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The Slave trade and British Abolition, 1787-1807
Historian article
In the 1780’s the British slave trade thrived. In that decade alone more than one thousand British and British colonial slave ships sailed for the slave coasts of Africa and transported more than 300,000 Africans. There was little evidence that here was a system uncertain about its economic future. If...
The Slave trade and British Abolition, 1787-1807
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The Origins of the Local Government Service
Historian article
The concept ‘local government’ dates only from the middle of the nineteenth century. ‘Local government service’ emerged later still. In 1903 Redlich and Hirst1 wrote of ‘municipal officers’, while in 1922 Robson2 preferred ‘the municipal civil service’. ‘Local government service’ perhaps derives its pedigree from its use in the final...
The Origins of the Local Government Service
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The Wonderful Land of Oz
Article
In the year of the centenary of the first publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L.Frank Baum, Douglas Horlock considers its political and intellectual context. On 7 May 1898, Frank Baum sat down in his Chicago home with a group of children including his sons. As on other...
The Wonderful Land of Oz
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The Great Exhibition
Article
‘Of all the decades to be young in, a wise man would choose the 1850s’ concludes G.M. Young in his Portrait of An Age. His choice is understandable. Historians and contemporaries have long viewed the middle years of the century as a ‘plateau of peace and prosperity’, an ‘age of...
The Great Exhibition
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The Spanish Collection
Article
For the art historian, a thorough study of works of art, their creators and the environment in which they were produced, as well as their significance then and now, is a specialised endeavour. This, nevertheless, does not exhaust the presentation of art to contemporaries, least of all in the context...
The Spanish Collection
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The British Union of Fascists: the international dimension
Article
Fascism failed in Britain in the 1930s – Europe’s decade of the ‘Brown plague’. Unlike in many European countries, fascists in Britain were never a serious threat to the democratic order. This was not for want of trying, especially on the part of Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union...
The British Union of Fascists: the international dimension
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Saint Robert and the Deer
Article
It is almost a commonplace that there is an affinity between a holy man and the creatures of the wild. The archetype is St. Francis of Assisi but the phenomenon was well marked both before and after his time. I would like to consider briefly an episode in the life...
Saint Robert and the Deer
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Lyndon Johnson & Albert Gore: Southern New Dealers and the Modern South
Historian article
Lyndon Johnson and Albert Gore were elected to Congress within a year of each other in 1937-38. They were elected in the old style of patronage-oriented southern Democratic Party politics in which a plethora of candidates, with few issues to divide them, contested primary elections. Both circumvented the local county...
Lyndon Johnson & Albert Gore: Southern New Dealers and the Modern South
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Chamberlain Day and the popular meaning of Tariff Reform
Historian article
Few Conservative institutions appealed to the Tory rank-and-file activist like the Tariff Reform League did in the opening two decades of the Twentieth Century. From its foundation in 1903, the League spearheaded Joseph Chamberlain’s crusade to grant tariffs on imported goods, acting as his grassroots organisation. This article attempts to...
Chamberlain Day and the popular meaning of Tariff Reform
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A Crusading Outpost: the City and County of Edessa - 1095-1153
Article
Edessa is not now to be found on maps of the Near East; instead there is Urfa, the Turkish name for the former Christian city lying in the upper region of the Euphrates valley some two hundred and fifty kilometres from the Mediterranean. Like Christian Edessa, Moslem Urfa is a...
A Crusading Outpost: the City and County of Edessa - 1095-1153
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Presenting Naseby
Historian article
The summer of 2007 saw the completion of new visitor facilities on and near the battlefield of Naseby. The two locations are the first to be created since the Cromwell Monument was finished in 1936 and they stand more than 5km (3 miles) apart, one of them 2km south-east of...
Presenting Naseby
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Iconic Images of War: photographs that changed history
Historian article
The recent photographs taken of US troops apparently abusing Iraqi prisoners-of-war in Abu Ghraib Jail have attracted attention across the world. Although it is too early to say whether these images will come to represent the essential character of the current Iraq conflict, they have altered public perceptions, producing doubt...
