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Found 684 results matching 'brief history' within Historian > Historical Periods > Modern   (Clear filter)

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  • Losing sight of the bigger picture: public policy and the visual arts

      Historian article
    From the 1940s to the late twentieth century, the visual arts in England were promoted and encouraged in a variety of ways by politicians and other policymakers, at both national and local level. Recent decades have seen a marginalisation of the arts, particularly in education. In this article Pauline Wood...
    Losing sight of the bigger picture: public policy and the visual arts

  • Vikings in the East: from Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin

      Historian article
    Martyn Whittock explores the lesser-known world of the Vikings who travelled east, forging the early state of Kyivan Rus and leaving a legacy still debated in Russia and Ukraine today. From silver routes and sagas to modern political claims, this article explores how their story and origins remain as dramatic...
    Vikings in the East: from Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin

  • Out and About: Leavesden Country Park

      Historian feature
    Concerns about demobilised soldiers after the Second World War were widespread, reflecting both the practical challenges faced by returning servicemen and broader anxieties about their reintegration into civilian life. In this article, Helen George explores how a temporary education facility in Hertfordshire helped prepare demobilised Canadian soldiers for higher education...
    Out and About: Leavesden Country Park

  • Real Lives: Eduard Friedrich Kärger

      Historian feature
    In this article, Alex van der Ham and Ling-Hua Huang explain how a casual browse through a nineteenth century journal led to an intriguing research journey into the author of a scientific dissertation. Here they discovered interesting insights into Prussian society in the years leading to the Unification of Germany,...
    Real Lives: Eduard Friedrich Kärger

  • The success of the Salford General Strike of 1911

      Historian article
    As we approach the centenary of Britain’s only national general strike, this article by Steve Illingworth tells the story of a successful local sympathetic strike in Salford in 1911. He analyses the reasons for the success of the Salford workers and considers why this kind of concerted industrial action could...
    The success of the Salford General Strike of 1911

  • Out and About: Bedfordshire’s airship memory

      Historian feature
    This article explores the Cardington airship hangars in Bedfordshire as reminders of Britain’s ambitious but short-lived airship programme. Built during the First World War, Cardington became central to the 1924 Imperial Airship Scheme and the construction of the R-100 and R-101. Celebrated as symbols of technological optimism, the programme ended...
    Out and About: Bedfordshire’s airship memory

  • Social Darwinism: the myth and its reinvention

      Historian article
    ‘Social Darwinism’ has been associated in academia and popular consciousness with negative concepts such as hyper-nationalism and eugenics. Geoffrey M. Hodgson challenges the notion that Social Darwinism or its proponents were ever well-defined. By tracing the use of ‘Social Darwinism’ across academic disciplines and globally over a long period, Hodgson...
    Social Darwinism: the myth and its reinvention

  • White heat or hot air? The politics of science in 1960s Britain

      Historian article
    Britain in the 1960s was captivated by scientific advancements. The public interest in ‘science’ was reflected in popular culture during this period. This zeitgeist for scientific revolution also captured aspects of British politics. The government of Harold Wilson sought to encourage scientific progress. Yet the difference between political aims and...
    White heat or hot air? The politics of science in 1960s Britain

  • Tunnel visions: London’s wartime shelters

      Historian article
    Ronan Thomas describes two different Second World War shelters in London. One was the top-secret Mayfair bunker in which Winston Churchill sheltered during the Blitz and governed the country from underground; the other protected thousands of south Londoners and went on to provide shelter to visitors to the capital for several years...
    Tunnel visions: London’s wartime shelters

  • 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

  • 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

  • Out and About: Locating the Local Lockup

      Historian feature
    If you are arrested for a crime today, you will very likely be taken to a police station and locked in a cell while officers decide if they have enough evidence to charge you. But have you ever wondered what happened to criminals and other disorderly folk – roughs, drunks...
    Out and About: Locating the Local Lockup

  • Imperial spaces of a ‘miniature world’: the case of Rugby School, c.1828–1850

      Historian article
    English public schools in the nineteenth century were training grounds not just for society’s elites but also for careers in Britain’s imperial service. In this article, Holly Hiscox explores the ways in which schools such as Rugby provided pupils with a miniature world of domestic and professional life which prepared...
    Imperial spaces of a ‘miniature world’: the case of Rugby School, c.1828–1850

  • What caused the decline of trams in West Yorkshire?

