-
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
-
What did you do in The Great War? A family mystery explored
Historian article
Research into family history is well-known as likely to dig up some uncomfortable evidence. Nearly every family has had its bastards; nearly every generation has had someone on poor relief. We had both. But more troubling was my recent suspicion that a hundred or so years ago not one but two...
What did you do in The Great War? A family mystery explored
-
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 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
-
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
-
The strange death of King Harold II: Propaganda and the problem of legitimacy in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings
Historian article
How did King Harold II die at the Battle of Hastings? The question is simple enough and the answer is apparently well known. Harold was killed by an arrow which struck him in the eye. His death is depicted clearly on the Bayeux Tapestry in one of its most famous...
The strange death of King Harold II: Propaganda and the problem of legitimacy in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings
-
The Tudor Court
Classic Pamphlet
In 1976, in one of his challenging Presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society, Professor Geoffrey Elton drew attention to the importance of the court as a ‘point of contact' between the Tudors and their subjects. It was, he suggested, a central and essential aspect of personal government, but in...
The Tudor Court
-
Peter the Great
Classic Pamphlet
No European ruler except Napoleon I has impressed both contemporise and later historians so profoundly as Peter I of Russia by the originality and the personal character of his achievements. Like Napoleon, Peter appeared to some observers, at least in his later years, as almost more than human. He seemed...
Peter the Great
-
Chartism
Classic Pamphlet
It is not surprising that Chartism has attracted a great deal of interest from historians and students, for at no other period in British history, with the possible exception of the second and third decades of the twentieth century, has so much excitement and activity been aroused at the working-class...
Chartism
-
Louis XIV
Classic Pamphlet
Louis XIV was born on 5 September 1638 and became King on May 14 1643 at the age of four years and eight months on the death of his father Louis XIII. He attended the Conseil d'en haut from 1649 when he was eleven years old. He announced his coming...
Louis XIV
-
Polychronicon 135: Post-modern Holocaust Historiography
Teaching History feature
The field of Holocaust studies has been hit by an intellectual earthquake whose precise magnitude and long-term consequences cannot be ascertained at this stage. In 2007 Saul Friedländer published The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945. The book has been rightly celebrated as the first victim-centred synthetic history...
Polychronicon 135: Post-modern Holocaust Historiography
-
The Poor Law in Nineteenth-century England and Wales
Classic Pamphlet
Variety rather than uniformity characterised the administration of poor relief in England and Wales, and at no period was this more apparent than in the decades before the national reform of the poor law in 1834. Unprecedented economic and social changes produced severe problems for those responsible for social welfare,...
The Poor Law in Nineteenth-century England and Wales
-
Napoleon: First Consul and Emperor of the French
Classic Pamphlet
Four years after the battle of Waterloo, Richard Whately publicised a philosophical essay in which he argued that there was no real proof of Napoleon's existence. The deeds attributed to him were either so wondrously good or so amazingly bad that they far outran the evidence available to support them:...
Napoleon: First Consul and Emperor of the French
-
The Chapel and the Nation
Classic Pamphlet
The Noncoformitst chapel has played a crucial role in the history of the English and Welsh nations. When the great French historian Elie Halevy sought to explain the contrast between the turbulent history of his own country and the peaceful evolution of England in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...
The Chapel and the Nation
-
Podcast: Why Medieval History Matters?
Medieval History
Why Medieval History Matters, Professor Anne Curry, President of the HA ‘I don't mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the state to pay for them'. So, allegedly, said Charles Clarke when Education Secretary in 2003. In fact, medieval history has never...
Podcast: Why Medieval History Matters?
-
Alexander II
Classic Pamphlet
The ‘great reforms' of Tsar Alexander II (1855-81) are generally recognised as the most significant events in modern Russian history between the reign of Peter the Great and the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The most important of Alexander's reforms, the emancipation of he serfs in 1861, has been described...
Alexander II
-
The Monarchies of Ferdinand and Isabella
Classic Pamphlet
On 12 December 1474, the news reached the Castillian city of Segovia, north-west of Madrid, that Henry IV, king of Castile, had died. After the proper ceremonies had been conducted in memory of the deceased monarch, his sister, Isabella, was proclaimed queen of Castile in that place. There was much...
The Monarchies of Ferdinand and Isabella
-
Between the Revolutions: Russia 1905 to 1917
Classic Pamphlet
"The key question is this - is the peaceful renovation of the country possible? Or is it possible only by internal revolution?"This quotation succintly expresses the problem that faced both contemporaries and subsequant generations of historians confronting the development of Russia between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The upheavals...
Between the Revolutions: Russia 1905 to 1917
-
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
-
Fascist behind barbed wire: political internment without trial in wartime Britain
Historian article
In the spring and early summer of 1940, the British government carried out a programme of mass internment without trial. On 11 May, the first of thousands of ‘enemy aliens' were interned. Many of these internees were refugees from Nazi Germany, often Jews who had fled Germany in fear of...
Fascist behind barbed wire: political internment without trial in wartime Britain
-
A medieval credit crunch
Historian article
The project: A three-year research project started in December 2007 with the aim of investigating the credit arrangements of a succession of English monarchs with a number of Italian merchant societies. The study, based at the ICMA Centre, University of Reading, is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)....
A medieval credit crunch
-
Numismatics and History
Classic Pamphlet
Numismatics may be defined as the science of money in its physical aspects. It is only indirectly connected with the theory of money, which belongs to the sphere of economics. Its subject-matter consists of the material objects which in most societies are used to measure the worth of goods and...
Numismatics and History
-
Charles XII
Classic Pamphlet
The reputation of Charles XII who became king of Sweden before he was fifteen years old and had the responsibility of absolutist goverment thrust upon him within the next six months - contrary to the plans laid down for him by his father - has tended to attract political rather...
Charles XII
-
An English Absolutism?
Classic Pamphlet
The term 'Absolutism' was coined in France in the 1790s, but the concept which described it was familiar to many Englishmen in the late seventeenth century. They talked of 'absolute monarchy', 'tyranny', 'despotism' and above all 'arbitrary government'. Their use of such terns were pejorative: they described political regimes of...
An English Absolutism?
