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‘The story of her own wretchedness’: heritage and homelessness
Historian article
David Howell uses eighteenth-century beggars at Tintern Abbey as a starting point for his research into the use of heritage sites by the homeless.
In 1782, the Reverend William Gilpin published his Observations on the River Wye, a notable contribution to the emerging picturesque movement. A key element of his work is a commentary on Tintern Abbey....
‘The story of her own wretchedness’: heritage and homelessness
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Promoting the First World War, 1914-16
Historian article
The popular image of the First World War is of young men leaving the tedium of the factory or the mine to volunteer for service on the Western Front in one of Kitchener’s new armies. Less well known is the background effort that went into maintaining and strengthening morale as...
Promoting the First World War, 1914-16
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Podcast: Richard Evans Medlicott -The Origins of the First World War
Medlicott Podcast
This year the Historical Association's Medlicott medal for services to history went to Professor Sir Richard Evans. Richard Evans is the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge and President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has written numerous highly respected and internationally best-selling books. Evans is bests known for his works on...
Podcast: Richard Evans Medlicott -The Origins of the First World War
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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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Earth in vision: Enviromental Broadcasting
Historian article
Joe Smith, Kim Hammond and George Revill share some of the findings of their work examining what digital broadcast archives are available and which could be made available in future.
The BBC’s archives hold over a million hours of programmes, dating back to the 1930s (radio) and 1940s (television). It...
Earth in vision: Enviromental Broadcasting
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William Morris, Art and the Rise of the British Labour Movement
Article
Commenting in early 1934 at the University College, Hull, at the time of the centenary of William Morris’ birth and of a large exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the historian and active socialist, G.D.H. Cole commented, William Morris’ influence is very much alive today: but let us not...
William Morris, Art and the Rise of the British Labour Movement
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Heritage and History
Article
Moves to protect and record the historic environment began at the turn of the 20th century with the establishment of the National Trust in 1895, the Victoria County History in 1899, and the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments for England in 1908. The VCH took the antiquarians’ task onto a...
Heritage and History
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Architecture within the reach of all
Historian article
Roisin Inglesby introduces us to the life and work of a lesser known member of the Arts and Crafts movement, Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, who helped to change the face of European architecture and interior design.
Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851–1942) may not be a household name, but he is arguably one of the most significant figures in British design...
Architecture within the reach of all
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The Transport Revolution 1750-1830
Classic Pamphlet
The period 1750-1830, traditionally marking the classical industrial revolution, achieved in Great Britain what Professor Rostow has called the economy's "take-off into self-sustained growth". A revolution in transportation was part of the complex of changes - industrial, agricultural, mercantile and commercial - occurring roughly concurrently.The impetus to transport change is...
The Transport Revolution 1750-1830
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Recorded webinar: Untold Stories of D-Day
Webinar
The HA has worked with film-maker, historian and Legasee ambassador Martyn Cox on a series of webinars looking at untold stories from the Second World War. Many of these stories are taken for the oral histories provided in interviews given to Martyn on film.
In this filmed webinar, Martyn goes...
Recorded webinar: Untold Stories of D-Day
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A sense of occasion
Historian article
It is appropriate, in this bicentenary year of Mendelssohn's birth, to remember a great day in Birmingham's musical and social calendar. A day when the composer's Oratorio, Elijah, especially commissioned for the city's 1846 Triennial Festival to raise money for the Children's Hospital, was first performed in the newly refurbished Town...
A sense of occasion
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Ancient Athenian inscriptions in public and private UK collections
Historian article
Peter Liddel introduces us to a rich source of historical information and encourages us to make some purposeful visits to museums.
From the seventeenth to the mid nineteenth century, travellers from the UK explored the Mediterranean lands of ancient civilisations in search of trophies that demonstrated the achievements of the classical world. Highly...
Ancient Athenian inscriptions in public and private UK collections
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William Stubbs
Classic Pamphlet
William Stubbs was among the earliest, and is still one of the greatest of the academical English historians. His life (1825-1901) fell in a period that produced a notable succession of distinguished historians in England. He was the first of them to do his historical work as a resident teacher...
