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  • Robert Peel: Portraiture and political commemoration

      Article
    On 4 March 1856, during a debate in the House of Lords on a motion to form a ‘Gallery of National Portraits', the Conservative peer Earl Stanhope quoted Thomas Carlyle's view that ‘one of the most primary wants [of the historian is] to secure a bodily likeness of the personage...
    Robert Peel: Portraiture and political commemoration
  • Empires of Gold

      Historian article
    In 1660, the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa was established under the leadership of Charles II's brother James, the Duke of York. Founded as a slaving company, the Royal African Company, as it became known, also traded in gold. African gold was mined in the interior before being...
    Empires of Gold
  • Cyprus: another Middle East issue

      Historian article
    Although Cyprus, the third largest Mediterranean island, remained nominally under Turkish suzerainty until 1914, the British were established there after the 1878 Congress of Berlin. The idea then was that, from this base, Britain could protect Turkey against threats from Russia, while ensuring that the Turks reformed their treatment of...
    Cyprus: another Middle East issue
  • Neville Chamberlain: Villain or Hero?

      Historian article
    Perhaps no other British figure of the twentieth century has been as vilified or as celebrated as Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister from 1937 to 1940. In 1999, a BBC Radio 4 poll of prominent historians, politicians and commentators rated Chamberlain as one of the worst Prime Ministers of...
    Neville Chamberlain: Villain or Hero?
  • Have gun, will travel: The myth of the frontier in the Hollywood Western

      Historian article
    The Western movies that from around 1910 until the 1960s made up at least a fifth of all the American film titles on general release signified escapist entertainment for British audiences: an alluring vision of vast open spaces, of cowboys on horseback outlined against an imposing landscape. For Americans themselves,...
    Have gun, will travel: The myth of the frontier in the Hollywood Western
  • Nazi aggression: planned or improvised?

      Historian article
    Read more like this: Nazism and Stalinism Fascism in Europe 1919-1945 Kristallnacht Anti-semitism and the Holocaust The Coming of War in 1939 Political internment without trial in wartime Britain Neville Chamberlain: villain or hero? The Mechanical Battle of Britain Since the 1960s, there have been two main schools of thought...
    Nazi aggression: planned or improvised?
  • Out and about in Silloth

      Historian feature
    Situated north west of the Lake District, Silloth is a seaside resort, looking across the Solway Firth to Dumfries and Galloway. The origins of this settlement lie in medieval times because the monks of nearby Holme Cultram Abbey had established storage facilities there to receive and store the grain from...
    Out and about in Silloth
  • India and the British war effort, 1939-1945

      Historian article
    India was vital as a source of men and material for the British in the Second World War, despite the constitutional, social and economic issues which posed threats to its contribution. Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India 1940-5, wrote to Churchill, 8 April 1941: ‘My prime care had naturally...
    India and the British war effort, 1939-1945
  • The Tale of Two Winstons

      Historian article
    Winston Churchill is generally regarded as one of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century. As Prime Minister he led Britain to victory against the Nazi war machine, leading Time to name him ‘Man of the Year' in 1940 and ‘Man of the Half Century' in 1949. As recently...
    The Tale of Two Winstons
  • Benjamin Jesty: Grandfather of Vaccination

      Historian article
    Commonly hailed as a discovery or a ‘medical breakthrough', vaccination against smallpox with cowpox exudate was a development of variolation i.e. inoculation with live smallpox matter - a technique popularised amongst the gentry in the early eighteenth century by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who had observed the procedure in Turkey...
    Benjamin Jesty: Grandfather of Vaccination
  • Oxford's Literary War: Oxford University's servicemen and the Great War

      Historian article
    The last two decades have seen a slow shift in the academic understanding of the impact of the Great War on interwar Britain. The work of a small group of cultural historians has challenged strongly held pre-existing interpretations of the cultural impact of the Great War. However, there is still...
    Oxford's Literary War: Oxford University's servicemen and the Great War
  • Polychronicon 143: the Balfour Declaration

      Teaching History feature
    In a letter from the British Foreign Secretary, A.J. Balfour, to Lord Rothschild, the Anglo-Jewish leader, on 2 November 1917, the British Government declared its intention to ‘facilitate' the ‘establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people'. The Balfour Declaration, as it became known, was endorsed by...
    Polychronicon 143: the Balfour Declaration
  • The British Government's Confidential Files on the United States

      Historian article
    Unpublished papers in Britain's National Archives at Kew reveal curious undercurrents in Anglo-American relations. After the conclusion of the Boer War, for example, the British Army supposed that the next major conflict would be not with Germany but with the U.S. A memo printed for circulation in July 1904 entitled ‘A...
    The British Government's Confidential Files on the United States
  • Schools of Vice: how a medical scandal led to the dismantling of Britain’s last prison hulks

      Historian article
    Hulks – former naval ships used as prisons for those convicted of serious crime and sentenced to transportation – were intended to be a temporary solution to a penal crisis caused by the American Revolutionary Wars. These ‘schools of vice’, or ‘floating hells’ lasted 80 years, casting a shadow over...
    Schools of Vice: how a medical scandal led to the dismantling of Britain’s last prison hulks
  • Aristotle and Dudley: what can books tell us about their owners?

