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Bayeux
Historian article
Bayeux, 23 kilometres west of Caen, was the first French town to be liberated in 1944 - on 7 June in fact, the day after the landings. Yet its origins go much further back than that: its first bishop was consecrated in the fourth century. It became part of Normandy...
Bayeux
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Adam Smith
Classic Pamphlet
Adam Smith 1723-1790
Adam Smith was so pre-eminently one of the master minds of the eighteenth century and so obviously one of the dominating influences of the nineteenth, in his own country and in the world at large, that is somewhat surprising that we are so ill-informed regarding the details...
Adam Smith
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India in 1914
Historian article
Rather as Queen Victoria was never as ‘Victorian' as we tend to assume, so British India in the years leading up to 1914 does not present the cliched spectacle of colonists in pith helmets and shorts lording it over subservient natives that we might assume. Certainly that sort of relationship...
India in 1914
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Round About A Pound A Week
Historian article
In this edition, we begin a new occasional feature, where we explore a classic text that had a major impact both at the time it was published, and since. Alf Wilkinson discusses a book first published in 1913, and still in print, and explains why he thinks it is as...
Round About A Pound A Week
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Queenship in Medieval England: A Changing Dynamic?
Historian article
In the winter of 1235-6, Eleanor, the 12 year old daughter of Count Raymond-Berengar V of Provence and Beatrice of Savoy, left her native homeland. She travelled to England to marry King Henry III, a man 28 years her senior whom she had never met. The bride and her entourage...
Queenship in Medieval England: A Changing Dynamic?
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Papal Election and Murder
Historian article
Before the smoke clears: The longest papal election in history was marred by a brutal murder
Papal elections never used to be so short or easy. In 1268 Pope Clement IV died and the cardinals, divided between French and Italian factions, would be deadlocked for the next three years over...
Papal Election and Murder
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Taking tea with Frau von Papen
Historian article
The Weimar Republic in its last days as seen and remembered by a five-year-old English boy. A long-standing member of the Historical Association remembers an experience from eighty years ago.
As Mrs Merkel is well aware, the fear of inflation is deeply embedded in the German folk memory. Eighty years...
Taking tea with Frau von Papen
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Cathars and Castles in Medieval France
Historian article
Almost exactly 800 years ago, in September 1213, a decisive battle was fought at Muret, about ten miles south-west of Toulouse. King Peter II of Aragon, fighting with southern allies from Toulouse and elsewhere, faced an army largely made up of northern French crusaders who had invaded the region at the...
Cathars and Castles in Medieval France
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Joan Vaux: a remarkable Tudor lady
Historian article
Joanna Hickson is a hugely successful novelist, specialising in historical fiction, and she describes herself as feeling that she actually lives in the fifteenth century. For readers of The Historian she explores and explains how she developed her understanding and knowledge of a highly significant Tudor woman who is a central figure in two of...
Joan Vaux: a remarkable Tudor lady
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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
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TV: modern father of history?
Historian article
Bettany Hughes Norton Medlicott Medal Winner Lecture
In 1991 I travelled to the BBC for a meeting with a senior television producer. It seemed to me that history just wasn't getting a fair crack of the whip. I talked animatedly about the on-screen discoveries that could be made and the...
TV: modern father of history?
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Librarian CPD
Continuing Professional Development
For advice and information about working as a Librarian or Information Professional, take a look at the following information from the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) website.
CILIP is the leading professional body for librarians, information specialists and knowledge managers. They provide practical support for members throughout their careers...
Librarian CPD
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Fighting a different war
Podcast
2012 Annual Conference LectureFighting a different war: contesting the place of the queer soldier in the mythology of the Second World WarEmma Vickers: Lecturer in Modern British History University of Reading In the mid-1990s, the queer soldier finally became visible. On the streets, gay rights campaigners led by Peter Tatchell...
Fighting a different war
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Football and British-Soviet Relations
Article
Following the recent ‘Euro 96’ championship, Jim Phillips looks at two earlier international football tours which had major political and ideological connotations. In November 1945 Moscow Dynamo became the first Soviet football team to visit Britain, playing in Cardiff, Glasgow and twice in London. With English, Welsh and Scottish crowds...
Football and British-Soviet Relations
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What did it mean to be a city in early modern Germany?
Historian article
Alexander Collin examines the significance of cities within the Holy Roman Empire in early modern times. With a strong political identity of their own, cities were at the heart of the Empire’s economy and, also, centres of theological and social change.
If you have ever read a description of a...
What did it mean to be a city in early modern Germany?
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Florence Nightingale and epidemics
Historian article
Richard Bates reveals how the expertise of Florence Nightingale is just as relevant now as it was in her own life-time.
Late in 2020, the Merriam-Webster dictionary chose ‘pandemic’ as its word of the year, writing that, ‘it’s probably the word by which we’ll refer to this period [i.e. Covid-19...
Florence Nightingale and epidemics
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History Painting in England: Benjamin West, Philip James de Loutherbourg, J.M.W. Turner
Historian article
History Painting is defined in Grove's Dictionary of Art as the ‘depiction of several persons engaged in an important or memorable action, usually taken from a written source.'
Though History Painters as important as Rubens and Van Dyke worked - in Van Dyke's case for nine years - in England,...
History Painting in England: Benjamin West, Philip James de Loutherbourg, J.M.W. Turner
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Christopher Hill: Marxism and Methodism
Historian article
Christopher Hill, the eminent historian of seventeenth century England, was a convinced Marxist throughout most of his long and productive life (1912-2003). He embraced this secular world-view when he was a young History student at Oxford in the polemical 1930s and never lost his ideological commitment, even though he resigned...
Christopher Hill: Marxism and Methodism
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Lloyd George & Gladstone
Article
Lloyd George, who died sixty years ago on 26 March 1945, grew up and began his Parliamentary career in Queen Victoria's reign. In taking up a major Welsh issue, disestablishment of the Church of Wales, he memorably clashed with William Ewart Gladstone, perhaps the greatest of all Liberal Prime Ministers....
Lloyd George & Gladstone
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Benjamin Jesty: Grandfather of Vaccination
Historian article
Commonly hailed as a discovery or a ‘medical breakthrough', vaccination against smallpox with cowpox exudate was a development of variolation i.e. inoculation with live smallpox matter - a technique popularised amongst the gentry in the early eighteenth century by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who had observed the procedure in Turkey...
Benjamin Jesty: Grandfather of Vaccination
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Cavour and Italian Unification
Classic Pamphlet
It may seem a little perverse to write a pamphlet on Cavour in 1972, the centenary year of the death of Mazzini, but no doubt there will be more than one publication on Mazzini to mark the occasion. To pretend that the two men had much in common would be...
Cavour and Italian Unification
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Smithfield's Bartholomew Fair
Historian article
On the north-western side of the City of London, directly in front of St Bartholomew's Hospital near the ancient church of St Bartholomew the Great, there once lay a ‘smooth field', now known as Smithfield. This open space of around ten acres had a long and turbulent history. In medieval...
Smithfield's Bartholomew Fair
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King Charles I
Classic Pamphlet
The principles involved in the great religious and constitutional conflicts of the seventeenth century are so important to us today, that it seems desirable on the occasion of the present tercentenary to lay before the members of the Historical Association some means of examining and re-examining their views on the...
King Charles I
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Pleasure Piers: a sign of Victorian exuberance
Article
October 2010 was a memorable month for England's historic pleasure piers. Early in the month, fire ravaged Hastings Pier, to the extent that there is some doubt as to whether it can be restored, but, by contrast, at the end of the month there was the delightful news that the...
Pleasure Piers: a sign of Victorian exuberance
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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
