World

The modern world cannot be studied without examining the course, impact and legacy of two world wars, the resources in this section set out to look at both the First and Second World Wars in their global context. The section also includes the Cold War and its impact in Latin America, South-East Asia and parts of Africa. This period also sees the rise and fall of European imperialism and the changing nature of global politics and economics as technology brings different stories from so many parts of the world directly to us. Read more

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  • Britain and the Formation of NATO

    Article

    Carl Watts outlines the shift in British security policy and examines the role played by the Foreign Office during the post-War period. April 1999 marks the 50th anniversary of the signature of the North Atlantic Treaty, which came into effect in August 1949. The Cold War is over, but NATO...

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  • British Cooperation with the Zionist Agency in Palestine 1940-42

    Article

    Nicholas Hammond provides an account of a little known Strategic Operations Executive intervention in the Middle East. In the summer of 1940, when Italy joined Germany, it was clear that attacks on the British position in the Middle East might be made from Italian bases in Africa and in Rhodes...

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  • British Defence and Appeasement Between the Wars 1919-1939

    Article

    Armed forces never exist in isolation, but always operate against a background of political, economic, social, cultural, intellectual and ideological conditions and attitudes, as well as in relation to diplomatic and strategic factors. Some governments regards their military forces especially their armies, more as instruments for maintaining internal order than...

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  • Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show opens London's Earl Court in 1887

    Article

    ‘It is often said on the other side of the water that none of the exhibitions which we send to England are purely and distinctively American', exhorted Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) in an unsolicited letter of September 1884 to ‘Colonel' William Frederick Cody (1846-1917). ‘If you will take the Wild...

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  • Capone's lost lair: The Lexington Hotel, Chicago

    Article

    Alphonse Gabriel Capone's bequest to history is a well-known catalogue of brutal racketeering, bootlegging, gangland murders (most infamously the St Valentine's Day Massacre of 14 February 1929) and the corruption of both American public morals and her elected officials, including the US Judiciary, Chicago mayoralty and city police force. Born...

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  • Comparing the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Jameson Raid

    Article

    Duplicated Debacles? A comparison of the 1895-96 Jameson Raid and the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion. Adam Burns and Robert Gallimore take us on two invasions, one by land and one by sea. Following the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the rise to power of the socialist regime of Fidel...

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  • D-Day, Commemorations - the last big year to remember?

    Article

    This year it was the 70th anniversary of D-Day. The world's politicians and media went into overdrive about it. The BBC dedicated a whole day to the coverage, mainly live from Normandy while small events took place around the UK. For a whole day the upcoming centenary of the First...

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  • Dean Mahomet: Travel writer, curry entrepreneur and shampooer to the King

    Article

    The National Portrait Gallery in London is home to many thousands of portraits, photographs and sculptures of the great and the good, as well as those who travelled on the darker side of history. In 2007 it hosted a small exhibition in the Porter Gallery entitled Between Worlds: Voyagers to...

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  • Diagrams in History

    Article

    One of the gifts of the social sciences to history is the use of expository diagrams; but attention is rarely given to the history of diagrams. Maps - schematized representations of locations in spatial relation to one another - can be dated back to Babylonia in the late third millennium...

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  • Doomed to fail: America’s intervention in Vietnam

    Article

    Why did American military involvement in Vietnam fail?  In this article, David McGill explains why the United States never had a realistic chance of defeating the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies. The decision by the United States government to become involved in supporting the South Vietnamese government against the...

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  • Echoes of Tsushima

    Article

    In 2005 East Asian regional strategy is once again a hot topic for policy makers, diplomats and journalists. As China begins to reassert herself regionally and as her economy revives to challenge conceptions of her place in the world, Japan, Russia, Korea (North and South) and the United States are...

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  • Eighteenth-century Britain and its Empire

    Article

    The concept of an ‘English’ or even of a ‘British’ empire has been in use at least from the sixteenth century. What the term then conveyed was of course very different from what it was to convey in modern times. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, contemporaries were beginning to envisage...

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  • Ending Camelot: the assassination of John F Kennedy

    Article

    The murder of America’s thirty-fifth president is often regarded as one of the key events in the recent history of the United States. Numerous conspiracy theories have made it appear more complex, and more mysterious, than was in fact the case. No event in recent American history has been more comprehensively...

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  • Evelyn Waugh’s books on the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–36

    Article

    Philip Woods discusses Evelyn Waugh’s contribution to understanding the nature of journalism before the Second World War. This article compares the value to historians of the two books Evelyn Waugh wrote based on his experiences as a war correspondent covering the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935–36. The popular satiric novel Scoop (1938) is...

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  • Exploring Twentieth-Century History

    Article

    For a long time, history curricula on the 20th century prioritised the narrative of a slide from World War I to World War II and fascism above many other topics. But the history of the 20th century is both far more complicated and far more interesting than that. For the historians writing here, the...

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  • Facing the Revolution: the other Americans

    Article

    The American Revolution presented all who lived through it with difficult choices about allegiance, identity, and self-interest.  The responses of American loyalists, enslaved people, and Native Americans reveal much about the country’s revolutionary foundation and the United States of today. The American Revolution was at once universal and narrowly nationalistic....

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  • Fake news: Psy-war and propaganda in the Indonesian Genocide of 1965-66

    Article

    Geoffrey Robinson explores a little-known episode of the Cold War where half a million people were killed and the Indonesian communist party was destroyed, aided and abetted by the major Western Powers. Amidst all the talk of fake news and Russian meddling in US politics, it is easy to lose...

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  • Film series: The African-American Civil Rights Movement

    Article

    The US civil rights battles of the latter half of the twentieth century are a common part of popular culture - and yet the detail is often overlooked in favour of the headlines. It is a positive step that so many of us now know the names of Rosa Parks...

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  • Film: An Interview with Margaret MacMillan

    Multipage Article

    The HA are delighted to announce that the Medlicott Medal for 2015 has been awarded to Professor Margaret MacMillan. The Medlicott Medal is for outstanding contributions to the study and enjoyment of history. The award will be presented on Wednesday 8 July 2015 in central London, where she will also...

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  • Film: China's Good War

    Article

    In this lecture Professor Mitter uses film and other propaganda works to explore how key events of global history are being represented in China to develop a different understanding of its own past. The talk addresses a number of the factors for this change in how China is reflecting on...

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