On this day in history: First modern Olympiad, 1896

On 6th April 1896, the Greek King, George I, officially opened the first summer Olympic games of the modern period, at the Panathinaiko Stadium in Athens, Greece. The event was the culmination of the work of the French educator and historian, Pierre de Coubertin, who said of the games:

"May joy and good fellowship reign, and in this manner, may the Olympic Torch pursue its way through ages, increasing friendly understanding among nations, for the good of a humanity always more enthusiastic, more courageous and more pure."

You can read more about the 1896 games on the official site of the International Olympic Committee.

On this day in history: First public park opens in Britain, 1847

Birkenhead Park opened for the first time on 5th April 1847. Designed by Joseph Paxton, it is widely regarded as the first civic park in Britain, and provided templates for many of the features that Frederick Law Olmsted later incorporated into New York's Central Park. Olmsted wrote of the park:

"five minutes of admiration, and a few more spent studying the manner in which art had been employed to obtain from nature so much beauty, and I was ready to admit that in democratic America there was nothing to be thought of as comparable with this People’s Garden".

Read more on the park at the Wirral local government site.

The Modern Historian

This introductory post is somewhat  unconventional as it does not appear as the earliest post on this blog. This is because I have imported a number of posts from another blog of mine, which used to be themed around the history of counter-culture. Due to pressures of research, work and writing other blogs I cannot dedicate enough time to that subject to keep that blog going in that form. It is now going to be my personal/general blog.

I still wish to maintain a blog on the subject of history where I can share my thoughts, writing and research. As such this blog will focus on modern history (or if you prefer post-medieval history). I am going to look over some of my undergraduate essays and see if they can be edited into a form suitable for posting here, and I will also share some of the fruits of my current research on the response of British newspapers to the French Revolution. I will also share links to primary and secondary sources, and other web based materials that will be interesting to historians of the modern world.