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Why the OBE survived the Empire
Historian article
An anomaly of the British honours system is the name of the award most frequently given - the Order of the British Empire created in 1917. Each medal carries the words: ‘For God and the Empire'. When the connection between the person honoured and the church is often very tenuous...
Why the OBE survived the Empire
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Britain's Olympic visionary
Historian article
Forty-six years before the modern Olympics began, the small Shropshire market town of Much Wenlock was the seemingly unlikely setting for the establishment of an ‘Olympian Games'. Commencing in 1850, they were to become an annual festival in the town. The architect of this sporting enterprise was a local surgeon...
Britain's Olympic visionary
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Spencer Perceval: private values and public virtues
Historian article
The public man and his career Spencer Perceval's career as a public figure lasted from 1796 when he became a King's Counsel and MP for Northampton until his murder sixteen years later at the age of 49. He was shot in the lobby of the House of Commons at 5.15pm...
Spencer Perceval: private values and public virtues
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The death of Lord Londonderry
Historian article
Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry, better known to his contemporaries and to history as Viscount Castlereagh, committed suicide on 12 August 1822, at the age of fifty-three, when Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons. He was one of the great statesmen of his age: as Chief...
The death of Lord Londonderry
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Disraeli, Peel and the Corn Laws: the making of a conservative reputation
Historian article
125 years after his death, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, still provides the political lode-star for generations of Conservatives. Lately, for the first time in 30 years, Disraeli's name and example has been enthusiastically evoked by the party leadership and David Cameron has projected himself as a Disraeli for the...
Disraeli, Peel and the Corn Laws: the making of a conservative reputation
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A Victorian deserter's family story: surviving a clash of loyalties
Historian article
More people than ever are seeking to trace their family histories. People can now sit at home and tap out in seconds from the internet many of their family's previously unknown genealogical details. But what if a century or more ago one of your family had tried to cover his...
A Victorian deserter's family story: surviving a clash of loyalties
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The Pennsylvanian Origins of British Abolitionism
Historian article
It can have escaped the attention of very few people in the United Kingdom that 2007 marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in British ships. Slavery itself continued to be legal in Britain and its colonies until the 1830s, while other nations continued both to...
The Pennsylvanian Origins of British Abolitionism
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The Willing Suspension of Disbeliefs
Article
There should be no hesitancy doubting his existence R. G. Collingwood is remembered today as a philosopher, a man with a wide range of interests, the core of whose work is in the Idealist tradition. He died in 1943 and although his work has subsequently not been widely celebrated the...
The Willing Suspension of Disbeliefs
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Beware the serpent of Rome
Article
On 14 February 1868, the Carlisle Journal reported as follows: … two meetings were held in the Athenaeum in this city , “for the purpose of forming an auxiliary to co-operate with the Church Association in London, to uphold the principles and order of the United Church of England and...
Beware the serpent of Rome
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England Arise! The General Election of 1945
Historian article
‘The past week will live in history for two things’, announced the Sunday Times of 29 July 1945, ‘first the return of a Labour majority to Parliament and the end of Churchill's great war Premiership.’ Most other newspapers concurred. The Daily Mirror, of 27 July, proclaimed that the 1945 general election...
England Arise! The General Election of 1945
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The 2007 Medlicott Medal Lecture What kind of history should school history be?
Historian article
I need to start by introducing myself. Most of the previous winners of the distinguished Norton Medlicott Medal have been household names, historians who have moved beyond the library shelves to reach wider audiences through the popularity of their books or television programmes. If you looked through the Radio Times...
The 2007 Medlicott Medal Lecture What kind of history should school history be?
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Roald Dahl and the Lost Campaign
Historian article
Following the successful filming of his book ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, Roald Dahl has an international reputation as a children’s writer. There is, however, a macabre dimension to his writing underlined by his successful TV series ‘Tales of the Unexpected’. Dark episodes in Dahl’s highly successful career touched his...
Roald Dahl and the Lost Campaign
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Landowners and their motives for change at the Suffolk village of Culford between 1793 and 1903
Historian article
Isabel Jones from Thomas Mills High School at Framlingham was the winner of the Young Historian Award for Local History [16-19] in 2006. The Director of the Young Historian Project, Trevor James, has edited her winning essay. It has been shortened and the footnotes removed, to enable it to fit...
Landowners and their motives for change at the Suffolk village of Culford between 1793 and 1903
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Oscar Wilde: the myth of martydom
Historian article
Over a century after his death, interest in Oscar Wilde and his work is at flood tide, with unprecedented levels of publication and research about Wilde and his work. Wildean studies proliferate, much in languages other than English. Recent translations of Wilde’s work have included Romanian, Hebrew, Swedish and Catalan,...
Oscar Wilde: the myth of martydom
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Guy Fawkes in Manchester: The World of William Harrison Ainsworth
Historian article
Some of the most enduring myths in British history were created and perpetuated by novelists, despite the fact that the historical novel has long been relegated to the second division of the literary arts. Deeply unfashionable today, writers like Sir Walter Scott, Edward Bulwer Lytton and William Harrison Ainsworth were...
Guy Fawkes in Manchester: The World of William Harrison Ainsworth
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Jubilee and the Idea of Royalty
2002 Medlicott Lecture
The Medlicott Lecture delivered at the Historical Association Annual General Meeting on 27th April 2002, transcribed and featured in The Historian 76.
Jubilee and the Idea of Royalty
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The Friar's Bush
Article
Nothing on earth would have persuaded me to enter the place… it was the house of the dead. Paul Henry, artist (1876-1958)
The Friar's Bush cemetery on the Stranmillis Road in Belfast may only be two acres in size, but its history is far bloodier and grislier than you would...
The Friar's Bush
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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 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 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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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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‘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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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
