populations caused by contact with rapacious Europeans, the emerging pattern is of smaller and more localised populations suffering inadvertently from diseases to which they had no resistance.
Issues of slavery, reparations and restitution in West Africa continue to incite controversy. Alistair Parker has contributed an essay on the long history of slave-trading and slavery within the borders of what is now Ghana, the state that has taken the lead at the United Nations this year in the organised movement calling for reparations for Atlantic slavery: https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/the-gravest-crime-ghana-and-slavery/ Ghanaian tribal warfare and profit-seeking led to the sale of black African slaves into two distinct slave systems, that of the Atlantic world and that of the Arab world, with the famous slave market at Salaga in northern Ghana selling to both. Yet for some unaccountable reason the government of Ghana seems to have overlooked its own slave cultures and the role of its people in capturing and selling slaves, and seems to have forgotten entirely the Arab trade in which some of those who became Ghanaians engaged. Nor does it recall the role of the British throughout the 19th century in protecting smaller and weaker tribes whose members would otherwise have been captured and sold as slaves, and in trying to stamp out the slave trade in both directions, west and east. It would seem that ‘recollections may vary’, as our late Queen put it, especially at the UN.
Mike Wells contributes another most helpful article on the Benin Bronzes, those remarkable and valuable artefacts distributed by the British to western museums and collections after the capital of the slave-holding, slave-trading, and human-sacrificing West African kingdom of Benin was sacked in 1897.
The Benin Bronzes: A reply to Sophia, Emily and Sarah, students at a German gymnasium
Mike’s essay, written to answer the questions of three German students, is an update on the current situation following the transfer of its collection of 116 bronzes by the University of Cambridge to…and that’s the point: where they’ve gone in Nigeria/Benin is unknown and apparently not of interest to Cambridge. We will try to follow this issue, and the Bronzes themselves. Whether they will appear in an accessible museum or public collection is anyone’s guess.
Another of our articles on restitution concerns the fabulous Koh-i-Noor diamond that adorns the Elizabeth The Queen Mother’s Crown in the royal collection held in the Tower of London:
I don’t know what is worse about Zohran Mamdani: his ignorance or his hypocrisy
Mayor Mamdani, newly installed in that office in New York, apparently intended to tell King Charles on his recent visit to the Big Apple that he should return the fabled jewel to India, a country with which the Mayor has many connections. But why India? As we explain in our essay, the diamond is claimed by five different nations. We also ask what great treasure the Mayor might like to return from the fabled collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum? ‘Colonial Loot’, if that it is, is widely spread, or perhaps he hasn’t noticed?
We recommend two recently-published books. The first, by one of our Australian founders and contributors, Bella d’Abrera, entitled Mindless. How the Education System is Indoctrinating Children and Destroying Our Civilisation is centrally concerned with the distorting education that western societies now provide, filling children with guilt about the past and depriving them of contact with the history of their own nations.
Mindless: How the Education System is Indoctrinating Children and Destroying our Civilisation
The second book, Not Your Victim. How Our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us reviewed by Mark Stocker, is a memoir and critique by another of our HR authors, Marie Kawthar Daouda. Partly autobiographical, tracing her journey to Oxford from Morocco via Paris, along the way Marie dismantles identity politics, race fixation, and progressive culture generally, focusing on their internal contradictions. See Marie’s discussion of art in the French Revolution here:
The absence of a sense of nationhood among many of Britain’s current crop of leaders and public appointees is evident in the recent decision by the Bank of England to replace great figures from British history – Churchill, Jane Austen, J. M. W. Turner and Alan Turing – from the next generation of our banknotes.
Why would the Bank of England replace Churchill with a hedgehog on a fiver?
They are to be replaced by drawings of British mammals, birds, reptiles and insects. Here at History Reclaimed we have nothing against small creatures but we can see no reason to remove history from our currency. Indeed, we’d like to see more and different historical Britons not only on our money but in public prominence in general. This latest decision may be compared with that taken by the Speaker of the House of Commons to remove portraits of dozens of famous Britons from the walls of the Palace of Westminster:
Pride’s Purge: Why have portraits of our greatest historical figures been removed from Parliament?
We also draw your attention to some items of news. After publication of our criticisms of the University of Sydney’s Library for redacting harmless images of early Australian exploration, we were delighted to be invited onto Sky News Australia where Lawrence Goldman was interviewed ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ by news anchor Adam Boulton. See
‘Redacted’. How Sydney University Library Prevents Free Inquiry
In Rochester, Kent, the Guildhall Museum has seen fit to criticise Charles Dickens’s ‘prejudice’ and his apparently offensive, imperialistic views. “Dickens, though in many ways a fair-minded man, took advantage of certain situations to promote a vociferous intolerance which he expressed in grossly offensive terms.” The great opponent of the heartless New Poor Law, the Debtors’ Prison, the Circumlocution Office, and Mrs Jellyby’s ‘telescopic philanthropy’, is cut down to size. Talk about trashing your own brand. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/23/charles-dickens-hometown-museum-condemns-his-prejudice/?recomm_id=9c220869-0c4b-4c63-8ef6-0409fe328ee7 The Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, Holborn, in a house where Dickens lived at the end of the 1830s, is much better – at least it was on the last occasion we visited – and to be recommended.
Robert Tombs saw this notice in a recent visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and remarked on the euphemism for invasion in the phrase ‘following settlement there in AD 642 of people of Islamic culture’. Imagine if the Fitzwilliam had been discussing western ‘settlement’?
Of course, the Islamic conquest of Egypt (639–642 AD), led by the Arab commander ‘Amr ibn al-‘As under the Rashidun Caliphate, permanently ended nearly seven centuries of Byzantine-Roman rule there. Meanwhile ‘Kemet’ meaning ‘black land’, refers not to Egyptian kinship with Africa but to the colour of the rich alluvial silt deposited by the annual flooding of the Nile.
We send our sympathies (perhaps our congratulations) to another of our authors, Dr Mario Trabucco della Torretta, whose view that the Elgin Marbles should remain in the British Museum led to his being barred from speaking at a conference at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, built in the hope that one day the Marbles will be returned there. The museum’s board members, who vetoed his attendance, have truly lost theirs – marbles, that is. You can read Mario in History Reclaimed here:
Finally, if anyone happens to be at the ARC Conference at London’s Olympia between June 23rd-25th, look for History Reclaimed’s stand in the exhibition area and come and say hello.
Do keep reading. Please recommend History Reclaimed to your friends. Do send us articles you’ve written, or information you think important and that we’ll find helpful – and do make a donation if you can. We are embarked on a major project on the British School History Curriculum and your financial help with that would be most helpful.
Lawrence Goldman
Robert Tombs
Zewditu Gebreyohanes
Alex Gray
