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How damaging to the Nazis was the Shetland Bus between 1940 and 1944?
Historian article
The Shetland Bus operation may be considered successful in that it supplied Norwegian resistance movements with weapons and took many refugees from Norway to Shetland, and that it managed to bind just shy of 300,000 German troops in Norway. However, because of this operation, forty-four men lost their lives, and...
How damaging to the Nazis was the Shetland Bus between 1940 and 1944?
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The Great Powers in the Pacific
Classic Pamphlet
This pamphlet covers a very large period of history in a very important region with great detail and focus. Themes that are covered include the transition of power and dominance in the pacific region, the conflicts that frequently arose in the struggle for pacific dominance throughout the centuries, as well...
The Great Powers in the Pacific
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Sir Francis Fletcher Vane, anti-militarist: The great boy scout schism of 1909
Historian article
Sir Francis Patrick Fletcher Vane, fifth baronet (1861-1934), a man of wideranging but seemingly contradictory passions and interests, was an idealistic but also hard-working aristocrat who played a major role in shaping the early Boy Scout movement in London. While the name of the founder of the Boy Scouts, Robert...
Sir Francis Fletcher Vane, anti-militarist: The great boy scout schism of 1909
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Kristallnacht
Historian article
Why Reichskristallnacht?
In The Third Reich Michael Burleigh writes: ‘We should be cautious in seeing spontaneity where frequency suggests instigation from a central source.' He comments on ‘a dialectic between "spontaneous" grassroot actions and "followup" state sponsored measures.' These remarks relate to 1935, the time of the Nuremberg Laws [the...
Kristallnacht
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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
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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?
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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?
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Irish Unionism 1885-1922
Classic Pamphlet
It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of Irish unionism for British and Irish politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement was supported almost exclusively by Irish Protestants who were of Anglo-Irish or Scotch-Irish descent and who comprised roughly one-quarter of the population of Ireland. Its...
Irish Unionism 1885-1922
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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
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The Mary Celeste: the history of a mystery
Historian article
Graham Faiella guides us through the historical evidence and literary speculation surrounding one of the ultimately unresolved incidents of recent times.
One hundred and fifty years ago, sometime between 25 November and 4 December 1872, the brigantine Mary Celeste was abandoned at sea somewhere between the Azores and the coast of Portugal....
The Mary Celeste: the history of a mystery
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Gladstone and the London May Day Demonstrators, 1890
Historian article
One hundred and twenty years ago the advent of the first red May Days caused major concern across Europe. To general surprise, in 1890 and the next few years some of the largest rallies occurred in London. In Britain the main demonstration on the nearest Sunday to May Day passed...
Gladstone and the London May Day Demonstrators, 1890
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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
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Real Lives: A German captain’s perspective on the end of WWI
Historian feature
Our series ‘Real Lives’ seeks to put the story of the ordinary person into our great historical narrative. We are all part of the rich fabric of the communities in which we live and we are affected sto greater and lesser degrees by the big events that happen on a daily...
Real Lives: A German captain’s perspective on the end of WWI
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Charles Gilpin
Historian article
Family Background and Early Life
Charles Gilpin was born in Bristol in 1815, the son of James Gilpin, a Quaker draper, and Mary Gilpin nee Sturge. The Sturges were a notable Quaker Liberal family, active in the campaign against slavery. Their relatives included the Darbys of Coalbrookdale. Charles Gilpin was...
Charles Gilpin
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Edwardian England
Classic Pamphlet
The Edwardian era is still less than a lifetime away. Yet the memoirs of surviving Edwardians, written any time between the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen sixties, have often made it sound like a remote epoch. The years between the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the outbreak of the...
Edwardian England
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The Oxford Movement and Anglican Ritualism
Classic Pamphlet
The English Reformation of the Sixteenth century had been a compromise, both politically and theologically. The administrative framework of the medieval church, with its system of church courts, private patronage, pluralism, the social and financial gulf between the lower and higher clergy, its inadequacy of clerical education and its hierarchical...
The Oxford Movement and Anglican Ritualism
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Polychronicon 129: Reinterpreting Peterloo
Teaching History feature
The Peterloo massacre is one of the best-documented events in British history. It was the bloodiest political event of the 19th century on English soil.
At St Peter's Fields in central Manchester on Monday 16 August 1819, a rally of around 60,000 people seeking parliamentary reform was violently dispersed by...
Polychronicon 129: Reinterpreting Peterloo
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The Great Spa Towns of Europe: a UNESCO World Heritage Site
Historian article
Catherine Lloyd introduces us to an international heritage initiative to celebrate ‘spa’ culture.
From ancient times, people believed that gods and spirits brought the means of natural healing. Step back in time to imagine an eerie wilderness, a glade in a wood, or a pool by a river, where the snow...
The Great Spa Towns of Europe: a UNESCO World Heritage Site
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The Englishness of George Orwell
Podcast
George Orwell is best known for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four - one book an allegory of The Russian Revolution, and the other a science fiction dystopia about a globalized world. Before these two last works, the heart and soul of Orwell's writing had been about England and the...
The Englishness of George Orwell
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Remember Peterloo!
Historian article
The BBC News at 10 on Saturday 5 July included an announcement that Manchester's campaign to have a memorial erected to the victims of the Peterloo Massacre had ‘got under way'. That afternoon, a workshop organised by the Peterloo Memorial campaign had encouraged members of the public to express their...
Remember Peterloo!
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The Enlightenment
Classic Pamphlet
Can a movement as varied and diffuse as the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century be contained within the covers of a short pamphlet? The problem would certainly have appealed to the intellectuals of that time. Generalists rather than specialists, citizens of the whole world of knowledge, they relished the challenge...
The Enlightenment
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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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Introductory film: Brezhnev - Interpretations
Part of the HA Interpretations Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
Log in below to preview the introductory film - available to all registered users of the website.
This open access introductory film forms part of our ongoing film series on Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union. All the films are available through the Student Zone with corporate secondary membership. ...
Introductory film: Brezhnev - Interpretations
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Harriet Kettle, Victorian rebel
Historian article
Harriet Kettle had a remarkable life. She was on the receiving end of everything that the institutions of social control in Victorian England could throw at her, but resisted, survived and fought back.
Harriet’s defiance earned her references in the records of a workhouse, two prisons, two asylums and, in...
Harriet Kettle, Victorian rebel
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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