This year the Wolfson History Prize has been won by Professor Peter Marshall for Heretics and Believers: A history of the English Reformation. We would like to send our congratulations to Professor Marshall of the University of Warwick for his impressive win with an excellent book. A couple of years ago Professor...

Jewish-German refugee Henry Wuga escaped Nazi Germany at 15 years old, but was arrested and falsely accused of espionage. The little-known history of Warth Mills WWII internment camp in Bury, Greater Manchester, is set to be revealed next week (June 2018) with the launch of a commemorative events programme and...

Alas it is gone (possibly pursued by a bear or two). If you weren’t in Stratford-upon-Avon on the weekend of 18-19 May then you missed a corker. If you were there, please let us know what you thought by filling out our short HA conference evaluation form.  Day 1: Civil liberties, Cymbeline... and a lot...

Notice is hereby given that the 111th Annual General Meeting of the Historical Association will be held at Foyles, 107 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0DT from 5.15 – 6.00 p.m. on Thursday 28 June 2018.  All members are welcome. Any member wishing to raise a motion not already on the...

For this edition of The Historian, we decided to move away from a subject theme and instead to pay tribute to the HA's branches. These provide an opportunity for anyone with a love of history to get together, to learn and to discuss a very wide range of fascinating topics,...

Six books are in the running for the Wolfson History Prize 2018, each selected for their outstanding historical writing that is also accessible to a general audience. The shortlisted books are: Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination by Robert Bickers (Allen Lane, Penguin Press) The...

It’s time to focus on the immediate world around us – yes, it’s Local History Month 2018. Everyone lives in an area of rich local heritage, even if they don’t know it yet. May is the time to investigate, explore and discover the history of the world immediately around you....

Historians have reconstructed what Windsor Castle originally looked like when it was built by William the Conqueror in 1071 to deter Anglo-Saxon rebels. Researchers have used a series of archaeological discoveries made over recent decades to determine the original size and construction of Britain’s largest medieval fortress. The reconstruction of that first Windsor...

The Syriac Galen Palimpsest is a fascinating and (until now) frustrating historical manuscript. For several years it has been known to contain traces of a 6th-century translation of a treatise ‘On simple drugs’ by the renowned early physician Galen. However, this original text had been erased and overwritten with psalms in the 11th century, and despite...

Historians have put forward a new theory to solve a mystery that has long baffled experts – why Stonehenge’s Neolithic builders went to the great effort of bringing some of its huge stones from 155 miles away in south-west Wales. "In contemporary Western culture, we are always striving to make...