Interest Groups Online group 'Coffee and Conversation' meets monthly to discuss everything and anything. Recently, the group's focus was discussing History-based conversation starters, with brilliant results. Read ideas from different periods of history, and see what you think. 

• The Hunter Gatherer times. 
• The beginning of writing, with cuneiform script, in Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, late fourth millennium BCE. 
•  Making Bronze Age tools in Britain, 1900-1600 BC.
• Tutankhamen and the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, 1341-1323 BC. Also the building techniques involved in Stonehenge or the Pyramids - and the possible influence of aliens! 
• The Forum in Rome, watching comedy plays by Plautus Circe 254 - 184 BC (up Pompeii).

• The Last Supper – the influence of Christendom.
• Hadrian’s Wall, built in 122AD across what Northern England from the North Sea to the Irish Sea is now. 
• The reign of Richard 2nd, when Chaucer wrote the Wife of Bath. 1380-1390, her life and times, early feminist thinking. 

• 1543, when Copernicus the Polish polymath published his work 'On the revolutions of Heavenly Spheres', putting the sun at the centre of the solar system, not the Earth. 
• 1588, Queen Elizabeth's speech at Tilbury “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too,…” 
• Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the first production of Hamlet.
• Velazquez (1599-1660) painting Las Meninas (the royal family), to be seen now in the Museo Del Prado in Madrid.
• The life and times of Ada Lovelace, Mathematician and writer b1815 - d.1852. 
• The great Famine of Ireland, 1845-1852.

• The life and times of Bessie Smith 1894-1937, USA. The Empress of the Blues’ died in a car crash aged 43 first recorded songs in 1923. 
• The time of the Suffragette movement. 
• 1963 JKF shooting - was Oswald really acting alone? Plus, various conspiracy theories eg the death of Princess Diana. 
• 1982 Greenham Common when protesters danced on the Silo’s.
• 1987 the fall of the Berlin Wall 
• The demise of Kirsty MacColl, who died in Mexico in December 2000 when a power boat ran over her. ‘There’s a guy works down the chip shop swears he’s Elvis’ 
• The Death of Pavarotti and his last performance in Manchester.
• Greta Thunberg in Sweden - ‘launching’ her protest alerting the world to Climate Change.
• Irish Balladeer Shane MacGowan who died at 65 in November 2023. He had his big hit with the Pogues and Kirsty in 1987 Fairy Tale of New York; “We just wanted to shove music that had roots… down the throats of a completely pap-orientated pop audience”.  

Compiled by Helen, IGO Coffee and Conversation group leader

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