Filter your results

Historian
Primary
Secondary
Student
Publications
Podcasts
Higher Education
Branches

Found 275 results matching 'brief history' within Student > Historical Periods > Modern > Britain & Ireland   (Clear filter)

Not found what you’re looking for? Try using double quote marks to search for a specific whole word or phrase, try a different search filter on the left, or see our search tips.

  • 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

  • Pressure and Persuasion Canadian agents and Scottish emigration, c. 1870- c. 1930

      Article
    In February, 1907, the Canadian government’s most northerly regional emigration office in the British Isles opened for business in Aberdeen. Located near the city centre, only a stone’s throw from the docks and the railway station, it soon fulfilled the expectation that it would capture the attention of a large...
    Pressure and Persuasion Canadian agents and Scottish emigration, c. 1870- c. 1930

  • 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

  • Queen Victoria as a Politician

      Article
    Even had Queen Victoria not presided over the achievements of the age which bears her name, her career would still hold a fascination for the historian. She was, for one thing, the solitary woman in a male political world. She was possessed of a personality at once perceptive and simple,...
    Queen Victoria as a Politician

  • The Second World War

      Classic Pamphlet
    On 5 September 1939 the German Führer, Adolf Hitler, paid a surprise visit to the corps which was in the forefront of his army's ferocious assault upon Poland. As they passed the remains of a smashed Polish artillery regiment, the corps commander, General Guderian, astonished Hitler by telling him that...
    The Second World War

  • 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

  • Lord Palmerston

      Historian article
    Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) has long interested (and confused) historians. A man of contradictions and paradoxes, he seemed both to embody modern Victorian Britain, and yet at the same time stand as a potent symbol of what had been lost.
    Lord Palmerston

  • World War 2 Letters

      Link
    Lt. Richard (Dick) Kelner Williams volunteered for the Dorset Regiment in June 1940.  He trained in Wiltshire with the 6th and 70th Dorsets in 1940 and 41.  After a period in the Intelligence Section of the Dorsets he volunteered for the 1st Air Landing Squadron and the 43rd Reconnaissance Regiment before his commission...
    World War 2 Letters

  • 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

  • Catch me if you can: Trevithik vs. Stephenson

      Historian article
    Richard Trevithick & George Stephenson: a twenty firstcentury Reassessment Two hundred years ago, a remarkable event took place in London. At the instigation of Richard Trevithick, engineer, polymath and inventor - who many regard as the greatest Cornishman ever - an elliptical circuit of cast iron rail was laid out...
    Catch me if you can: Trevithik vs. Stephenson

  • 'The end of all existence is debarred me': Disraeli's depression 1826-30

      Historian article
    During the years from 1826 to 1830 Benjamin Disraeli went through the slough of despond. His first major biographer,William Flavelle Monypenny, observed the ‘clouds of despondency which were now settling upon Disraeli's mind'. In his magisterial life of the great tory leader Robert Blake commented that ‘after completing Part II...
    'The end of all existence is debarred me': Disraeli's depression 1826-30

  • The snobbery of chronology: In defence of the generals on the Western Front

      Historian article
    Faced with the testimony of the huge casualty lists of the First World War, the desperate battles of attrition, the emotive evidence of the seemingly endless cemeteries and memorials, the moving war poetry of men such as Owen and Sassoon, and the memoirs of those who fought, it is not...
    The snobbery of chronology: In defence of the generals on the Western Front

  • The People's Pensions

      Recorded lecture
    Why did the British get pensions when they did? What part did the great social surveys (Booth and Rowntree) play? Was there something rotten at the heart of Empire? What part did fears of a Red Peril play? Was Britain slow, with Bismarck and even the Tsar providing some measures of...
    The People's Pensions

  • 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

  • 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

  • What's New About New Labour?

      Historian article
    In the 1980s it was often argued that the Labour party was finished as a major force in British politics. Yet on 1st May 1997 it won a landslide victory, securing an overall majority of 179 in parliament. Two years into its term of office, it retains a strong lead...
    What's New About New Labour?

  • My grandfather's recollections of the invasion of Normandy

      Historian article
    16-year-old Daisy Black of Newcastle-under-Lyme School in Staffordshire was the Senior Award winner in the Spirit of Normandy Trust Young Historian competition in 2007. Having been judged the winner by the Young Historian panel, the Spirit of Normandy Trsutees were so taken with her entry that they gave her an...
    My grandfather's recollections of the invasion of Normandy

  • 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'

  • 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

  • Social Darwinism: the myth and its reinvention

      Historian article
    ‘Social Darwinism’ has been associated in academia and popular consciousness with negative concepts such as hyper-nationalism and eugenics. Geoffrey M. Hodgson challenges the notion that Social Darwinism or its proponents were ever well-defined. By tracing the use of ‘Social Darwinism’ across academic disciplines and globally over a long period, Hodgson...
    Social Darwinism: the myth and its reinvention

  • Tunnel visions: London’s wartime shelters

      Historian article
    Ronan Thomas describes two different Second World War shelters in London. One was the top-secret Mayfair bunker in which Winston Churchill sheltered during the Blitz and governed the country from underground; the other protected thousands of south Londoners and went on to provide shelter to visitors to the capital for several years...
    Tunnel visions: London’s wartime shelters

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Mountbatten in retirement: the abortive trip to rebel Rhodesia

      Historian article
    Adrian Smith investigates an abortive plan for the earl to intervene in Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Earl Mountbatten of Burma boasted a unique CV: Chief of Combined Operations, Supreme Commander South-East Asia, Admiral of the Fleet and First Sea Lord, Chief of the Defence Staff, and Viceroy of India. Yet somehow...
    Mountbatten in retirement: the abortive trip to rebel Rhodesia