HA Annual Conference 2011: General Pathway

Full details of lectures and walks!

To book please contact Suzannah Stern on 0207 820 5989 or suzannah.stern@history.org.uk

The 2011 Annual Conference takes place at Manchester Conference Centre on 13^th and 14^th May 2011.  We have two fantastic days of workshops, talks, visits and much more.  This Conference will cater for all our education practitioners, as well as our general enthusiasts.

Keynote Address

Friday 13^th May

Professor Sir Ian Kershaw 

Regarded as one of the world's leading experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany Professor Sir Ian Kershaw shall be giving our Keynote Address: How and Why Hitler's Germany Fought on to the Bitter End. 

Germans were heard to say in early 1945 that they would prefer ‘an end with horror' rather than ‘a horror without end'. An ‘end with horror' was what they got. It could have been avoided, had Germany bowed to Allied terms. A country defeated in war almost always seeks terms. Fighting to the last, down to almost total devastation and complete enemy occupation, is extremely rare. Yet that is what the Germans did in 1945. Why? Sir Ian Kershaw's book ‘The End. Hitler's Germany, 1944-45', will be published by Penguin in September 2011.

General Pathway Lectures

Friday 11.45-12.45

Dr Melanie Tebbutt - Manchester Metropolitan University

Problem pages have been described as ‘social barometers' which chronicle shifting values, attitudes and behaviour. They are usually associated with women, but their expansion into the mainstream popular press in the 1930s encouraged many boys and young men in their teens and twenties to write in about problems they found difficult to raise with peers, parents, teachers or work-mates. This paper suggests that such letters challenge familiar assumptions that ‘boys will be boys', by providing valuable evidence of young men's emotional lives and sensitivities.

Members of the London Auxiliary Firefighting Service. The Battle of Britain.

Friday 13.30-14.30

2. Film and the popular memory of the Second World War in Britain

Professor Penny Summerfield - University of Manchester

The 1950s was the decade of war films that made a lasting imprint on popular memory. Film-makers may have intended to console the British with tales of heroism in the austere aftermath of World War Two. But tensions often flared with the guardians of the memory of that war, from the chiefs of the Armed Forces to former prisoners of war. This paper argues that the memory of the Second World War transmitted in the most popular films of the 1950s was both highly selective and not consistently reassuring to the British.

Friday 14.45-15.45

3. The Opium War: a new interpretation

Dr Yangwen Zheng - Lecturer in the History of China, University of Manchester

Would post-Mao economic reform have succeeded so spectacularly without Hong Kong and Shanghai - consequences of the Opium War (1839 - 1842)? 　 China's rise as the world's second largest economy and the world's largest market just as she had been on the eve of the Opium War demand Chinese historians to re-reconsider the origin, theatre and consequences of the first Sino-British conflict. 　 This talk will revisit the conflict; it will also challenge the established views that were formulated in the 1960s. 　 It proposes a new interpretation of the conflict in this age of global integration and scholarship.

Saturday 9.45-10.45

4. The Short Reign of King Philip I of England, 1554-1558

Dr Glyn Redworth - University of Manchester

Why did Philip marry Mary? This lecture will deal with the question of gendered monarchy, and will consider King Philip's role at the side of Queen Mary Tudor. It will consider the constitutional restraints put on his role and contrast this with the moral economy of the time. Various aspects will be considered, including questions of precedence and iconography, not to mention the King's involvement in the restitution of papal authority, his relations with the Princess Elizabeth, and the War with France.

Cottonopolis is a name given to the city of Manchester, in England. It denotes a metropolis of cotton and cotton mills, as inspired by Manchester's status as the international centre of the cotton and textile processing industries during this time.

Saturday 11.15-12.15

5. Manchester in British History

Professor Martin Hewitt - Head of History & Economic History, Manchester Metropolitan University

This lecture examines the place of Manchester in British history. Taking as its starting point the often mythologised versions of Manchester's history created in past centuries, and in particular Ford Madox Brown's murals in Manchester Town Hall, the lecture asks what impact the city of Manchester has actually had on the evolution of Britain, as an engine of technological innovation, as exemplar of the problems of industrial society and their solutions, as a crucible of ideas, as a pioneer of civic culture, as a hothouse of sporting giants and contemporary music.

An 1835 illustration of liberated Africans arriving in Sierra Leone.

Saturday 12.30-13.30

6. Sierra Leone, abolition and the suppression of the slave trade

Professor Suzanne Schwarz - Liverpool Hope University

Sierra Leone was an important site of early abolitionist intervention in Africa. By the time the settlement was transferred to British Crown control in 1808, it had already been a site of abolitionist experimentation for more than two decades. In late eighteenth-century Sierra Leone, leading abolitionists were testing out ways of shaping a new identity for Africa by eradicating the traffic in slaves and attacking the system of plantation slavery. By emphasising the close interconnections between ‘commerce, civilization and christianity', the Sierra Leone Company anticipated the ‘New Africa' policy of Thomas Fowell Buxton in 1839 and set the agenda for early Victorian debate on the regeneration of Africa.

Mary Seacole

Saturday 15.15-16.15

7. The colonies, black Britons and WWI and WWII

Marika Sherwood - Vice-Chair, Black and Asian Studies Association & Hon. Senior Research Fellow, University of London

In this session we shall look at the colonial contributions to WWI and WWII, but with the emphasis on WWII. The focus will be on Africa, the Caribbean and India: the ‘home front' there, the financial and manpower contributions to the war effort, the military involvements; the raw materials exported; how women and men were recruited in Britain and in the colonies and how they were treated, including the racial discrimination they faced.

Walks

Friday 13.30-15.45

1. A local history walk around Manchester's Deansgate

Walk Leader: Dr Trevor James

A walk through the streets of Manchester's historic Deansgate, demonstrating just how many conclusions can be drawn from the visual evidence of the urban landscape. The walk will begin at the Portico Library in St Peter's Street.

This guided walk will explore the area around Manchester Cathedral, and the Cathedral itself, and will hope to incorporate the historic Chetham's Library, with its priceless collection of books stretching back into the history of Manchester and its region. This walk will begin outside Manchester Cathedral.