      Historian article
    In an article based on his award-winning essay for the Young Historian competition, Christopher Barnett describes the development, decline and potential resurrection of West Yorkshire’s tram network...
    What caused the decline of trams in West Yorkshire?

  • Film: Brezhnev's legacy

      Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
    In this film Dr Edwin Bacon looks back at Brezhnev’s 18 years and how is has been described as an era of stagnation, producing an appetite for change from younger leaders such as Mikail Gorbachev. Dr Bacon reflects that this was a period of relative peace, stability and predictability which...
    Film: Brezhnev's legacy

  • Film: Brezhnev and Détente

      Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
    In this film Dr Edwin Bacon blanks about the modernisation of the soviet union in the 1960s and 70s under Brezhnev, with some scholars predicting that as the East and West evolved, they would eventually converge as modern developed industrialised societies. The problem with convergence theory is that it didn’t...
    Film: Brezhnev and Détente

  • Film: Brezhnev's agenda

      Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
    In this film Dr Edwin Bacon talks about Brezhnev’s change in direction and approach after Khruschev, making collective leadership work and the Kosygin reforms. Whilst there were changes from the era of Khruschev, Brezhnev’s response to the Prague Spring in 1968 showed that some things had not changed. The events...
    Film: Brezhnev's agenda

  • Film: From Khrushchev to Brezhnev

      Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
    In this film Dr Edwin Bacon reflects upon the instability of the Khrushchev era and how Brezhnev positioned himself as the perfect replacement for a Soviet Communist party desperate for stability in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis. Brezhnev would be the first amongst equals looking to move forward...
    Film: From Khrushchev to Brezhnev

  • Film: Brezhnev's early life and career

      Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
    In this film Dr Edwin Bacon takes us through Brezhnev’s early life and career: his birth in Ukraine in 1906, the opportunities brought by the revolution, his role in the battle of Ukraine and his eventual arrival to the Politburo at the end of the 1950s. Dr Bacon looks at...
    Film: Brezhnev's early life and career

  • Film: Lenin and the Russian Civil War

      Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
    Revolution is never simple. Lenin and the Bolsheviks quickly found that not everyone in Russia or outside of it approved of their new radical agenda. Russia was plunged into a civil war of devastating circumstances. How would its new leader manage and how much were the needs of the people...
    Film: Lenin and the Russian Civil War

  • Film: Lenin and the birth of Soviet Russia

      Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
    Having changed the course of Russian society Lenin now needed to secure his Bolshevik survival. Unlike his predecessor he saw no need to continue with the Imperialist policies of a war in Europe. Territory could be sacrificed for control, but would promises and rhetoric be enough to govern among people...
    Film: Lenin and the birth of Soviet Russia

  • Film: Lenin and the 1917 Revolutions

      Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
    You wait a lifetime for a revolution and then two come along at once! Such was 1917 in Russia. As the world seemed in chaos and Russia and the Russian people began to collapse, Lenin and the Bolsheviks saw their opportunity and overthrew the government to create the first communist...
    Film: Lenin and the 1917 Revolutions

  • Film: Lenin, the 1905 Russian Revolution and WWI

      Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
    The founders of Communism, Marx and Engels, had created a set of social structures and industrial developments that were believed necessary for Communism to be achieved. Imperial Russia did not fit these conditions and yet at the start of the twentieth century Russian revolutionaries were some of the most active...
    Film: Lenin, the 1905 Russian Revolution and WWI

  • Film: Lenin's early thought

      Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
    As Lenin’s own political outlook and beliefs developed so did the European movements of Socialism and Communism. Groups emerged that wanted to radically change society and social structures. Lenin positioned himself as one of the leaders and crucially one of the thinkers behind these new ideas and movements.  Dr Lara...
    Film: Lenin's early thought

  • ‘The Nazi Service’? The Prussian origins of the Luftwaffe

      Historian article
    The Luftwaffe had been a real achievement of Prussian military culture, but under poor Nazi leadership it degenerated into an ineffective fighting force, writes Stephen Graham.
    ‘The Nazi Service’? The Prussian origins of the Luftwaffe