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Film: Black British History – 1714 to 1785
Power and Freedom in Britain and Ireland: 1714–2010
In Episode 4, Dr Montaz Marché (University College London) and Professor Ryan Hanley (University of Exeter), discuss the lives and experience of 18th century Black Britons.
In this discussion they look at the lives of both the exceptional and the ordinary, and reflect upon the politics of race and gender in...
Film: Black British History – 1714 to 1785
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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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The Battle of Monte Cassino and the D-Day Landings
Article
The Second World War is no longer a recent war. Very soon, there will be no veterans left to tell us how they saw things and what it was really like for them. While some eyewitnesses who were children at the time might be with us to see the centenary...
The Battle of Monte Cassino and the D-Day Landings
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Virtual Branch Recording: Vagabonds versus the Mendicity Society
Article
Red Lion Square was long one of London's most genteel addresses, home to nobles, scholars, and professionals. But on 25 March 1818, one house on the south side opened its doors to quite another class of person, as the Mendicity Society began its business. Set up to solve the growing...
Virtual Branch Recording: Vagabonds versus the Mendicity Society
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Film: Bricks and the making of the city - London in the 19th century
Virtual Branch
In this HA Virtual Branch talk Peter Hounsell drew on his recently published book Bricks of Victorian London, exploring the crucial role brick production played in the creation of Britain's capital and why the important place of bricks in the fabric of the city isn't always obvious.
Peter Hounsell has published...
Film: Bricks and the making of the city - London in the 19th century
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Recorded Webinar: Female slave-ownership in 18th- and 19th-century Britain
Article
There is a great deal of discussion at the moment about how we engage with and confront the history and legacies of slavery in twenty-first century Britain. A lot of attention has been placed on men like slave trader Edward Colston or merchant and slave-owner Robert Milligan, both of whom were memorialised...
Recorded Webinar: Female slave-ownership in 18th- and 19th-century Britain
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Recorded Webinar: Nineteenth-century crime and punishment
Article
This webinar with Dr Emma D Watkins explores the changing understanding of crime and responses to it in the nineteenth-century. It provides a brief overview on the general shift from punishment of the body, to banishment, all the way through to imprisonment.
With a particular emphasis on the use of...
Recorded Webinar: Nineteenth-century crime and punishment
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Thomas Muir and the 'Scottish Martyrs' of the 1790s
Article
From the 1750s, after more than a century of intense political and religious disputes and of economic stagnation, Scotland began to enjoy several decades of almost unprecedented political stability, religious harmony, economic growth and cultural achievements. Jacobitism had been crushed and most propertied and influential Scots rallied to the Hanoverian...
Thomas Muir and the 'Scottish Martyrs' of the 1790s
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Queen Victoria
Article
A century ago Britain celebrated Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee – her reign having provided 60 years of stability at the height of Britain’s imperial power. Dorothy Thompson profiles the woman at the heart of the Empire. More than any other British monarch, with the possible exception of her one-time model,...
Queen Victoria
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Navigating the ‘imperial history wars’
Teaching History article
Concerned by the growing tendency of politicians and press to revive the moral balance-sheet approach to British imperial history and by some evidence of its resurgence in schools, Alex Benger set about devising a framework which would keep pupils’ analysis rigorously historical, rather than moral and politicised. In this article,...
Navigating the ‘imperial history wars’
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Film: Proto-feminism in Britain and Ireland – 1714 to 1785
Power and Freedom in Britain and Ireland: 1714–2010
In Episode 11, Dr Mary Jo MacDonald of the University of Jyväskylä explores how the end of the Licensing Act, sweeping political change, and a revolution in intellectual culture opened unprecedented opportunities for women to shape political, social, and intellectual life in Britain and Ireland. The film highlights major proto‑feminist thinkers...
Film: Proto-feminism in Britain and Ireland – 1714 to 1785
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Film: Disability in Britain and Ireland – 1714 to 1785
Film Series: Power and freedom in Britain and Ireland: 1714-2010
In Episode 6, Dr Declan Kavanagh (University of Kent) discusses the development of ideas around, and responses to, disability in Britain and Ireland in the 18th century.
Dr Kavanagh examines the definition given in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary in 1755 and looks at the medical and charity models of responding to disability...
Film: Disability in Britain and Ireland – 1714 to 1785
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Film: Power and freedom: Introduction – 1714 to 1785
Film Series: Power and freedom in Britain and Ireland: 1714-2010
In Episode 1, Dr Robin Eagles (History of Parliament), discusses the development of power and freedom in Britain and Ireland from the reign of Queen Anne to the beginning of the Georgian Age.
This was a period of strict hierarchy where the monarchy and aristocracy retained significant control over both...
Film: Power and freedom: Introduction – 1714 to 1785
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The ‘workless workers’ and the Waterbury watch
Historian article
Peter Hounsell looks at the role of the Waterbury Watch Company in both the Queen’s Jubilee and the attempt to record and alleviate unemployment in London in the 1880s.
In Britain generally, but for London in particular, 1887 was a year of great contrasts. On 27 June, Londoners lined the...
The ‘workless workers’ and the Waterbury watch
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The Historian 166: Crime and Punishment
The magazine of the Historical Association
This edition of The Historian is free to access for all HA members. Find out about membership here.
Contents
5 Editorial (Read article)
6 Coroners, communities, and the Crown: mapping death and justice in late medieval England – Stephanie Emma Brown (Read article - open access)
11 Mercurial justice: a...
The Historian 166: Crime and Punishment
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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
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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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Opinion: the populist politics of Joseph Chamberlain and Donald Trump
Historian feature
What are the pitfalls and pluses of comparing historical figures with contemporary politicians? Chris Godden argues that recent comparisons of Donald Trump with one of his predecessors may be wide of the mark, but that a more illuminating parallel may be found with one of Britain’s most controversial nineteenth-century politicians.
Opinion: the populist politics of Joseph Chamberlain and Donald Trump
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Making and breaking Britain’s national energy order
Historian article
British history flows through energy. Changes to fuel sources, technologies, workplace organisation and power along with government policy and ownership have been defining turning points in British economic history. In this article Ewan Gibbs traces the making, development and subsequent breaking of a national British energy order across the second half of...
Making and breaking Britain’s national energy order
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Out and About: The historical significance of the Botanic Garden in Oxford
Historian feature
The Oxford Botanic Garden was Britain’s first botanic garden and is world-renowned. Mia Andreasen, who knows it well, explores why they have been so successful and how they reflect not only plant life but also the global history of the past 400 years.
Out and About: The historical significance of the Botanic Garden in Oxford
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Doing history: reconstructing the life of physician, psychiatrist and anthropologist James Cowles Prichard
Historian feature
Margaret Crump’s Doing History explains how she went about researching the life of a Victorian scientist, gathering material about the man himself from a variety of sources including newspapers, genealogical databases, and archives, supplemented by contextual knowledge of the period.
Doing history: reconstructing the life of physician, psychiatrist and anthropologist James Cowles Prichard
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Cinderella dreams: young love in post-war Britain
Historian article
In a lecture given to the Cambridge branch, Carol Dyhouse explains changing attitudes to marriage in the 1950s and 60s.
Women teachers in the 1950s and 1960s regularly complained about how hard it was to keep girls’ attention on their schoolwork. Educationist Kathleen Ollerenshaw pointed out that the prospects of marriage,...
Cinderella dreams: young love in post-war Britain
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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
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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
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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