Iconic Images of War: photographs that changed history
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‘You should be proud about your history. They make you feel ashamed’: Teaching history hurts
Teaching History article
As history teachers we are used to encouraging pupils to think; enabling them to express thoughts with clarity both verbally and in written form. Yet, if history as a school subject becomes purely cognitive, then something is missing. History deals with human behaviour and therefore the affective and the emotional...
‘You should be proud about your history. They make you feel ashamed’: Teaching history hurts
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The Uses of History in the Twenty First Century
Historian article
During the last century or so there has developed a new ‘public role’ for history: the past as personal history, a vital element in the nourishing of people in society. During the past decades a new perception of what history is has manifested itself on two levels: first a shift of...
The Uses of History in the Twenty First Century
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The Historical Manuscripts Commission
Article
The Historical Manuscripts Commission (or, to give it its full and formal title, the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts) was established in 1869. Its purpose was to enquire into the existence and whereabouts of manuscripts of value for the study of British history, and to make the results of its...
The Historical Manuscripts Commission
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A Social History of the Welsh Language
Historian article
When the historian Peter Burke wrote in 1987 ‘It is high time for a social history of language’, he could scarcely have imagined that the first to meet the challenge would be the Welsh. In November 2000 the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, a research...
A Social History of the Welsh Language
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The Spanish Armada of...1597?
Article
Graham Darby gives an anniversary account of the later Spanish Armadas, long forgotten, but comparable in size and as threatening to contemporaries as the more famous Armada of 1588. As every schoolboy and schoolgirl should know, the Spanish Armada set sail in 1588: ‘God blew and they were scattered.’ However,...
The Spanish Armada of...1597?
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Personality & Power: The individual's role in the history of twentieth-century Europe
Article
What role do individuals wielding great power play in determining significant historical change? And how do historians locate human agency in historical change, and explain it? These are the issues I would like to reflect a little upon here. They are not new problems. But they are inescapable ones for...
Personality & Power: The individual's role in the history of twentieth-century Europe
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A-Level Essay: To what extent does the art of the Edo period of Japan reflect the contentment of the classes within its society?
Article
The Edo period in Japanese history fell between the years 1600 and 1867, beginning when Tokugawa Ieyatsu, a daimyo (samurai lord), became the strongest power in Japan, and ending with Tokugawa Keiki’s abdication. The Tokugawas claimed the hereditary title of Shogun, supreme governor of Japan. (The emperor had become a...
A-Level Essay: To what extent does the art of the Edo period of Japan reflect the contentment of the classes within its society?
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Jerome K Jerome and other travellers in the Thames Valley
Article
Travellers and visitors have streamed to, and through Oxford, for centuries. Its name conveys its very functional origin as a fording point on the River Thames. Obviously these travellers and visitors came from a variety of directions, and by a variety of routes, using land and water transport. On this...
Jerome K Jerome and other travellers in the Thames Valley
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The Value of Biography in History
Article
7 April 2000: Historical Association, Norton Medlicott Medal Lecture. President, fellow members, ladies and gentlemen. I am deeply conscious that having just received the Norton Medlicott Medal; which means so much to me, that I must try to live up to the honour itself and the traditions of the recipients....
The Value of Biography in History
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The 1650s
Historian article
The 1630s in England began effectively in 1629 with the abrupt dismissal of Charles I’s third parliament and ended in 1640 at the first meeting of what would become the Long Parliament. Similarly we may start the 1650s with the regicide of January 1649 and finish with the surprising return...
The 1650s
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The Insanity of Henry VI
Article
Carole Rawcliffe examines medieval attitudes to madness and the case of Henry VI. Mad kings are all the rage at present. The remarkable success, first of Alan Bennett’s stage play, The Madness of George III, and then of the widely acclaimed film version, has prompted a spate of newspaper articles...
The Insanity of Henry VI
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The ideological contribution of 'The Times' in favour of motherhood in Great Britain between 1910–1920
Historian article
During the early years of the twentieth century, the New Liberals spread a political ideology which was much closer to socialism than to Victorian liberalism. Indeed, they preached State intervention in favour of social welfare, national prosperity and imperialistic strength; that social policy which logically required extra care and increased...
The ideological contribution of 'The Times' in favour of motherhood in Great Britain between 1910–1920
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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...
Britain and the Formation of NATO