William Stubbs
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Newcastle and the General Strike 1926
Historian article
The nine-day General Strike of May 1926 retains a totemic place in the nation's history nearly 100 years later. The Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill was among those who attempted to characterise it as anarchy and revolution, but this was hyperbole and largely inaccurate for, as Ellen Wilkinson (then...
Newcastle and the General Strike 1926
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Each man's life was worth 1sh 1d 1/2d!
Historian article
Alf Wilkinson explores Britain's biggest coal mining disaster, at Senghenydd Colliery, in South Wales, in October 1913.
At ten past eight in the morning of Tuesday 14 October 1913, just after 900 men had started work underground, an explosion ripped through Senghenydd Colliery, near Caerphilly, killing 439 miners and, later...
Each man's life was worth 1sh 1d 1/2d!
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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
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Film: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War
The Searchers
Historian Robert Sackville-West joined the HA Virtual Branch in November 2021 to talk about the topic of his book The Searchers: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War. By the end of the First World War, the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers were unknown. Most were presumed...
Film: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War
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Filmed Lecture: Medlicott Lecture 2022 by David Olusoga
Article
Professor David Olusoga is a revered TV historian, a writer and a practising academic at Manchester University. In 2022 he was the recipient of the Historical Association's annual Medlicott medal, awarded for outstanding contributions to history.
The recipient of the medal provides the closing lecture of the HA's annual awards evening. Professor...
Filmed Lecture: Medlicott Lecture 2022 by David Olusoga
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Chartism
Classic Pamphlet
It is not surprising that Chartism has attracted a great deal of interest from historians and students, for at no other period in British history, with the possible exception of the second and third decades of the twentieth century, has so much excitement and activity been aroused at the working-class...
Chartism
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Eighteenth-century Britain and its Empire
Article
The concept of an ‘English’ or even of a ‘British’ empire has been in use at least from the sixteenth century. What the term then conveyed was of course very different from what it was to convey in modern times. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, contemporaries were beginning to envisage...
Eighteenth-century Britain and its Empire
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Faster, Higher, Stronger: The Birth of the Modern Olympics
Article
As the leading athletes of all nations prepare to come together this summer in Atlanta, the global communications media of the late twentieth century are constantly reminding us that 1996 marks the first centenary of the modern Olympic Games. The worldwide impact now made by these sporting festivals is all...
Faster, Higher, Stronger: The Birth of the Modern Olympics
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Jane Austen: a writer for all seasons
Article
Irene Collins provides a fresh assessment of the life and work of one of this country’s greatest novelists, whose own wit and charm, combined with a deep insight into human nature, is reflected in her novels. Jane Austen was not the first woman novelist in England to achieve popularity and...
Jane Austen: a writer for all seasons
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The Pilgrimage of Grace: Reactions, Responses and Revisions
Article
Dr Michael Bush investigates the interpretations of the pilgrimage of grace. Our perception of the pilgrimage of grace has been largely created by Madeleine and Ruth Dodds and their magnificent book The Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536-7, and the Exeter Conspiracy, 1538 (Cambridge). Published in 1915, it has dominated the subject...
The Pilgrimage of Grace: Reactions, Responses and Revisions
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The Rise and Fall of the Constitutional Press, 1858-1860
Article
Amy de Gruchy provides an account of a short-lived newspaper of the Conservative Right which published work by Charlotte Yonge. The Constitutional Press was born in March 1858 following the formation of the second minority Conservative government under Lord Derby. It was a weekly paper containing Parliamentary reports, British and...
The Rise and Fall of the Constitutional Press, 1858-1860
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Quixotically Generous...Economically Worthless'
Article
William Kenefick considers two views of the dockers and the dockland community in Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries. 'Quixotically generous and economically worthless’! But what does this mean? How does this curious descriptor help us understand the docker or the waterside community? Indeed, does it tell us...
Quixotically Generous...Economically Worthless'
