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  • The Fall of Singapore 1942

      Article
    Churchill called it "the worst disaster and the largest capitulation in British history" and the Fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942 has certainly gathered its own mythology in the past 70 years. Was it all the fault of General Percival; were the guns pointing the wrong way; did the...
    The Fall of Singapore 1942
  • How damaging to the Nazis was the Shetland Bus between 1940 and 1944?

      Article
    The Shetland Bus operation may be considered successful in that it supplied Norwegian resistance movements with weapons and took many refugees from Norway to Shetland, and that it managed to bind just shy of 300,000 German troops in Norway. However, because of this operation, forty-four men lost their lives, and...
    How damaging to the Nazis was the Shetland Bus between 1940 and 1944?
  • Woodcraft Youth: the interwar alternative to scouting

      Article
    ‘We should recognize once and for all', exclaimed ‘White Fox', a rebel London Scout leader, ‘that the ideas and ideals which may have fitted fairly well into the social fabric of 1908 [year Scouts formed] may be very ill-fitting "reach-medowns" in 1920'. During the First World War, the enthusiastic support...
    Woodcraft Youth: the interwar alternative to scouting
  • The Long Winding Road to the White House

      Article
    The Long Winding Road to the White House: caucuses, primaries and national party conventions in the history of American presidential elections Almost the Last Hurrah At last we know officially. In late August at their 40th national convention in Tampa, Florida, the Republican party formally nominated its candidates to run...
    The Long Winding Road to the White House
  • Robert Peel: Portraiture and political commemoration

      Article
    On 4 March 1856, during a debate in the House of Lords on a motion to form a ‘Gallery of National Portraits', the Conservative peer Earl Stanhope quoted Thomas Carlyle's view that ‘one of the most primary wants [of the historian is] to secure a bodily likeness of the personage...
    Robert Peel: Portraiture and political commemoration
  • Empires of Gold

      Historian article
    In 1660, the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa was established under the leadership of Charles II's brother James, the Duke of York. Founded as a slaving company, the Royal African Company, as it became known, also traded in gold. African gold was mined in the interior before being...
    Empires of Gold
  • Cyprus: another Middle East issue

      Article
    Although Cyprus, the third largest Mediterranean island, remained nominally under Turkish suzerainty until 1914, the British were established there after the 1878 Congress of Berlin. The idea then was that, from this base, Britain could protect Turkey against threats from Russia, while ensuring that the Turks reformed their treatment of...
    Cyprus: another Middle East issue
  • Neville Chamberlain: Villain or Hero?

      Historian article
    Perhaps no other British figure of the twentieth century has been as vilified or as celebrated as Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister from 1937 to 1940. In 1999, a BBC Radio 4 poll of prominent historians, politicians and commentators rated Chamberlain as one of the worst Prime Ministers of...
    Neville Chamberlain: Villain or Hero?
  • Have gun, will travel: The myth of the frontier in the Hollywood Western

      Article
    The Western movies that from around 1910 until the 1960s made up at least a fifth of all the American film titles on general release signified escapist entertainment for British audiences: an alluring vision of vast open spaces, of cowboys on horseback outlined against an imposing landscape. For Americans themselves,...
    Have gun, will travel: The myth of the frontier in the Hollywood Western
  • Nazi aggression: planned or improvised?

      Historian article
    Read more like this: Nazism and Stalinism Fascism in Europe 1919-1945 Kristallnacht Anti-semitism and the Holocaust The Coming of War in 1939 Political internment without trial in wartime Britain Neville Chamberlain: villain or hero? The Mechanical Battle of Britain Since the 1960s, there have been two main schools of thought...
    Nazi aggression: planned or improvised?
  • India and the British war effort, 1939-1945

      Article
    India was vital as a source of men and material for the British in the Second World War, despite the constitutional, social and economic issues which posed threats to its contribution. Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India 1940-5, wrote to Churchill, 8 April 1941: ‘My prime care had naturally...
    India and the British war effort, 1939-1945
  • The Tale of Two Winstons

