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Found 278 results matching 'brief history' within Student > Historical Periods > Modern > Britain & Ireland   (Clear filter)

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  • 'Women and Children first!' a lost tale of Empire and Heroism

      Historian article
    In January 1852, under the command of Captain Robert Salmond, HMS Birkenhead left Portsmouth carrying troops and officers' wives and families from ten different regiments. Most were from the 73rd Regiment of Foot, and were on their way to South Africa to fight the Xhosa in the 8th Kaffir War (1850-1853),...
    'Women and Children first!' a lost tale of Empire and Heroism

  • Antarctica 100 years on from Captain Scott

      Historian article
    No longer "A Pole Apart": Antarctica 100 years on from Captain Scott At last on 12 November 1912 the search party found the tent almost totally buried in snow. According to Thomas Williamson: ‘Mr Wright came towards us, and said it was the Polar Party ... it was a great blow...
    Antarctica 100 years on from Captain Scott

  • 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

  • The Coming of War in 1939

      Classic Pamphlet
    I. The Legacy of Versailles The Outbreak of a second world war on 1 September 1939 might have been expected to produce in due course a great controversy on ‘war guilt'. But there has been nothing comparable with the debate which took place during the 1920s on the 1914 issues. The...
    The Coming of War in 1939

  • The British Government's Confidential Files on the United States

      Historian article
    Unpublished papers in Britain's National Archives at Kew reveal curious undercurrents in Anglo-American relations. After the conclusion of the Boer War, for example, the British Army supposed that the next major conflict would be not with Germany but with the U.S. A memo printed for circulation in July 1904 entitled ‘A...
    The British Government's Confidential Files on the United States

  • The price of reform: the people's budget and the present trauma

      Historian article
    When Lloyd George succeeded Asquith as Chancellor of the Exchequer in April 1908, his first task was to introduce the old age pensions Asquith had initiated. His second was to prove even more momentous. On 29 April 1909 he presented what has become known as "The People's Budget". The task...
    The price of reform: the people's budget and the present trauma

  • The Advent of Decimalisation in Britain: 1971

      Historian article
    Decimal Day in Britain was Monday 15 February 1971. New coins and notes were circulated. There was no special issue postage stamp to commemorate the occasion, only a new series with some unfamiliar values, such as 7½p instead of 1s 6d. The fortieth anniversary of the arrival of decimal currency...
    The Advent of Decimalisation in Britain: 1971

  • 1914: The Coming of the First World War

      Classic Pamphlet
    This pamphlet argues that the outbreak of the First World War represented not so much the culmination of a long process started by Bismarck and his successors, as the relatively sudden breakdown of a system that had in fact preserved the peace and contained the dangerous Eastern Question for over...
    1914: The Coming of the First World War

  • Hammer, House of Horror: The making of a British film company, 1934 to 1979

      Historian article
    The now legendary film company Hammer made such classics as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958), plus their numerous sequels and subsequent remakes of old Universal Gothic chillers (The Curse of the Werewolf, The Mummy, The Phantom of the Opera), as well as making international stars out of Peter...
    Hammer, House of Horror: The making of a British film company, 1934 to 1979

  • The League of Nations

      Classic Pamphlet
    It is common to see the failure of the League of Nations in its inability to stand up to the crises of the inter-war years.Peter Raffo shows that the League was flawed from the start. Never more than a voluntary association of sovereign states hoping to create ‘an atmosphere capable...
    The League of Nations

  • Fascism in Europe 1919-1945

      Classic Pamphlet
    The importance of fascism in 20th Century Europe is beyond question. But what was - or is - fascism?It is synonymous with authoritarian rule or the totalitarian state, or with both? In political terms, is fascism ‘right-wing' or ‘left-wing', revolutionary or reactionary? Why did it develop? Was it truly only...
    Fascism in Europe 1919-1945

  • 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

  • Women and Gender in the French Wars

      The Napoleonic Wars
    In this podcast Dr Louise Carter critically examines the role of women in Britain during the French Revolution. During these wars, women were typically called on for army cooking, laundry, nursing and spying, and as such were considered part of the war machine. While women in the French wars accounted for...
    Women and Gender in the French Wars

  • The Northern Ireland Question 1886-1986

      Classic Pamphlet
    The nature of the rights of majorities and minorities is one of the most intractable of the issues raised by the Northern Ireland question, especially since much depends on definitions. Ulster Protestants are a majority in that province but a minority in both Ireland and the United Kingdom, while Catholics,...
    The Northern Ireland Question 1886-1986

  • 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

  • Anorexia Nervosa in the nineteenth century

      Historian article
    First referred to by Richard Morton (1637-98) in his Phthisiologia under the denomination phthisis nervosa as long ago as 1689, anorexia nervosa was given its name in a note by Sir William Gull (1816-90) in 1874. Gull had earlier described a disorder he termed apepsia hysterica, involving extreme emaciation without...
    Anorexia Nervosa in the nineteenth century

  • Hat on headstones

      Historian article
    The grave markers in churchyards and cemeteries are for the most part depressingly unimaginative both in their design and in their inscriptions but one occasionally meets with an attempt at striking an individual note, such as a sculpted depiction of a motor vehicle, or an animal, or the head-gear worn...
    Hat on headstones

  • Child labour in eighteenth century London

      Historian article
    On 1 March 1771, thirteen year-old John Davies, a London charity school boy, left his home in Half MoonAlley and made his way to Bishopsgate Street. There he joined thirteen other boys of similar age who, like him, were new recruits of the Marine Society, a charity that sent poor...
    Child labour in eighteenth century London

  • The Versailles Peace Settlement

      Classic Pamphlet
    This classic pamphlet takes you through the Paris Peace Conference and the 'German Question', Peacemaking and the Treaty of Versailles, Europe and the German question after Versailles.
    The Versailles Peace Settlement

  • 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

  • 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

  • Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show opens London's Earl Court in 1887

      Historian article
    ‘It is often said on the other side of the water that none of the exhibitions which we send to England are purely and distinctively American', exhorted Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) in an unsolicited letter of September 1884 to ‘Colonel' William Frederick Cody (1846-1917). ‘If you will take the Wild...
    Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show opens London's Earl Court in 1887

  • 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

  • Attitudes to Liberty and Enslavement: the career of James Irving, a Liverpool slave ship surgeon and captain

      Historian article
    Prior to abolition in 1807, Britain was the world’s leading slave trading nation. Of an estimated six million individuals forcibly transported from Africa in the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century, almost 2.5 million (40 per cent) were carried in British vessels.2 The contemporary attitudes and assumptions which underpinned...
    Attitudes to Liberty and Enslavement: the career of James Irving, a Liverpool slave ship surgeon and captain

  • 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