Mitchel Stuffers
Assistant Editor at CIGH Exeter & PhD Candidate in History, University of Exeter

From a fraudulent “ancient Roman amphitheatre” to the destruction of rare books in AI training, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

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Italian con artist jailed for building ‘world’s oldest and largest amphitheatre’ 20-years ago

Cagla Uren
EuroNews

A man has been jailed in Italy for fraud after charging tourists €40 to visit a fake Roman amphitheatre he built himself twenty years ago. Franco Malosso ‘von Rosenfranz’, 69, claimed to have discovered the site, known as the Berico Maritime Amphitheatre in the north-eastern city of Vicenza, after a landslide in 200 According to Italy’s Correiere della Sera, Malosso told visitors the site was one of the world’s “oldest and largest amphitheatres” and dated back to AD 393.

He claimed that Julius Caesar had visited it on his return to Rome from Egypt with Cleopatra, and that Shakespeare’s famous ficitional character Juliet Capulet had lived in an old church there. In addition, Malosso described himself as a “philantropist, entrepreneur and orchestra conductor” and managed to persuade local authorities to include the in Vicenza’s EU-funded tourism guide and online app. [Continue reading]

New Zimbabwean dinosaur species named by Museum scientist reveals Africa’s hidden history

Editorial Team
Natural History Museum

A newly discovered dinosaur is shining a light on an important moment in the evolution of dinosaurs. Discovered on the shore of Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, Musango matusadonaensis opens a window into the Late Triassic around 210 million years ago. This was the time dinosaurs were beginning to spread around the planet as they moved towards becoming Earth’s dominant animals.

Understanding how dinosaurs moved from being a relatively small part of life in the Triassic to a major part of the Jurassic and Cretaceous ecosystems that followed is still a major area of research. Fossils from Africa may hold the answer, as they have historically been understudied compared to sites in Europe and North America. A team of British, South African and Zimbabwean scientists have been working to change this as part of research in Zimbabwe. The team previously named Musankwa sanyatiensis as just the fourth dinosaur ever described from the country in 2024, with Musango now the fifth. [Continue reading]

Hitler’s birthplace begins new life as a police station

Editorial Team
CNN World

(Reuters) —The building Adolf Hitler was born in near the Austrian border with Germany officially begins a new life as a police station on Wednesday, a conversion Austria’s government hopes will prevent it serving as a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis. After years of debate about the large, traditional terraced house in the town of Braunau am Inn, which was in private ownership and had housed a charity for people with disabilities, Austria made a compulsory purchase in 2017 and announced in 2019 it would be remodeled and turned into a police station.

Even before the conversion, the only sign of its historical significance was a rock on the pavement from the Mauthausen concentration camp with the inscription “Never again fascism,” which does not mention Hitler. The rock remains in place. The only sign added to the white facade reads “Police.” “The aim was to prevent any association with Adolf Hitler, so as to strip it of that mystique,” the head of the Austrian interior ministry’s history department, Stephan Mlczoch, told reporters on a tour of the building. [Continue reading]

Drought, water shortages and crop failures: how does the medieval warm period compare with today?

Alex Brown
Conversation

A heatwave lasting four months, followed by water shortages and crop failures. This is England in the 13th century, not the 21st. What is often called the Medieval warm period saw elevated temperatures in many parts of the world between the 10th and 13th centuries. These warmer temperatures were caused in part by an increase in solar irradiance. This is the amount of solar energy reaching Earth, which effects global temperature patterns and influences weather systems. There were also very few volcanic eruptions in this period, which can produce a temporary global cooling effect.

In England, the 13th century saw extreme droughts, devastating city fires and outbreaks of disease. The dry summer of 1212 contributed to the devastation of the Great Fire of Southwark in London, which killed thousands of people. Contemporary medieval chroniclers recorded a severe drought in 1252. The English Benedictine monk Matthew Paris described four months of “intolerable heat and drought” between March and July, unrelieved by “any fall of rain or dew”. [Continue reading]

Is Anthropic Destroying Rare Books After Training AI Models On Them? Elon Musk, Michael Burry And Others React Amid Online Outrage

Editorial Team
StockTwits

Anthropic was at the center of another controversy this week after details emerged from a recently settled lawsuit, revealing that the AI company had purchased rare books in bulk, scanned them using high-speed machines that sliced off their spines, and then shredded the original copies. According to the settled lawsuit, Anthropic used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging equipment, tech news site Futurism reported. However, since Anthropic was converting the original physical texts into digital copies — rather than redistributing them as new copies — a judge found this to be “transformative” and therefore protected by fair use. In fact, 404 Media reported there exist services – one such being ISBNdb – that offer AI companies rare books and keep buyers’ identities anonymous. [Continue reading