      Article
    Winston Churchill is generally regarded as one of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century. As Prime Minister he led Britain to victory against the Nazi war machine, leading Time to name him ‘Man of the Year' in 1940 and ‘Man of the Half Century' in 1949. As recently...
    The Tale of Two Winstons
  • Benjamin Jesty: Grandfather of Vaccination

      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
  • Oxford's Literary War: Oxford University's servicemen and the Great War

      Article
    The last two decades have seen a slow shift in the academic understanding of the impact of the Great War on interwar Britain. The work of a small group of cultural historians has challenged strongly held pre-existing interpretations of the cultural impact of the Great War. However, there is still...
    Oxford's Literary War: Oxford University's servicemen and the Great War
  • The British Government's Confidential Files on the United States

      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
  • Aristotle and Dudley: what can books tell us about their owners?

      Article
    Books as evidence The study of books as objects can reveal a great deal about their owners and the society in which they lived. By examining why the books were printed in the first place, and by whom; why they were acquired and for what purpose; how they were bound;...
    Aristotle and Dudley: what can books tell us about their owners?
  • Diagrams in History

      Historian article
    One of the gifts of the social sciences to history is the use of expository diagrams; but attention is rarely given to the history of diagrams. Maps - schematized representations of locations in spatial relation to one another - can be dated back to Babylonia in the late third millennium...
    Diagrams in History
  • Alexandra and Rasputin

      Article
    Has the role of Alexandra and Rasputin in the downfall of the Romanovs been exaggerated out of all proportion? If a country is defeated in war, the rulers run the risk of being overthrown. In 1918 the Kaiser left Germany for Holland, Germany became a Republic; the Austro-Hungarian Empire came...
    Alexandra and Rasputin
  • The London Charterhouse

      Article
    Four hundred years ago, in 1611, Thomas Sutton was reputed to be the wealthiest commoner in England but he was nearing the end of his life. He had been a financier and he was formerly the Master of Ordnance in the Northern Parts. He decided to take up good works...
    The London Charterhouse
  • A Tale of Two Chancellors: The Ineffectual Reformation in Elizabethan Staffordshire

      Article
    The Elizabethan Reformation in Staffordshire had a shallow seedbed. The radical reformers of the 1540s had greeted the conversion of the county with a mixture of high hopes and hyperbole. The East Anglian preacher and disciple of Latimer, Thomas Becon, wrote a treatise The Iewel of Ioye urging that itinerant...
    A Tale of Two Chancellors: The Ineffectual Reformation in Elizabethan Staffordshire
  • Imperialism resurgent: European attempts to 'recolonise' South East Asia after 1945

      Article
    ‘To think that the people of Indochina would be content to settle for less [from the French] than Indonesia has gained from the Dutch or India from the British is to underestimate the power of the forces that are sweeping Asia today'. An American adviser in 1949 cited: Robin Jeffrey...
    Imperialism resurgent: European attempts to 'recolonise' South East Asia after 1945
  • Arnold Wilkins: Pioneer of British Radar

      Article
    Whenever British radar is discussed the name that usually comes to mind is that of Robert Watson Watt. Our history books and our dictionaries of biography consistently attribute the discovery of radar in Britain solely to Watson Watt, with little or no mention of the key role played by his...
    Arnold Wilkins: Pioneer of British Radar
  • The price of reform: the people's budget and the present trauma

      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
  • Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust

      Article
    Daniel Goldhagen defines anti-semitism as ‘negative beliefs and emotions about Jews qua Jews.' Nazis believed Jews to be the source of Germany's misfortunes, and that they must be denied German citizenship and removed from German society. Hitler never compromised on the need to settle what he regarded as the Jewish...
    Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust
  • Remembering Neville Chamberlain

      Article
    Brent Dyck is a Canadian teacher and a previous contributor to The  Historian. In this short essay he offers us his objective  interpretation of the achievements of Neville Chamberlain. For some what he says may seem surprising and for others it might even be controversial. However, editorially it seemed entirely...
    Remembering Neville Chamberlain