The Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini understood more than other leaders of his generation the power of images and used them to great effect in building his personality cult which was central to Italian Fascism. In this illustrated webinar, Professor Giuliana Pieri will explore the evolution of the iconography of...

This webinar examines the era of ‘post-emancipation’ in the Caribbean from around the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It interrogates the notion of ‘emancipation’ and asks what kind of ‘freedom’ did abolition bring to the formerly enslaved? How did colonial states and other authorities seek to regulate the lives of...

In this webinar historian Shane O’Rourke – a specialist in late-Imperial Russian society and ethnicities, including the Cossacks – explores society under the last three Tsars, examining Russification in the western Russian borderlands, Russian settler colonialism, the Caucasus and deportation, and current historiographical trends.

The HA has worked with film-maker,  historian and Legasee ambassador Martyn Cox on a series of webinars looking at untold stories from the Second World War. Many of these stories are taken for the oral histories provided in interviews given to Martyn on film.  In this filmed webinar, Martyn goes...

This year's Holocaust Memorial Day the theme is 'One Day'. In this webinar with historian Paula Kitching, we will use the one day Wannsee Conference of January 1942 to help explore the actions of the perpetrators, the Holocaust victims and how decision making by people can lead to genocide. This...

Dr Samantha K. Knapton [she/her] is an Assistant Professor in History at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is an historian of central and east-central Europe, forced displacement, and international humanitarianism. In 2023, she has published her first monograph, Occupiers, Humanitarian Workers, and Polish Displaced Persons in British-occupied Germany and a co-edited...

Eleanor Barraclough tells a richly detailed history of the Viking Age through the everyday objects and traces left by ordinary people, revealing the complex, lived realities behind the familiar saga‑era myths. Dr Eleanor Barraclough is a historian, author and broadcaster. Her most recent book, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories...

The coast means something different to everyone. It’s a place of pleasure and reckless pursuits, of fishing, fearless endeavours and a crashing, rugged beauty. The coast is, and always has been, Britain's first line of defence and springboard to other cultures. In this talk public historian Sally Coulthard delves into...

In this talk, Steve Tibble discusses the Assassins and Templars, two of history's most legendary groups. One was a Shi’ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Steve Tibble traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction showing how they survived...

The religious wars of the Crusades are renowned for their military engagements. But the period was witness to brutality beyond the battlefield. More so than any other medieval war zone, the Holy Land was rife with unprecedented levels of criminality and violence. In the first history of its kind, Steve Tibble explores...

In his recent book The Monastic World, Andrew Jotischky looks at how from the late Roman Empire onwards, monasteries and convents were a common sight throughout Europe. The history of monasticism is defined by the fierce and passionate abandonment of the ordinary comforts of life, the most striking being food and drink....

Normandy originated from a grant of land to Rollo, a Viking leader, in the early tenth century. By the end of that century Normans were to be found in southern Italy, then in Britain and, at the end of the eleventh century, in the near East on the First Crusade....

Jane Rogoyska tells the story of the Hôtel Lutetia, the only ‘grand’ hotel on the city’s bohemian Left Bank, serving as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. But...

In this Virtual Branch talk, Dr Alvin Finkel challenges claims that egalitarian, peaceful societies disappeared with the founding of agriculture or with the founding of state-level social organisation.  Different authors have suggested that early human society was essentially egalitarian in nature, with hierarchies only later becoming common. The point at which...

As part of a project to identify and write biographies of all of the Jews of the medieval Lincoln Jewry, Natasha Jenman, Luka Liu, and Josh Outhwaite have been working on records of Jewish property ownership in the city across the thirteenth century. This allows them to identify those individuals who will be...

This month at the Virtual Branch, renowned medieval historian David Carpenter will delve into the enduring legacy of Magna Carta. Drawing on his recent work uncovering and authenticating a Magna Carta document in the United States, Carpenter will explore why both the dating and the content of this foundational charter...

What was life really like for women in the medieval period? How did they think about sex, death and God? Could they live independent lives?  Few women had the luxury of writing down their thoughts and feelings during medieval times. But remarkably, there are at least four who did: Marie de France,...

This talk explored the struggle for liberation from the perspective of the enslaved, wherever possible in their own words. Dr Sudhir Hazareesingh shines a light on the lives of revolutionaries like Toussaint Louverture, José Antonio Aponte, Nat Turner, and the pregnant rebel Solitude; touching on the stories of the freed...

This is the story of the Venice Ghetto, the corner of the city where Jews were exiled; free to walk the streets by day, locked behind gates and walls at night. Yet, gates and walls notwithstanding, from its establishment in 1516 until the fall of Venice in 1798, the ghetto...

In this talk Professor Henrietta Harrison uses diary records to think about the experience of living through the revolution in China in 1949, focussing on what it meant to Chinese people, how they learned about its practices and ideology, and how this changed their lives - whether they were radical intellectuals returning...