      Historian article
    Books as evidence The study of books as objects can reveal a great deal about their owners and the society in which they lived. By examining why the books were printed in the first place, and by whom; why they were acquired and for what purpose; how they were bound;...
    Aristotle and Dudley: what can books tell us about their owners?
  • Diagrams in History

      Historian 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...
    Diagrams in History
  • Alexandra and Rasputin

      Historian article
    Has the role of Alexandra and Rasputin in the downfall of the Romanovs been exaggerated out of all proportion? If a country is defeated in war, the rulers run the risk of being overthrown. In 1918 the Kaiser left Germany for Holland, Germany became a Republic; the Austro-Hungarian Empire came...
    Alexandra and Rasputin
  • The London Charterhouse

      Historian article
    Four hundred years ago, in 1611, Thomas Sutton was reputed to be the wealthiest commoner in England but he was nearing the end of his life. He had been a financier and he was formerly the Master of Ordnance in the Northern Parts. He decided to take up good works...
    The London Charterhouse
  • A Tale of Two Chancellors: The Ineffectual Reformation in Elizabethan Staffordshire

      Historian article
    The Elizabethan Reformation in Staffordshire had a shallow seedbed. The radical reformers of the 1540s had greeted the conversion of the county with a mixture of high hopes and hyperbole. The East Anglian preacher and disciple of Latimer, Thomas Becon, wrote a treatise The Iewel of Ioye urging that itinerant...
    A Tale of Two Chancellors: The Ineffectual Reformation in Elizabethan Staffordshire
  • Imperialism resurgent: European attempts to 'recolonise' South East Asia after 1945

      Historian article
    ‘To think that the people of Indochina would be content to settle for less [from the French] than Indonesia has gained from the Dutch or India from the British is to underestimate the power of the forces that are sweeping Asia today'. An American adviser in 1949 cited: Robin Jeffrey...
    Imperialism resurgent: European attempts to 'recolonise' South East Asia after 1945
  • Arnold Wilkins: Pioneer of British Radar

      Historian article
    Whenever British radar is discussed the name that usually comes to mind is that of Robert Watson Watt. Our history books and our dictionaries of biography consistently attribute the discovery of radar in Britain solely to Watson Watt, with little or no mention of the key role played by his...
    Arnold Wilkins: Pioneer of British Radar
  • The price of reform: the people's budget and the present trauma

      Historian article
    When Lloyd George succeeded Asquith as Chancellor of the Exchequer in April 1908, his first task was to introduce the old age pensions Asquith had initiated. His second was to prove even more momentous. On 29 April 1909 he presented what has become known as "The People's Budget". The task...
    The price of reform: the people's budget and the present trauma
  • Mercurial justice: a Jesuit chaplain’s view of life in the prisons of sixteenth-century Seville

      Historian article
    Justice in the early modern period was discretionary, which meant it could be both violent and deeply unfair. Elites often escaped the most severe punishments inflicted on the poor and minoritised groups. Clare Burgess shows how a Jesuit chaplain in sixteenth- century Seville used his spiritual discretion and zealous belief...
    Mercurial justice: a Jesuit chaplain’s view of life in the prisons of sixteenth-century Seville
  • James Macpherson: a Scottish Robin Hood

      Historian article
    James Macpherson led a notorious gang of robbers in late seventeenth-century Scotland, and he became infamous for robbing rich lairds to give to the poor. Anne-Marie Kilday explains how his notoriety is also significant for revealing how people in early modern Scotland could hold complex attitudes towards the Gypsy Roma...
    James Macpherson: a Scottish Robin Hood
  • Finding Bad Bridget: the lives and crimes of Irish immigrant women in America

      Historian article
    From the early nineteenth century until the First World War, millions of Irish women emigrated to North America in search of better lives. Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, co-leads for the AHRC-funded Bad Bridget research project, tell us how poverty, discrimination, isolation from family as well as greed and opportunism...
    Finding Bad Bridget: the lives and crimes of Irish immigrant women in America