You can move up and down the timeline using the date bands: the bottom band moves you along centuries quickly and the middle bank moves along decades. Click on individual events to see more details and description.
Our ongoing history of Scotland that chronicles the events in Scotland over the past million years with a special focus on the last thousand as you might expect. We have also digitised a copy of Patrick Tytler's History of Scotland which is an eccentric but wonderfully written history of the the mediaeval years in Scotland. The project of chronicling Scotland's history is ongoing, as is the process of organising and structuring and linking the pages together.
Scotland may have been a wealthy country in the Victorian era - but much of its prosperity was created at the expense of its workers.
Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children toiled in factories and down mines to build business empires for their employers.
They often worked for long hours in appalling conditions. Inevitably, there had to be a backlash sooner or later. When it came, it was in the formation of the Scottish Labour Party.
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Born 14 December 1730 at Kinnaird House, Larbert near Stirling, the eldest son of a wealthy landowner. In adulthood Bruce certainly stood out from the crowd, as he was 1.93m (six foot four inches) in height with red hair. He also had a natural arrogance to go with it. He was educated at Harrow School and later studied law at Edinburgh University.
He married the daughter of a London wine-merchant in 1753 and joined the family business, but when his heavily pregnant wife died of consumption (tuberculosis) he set off on a series of travels. In 1762 he was appointed British Consul in Algiers, and six years later set off in search of the source of the Nile, a perennial holy grail in those days.
He travelled from Cairo to the Red Sea by way of the desert, then struck south eventually reaching Gondar, the capital of Abyssinia (later Ethiopia, now Eritrea) in February 1770. He continued after a stay there and reached Lake Tana, where the Blue Nile rises, in November, before returning to Gondar.
His final epic journey began from Gondar in December 1771, heading westward across the terrible landscapes of the Sudan with mountains and deserts. It would be two years before he regained Cairo, and Scotland, in 1774.
His stories were too bizarre for general acceptance, and the otherwise esteemed Dr Johnson, as he did with others, dismissed him as a fraud. He published Travels to Discover the Sources of the Nile in 1790, but this did little to allay the sceptics, and it was only with the slow rediscovery and retracing of his steps by other explorers that his findings were vindicated.
An astronomer, naturalist and linguist, Bruce use a specially-designed portable camera obscura in North Africa, producing many sketches of Roman antiquities. Back home in Kinnaird, he remarried a woman 24 years his junior. Sadly, she died in 1788 aged 34. Bruce himself was a victim of a common enough accident, falling down the stairs at the age of 64 on 27 April 1794.
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