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Recorded Webinar: Ukraine and the Soviet Politics of Empire
Article
Recorded Webinar: Ukraine and the Soviet Politics of Empire
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Recorded webinar: Ordinary people - Holocaust Memorial Day 2023
Recorded webinar
Recorded webinar: Ordinary people - Holocaust Memorial Day 2023
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The Road to Dunkirk
Article
Seventy years after the outbreak of the Second World War, British foreign policy in the 1930s remains as controversial as ever. While appeasement is now a byword for political failure, the reasons for its adoption and the responsibility of the statesmen concerned are constantly debated. In general, opinion looks unfavourably...
The Road to Dunkirk
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Polychronicon 137: Bringing space travel down to Earth
Article
It nearly began like this: ‘On Christmas Eve 1968, two episcopalians and a Roman Catholic were in orbit around the Moon.' I was writing a book called Earthrise, about the first views of Earth from space. Most other books about the Apollo programme of the 1960s and 1970s took an...
Polychronicon 137: Bringing space travel down to Earth
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Recorded webinar: Introduction to Sporting Heritage in the Curriculum
Webinar
Excited about the opportunity to creatively incorporate sporting history as new part of your curriculum offer or a thematic enrichment extension to it?
Interested in hearing more about how this approach could inspire your students’ potential approach to EPQ?
Like to influence and shape how this might be achieved?
This...
Recorded webinar: Introduction to Sporting Heritage in the Curriculum
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Spencer Perceval private values and public virtues
Article
The public man and his career Spencer Perceval's career as a public figure lasted from 1796 when he became a King's Counsel and MP for Northampton until his murder sixteen years later at the age of 49. He was shot in the lobby of the House of Commons at 5.15pm...
Spencer Perceval private values and public virtues
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Film: An introduction to the African-American Civil Rights Movement
Article
Film: An introduction to the African-American Civil Rights Movement
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Child labour in eighteenth century London
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
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Fascist behind barbed wire: political internment without trial in wartime Britain
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
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Remember Peterloo!
Article
The BBC News at 10 on Saturday 5 July included an announcement that Manchester's campaign to have a memorial erected to the victims of the Peterloo Massacre had ‘got under way'. That afternoon, a workshop organised by the Peterloo Memorial campaign had encouraged members of the public to express their...
Remember Peterloo!
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Dean Mahomet: Travel writer, curry entrepreneur and shampooer to the King
Article
The National Portrait Gallery in London is home to many thousands of portraits, photographs and sculptures of the great and the good, as well as those who travelled on the darker side of history.
In 2007 it hosted a small exhibition in the Porter Gallery entitled Between Worlds: Voyagers to...
Dean Mahomet: Travel writer, curry entrepreneur and shampooer to the King
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Britain's Olympic visionary
Article
Forty-six years before the modern Olympics began, the small Shropshire market town of Much Wenlock was the seemingly unlikely setting for the establishment of an ‘Olympian Games'. Commencing in 1850, they were to become an annual festival in the town. The architect of this sporting enterprise was a local surgeon...
Britain's Olympic visionary
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The death of Lord Londonderry
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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A Victorian deserter's family story: surviving a clash of loyalties
Article
More people than ever are seeking to trace their family histories. People can now sit at home and tap out in seconds from the internet many of their family's previously unknown genealogical details. But what if a century or more ago one of your family had tried to cover his...
A Victorian deserter's family story: surviving a clash of loyalties
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The Creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707
Article
Why did both the parliaments of Scotland and England vote themselves out of existence in 1707 in order to create a new ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain’? From an English perspective, there was always a strong feeling that this union did not create a new kingdom and that it certainly...
The Creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707
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How did the Civil Rights movement change America?
Article
In 1984 Jimmy Carter reflected on growing up in the segregated South. He recalled that, as a young child, he, like many white children, had had an African American child as his closest friend. The two children spent all their play time together. One day they travelled on the train...
How did the Civil Rights movement change America?
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The Slave trade and British Abolition, 1787-1807
Article
In the 1780’s the British slave trade thrived. In that decade alone more than one thousand British and British colonial slave ships sailed for the slave coasts of Africa and transported more than 300,000 Africans. There was little evidence that here was a system uncertain about its economic future. If...
The Slave trade and British Abolition, 1787-1807
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Child Health & School meals: Nottingham 1906-1945
Article
Following Jamie Oliver’s devastating television series on the inadequacy of school meals the present government has been quick to be seen to address the situation. In September 2005, Ruth Kelly, the then Education Secretary, announced a war on junk food in schools.1 This was nothing new, because the history of...
Child Health & School meals: Nottingham 1906-1945
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A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Forgotten William Dampier
Article
In September 1683 in the Cape Verde Islands William Dampier lay 'obscured' among the scrubby vegetation to do some bird watching. He was excited for he had just caught his first sight of flamingos. The detail and delicacy of his description would gladden any modern ornithologist. They were, he wrote,...
A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Forgotten William Dampier
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Guy Fawkes in Manchester: The World of William Harrison Ainsworth
Article
Some of the most enduring myths in British history were created and perpetuated by novelists, despite the fact that the historical novel has long been relegated to the second division of the literary arts. Deeply unfashionable today, writers like Sir Walter Scott, Edward Bulwer Lytton and William Harrison Ainsworth were...
Guy Fawkes in Manchester: The World of William Harrison Ainsworth
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A Crusading Outpost: the City and County of Edessa - 1095-1153
Article
Edessa is not now to be found on maps of the Near East; instead there is Urfa, the Turkish name for the former Christian city lying in the upper region of the Euphrates valley some two hundred and fifty kilometres from the Mediterranean. Like Christian Edessa, Moslem Urfa is a...
A Crusading Outpost: the City and County of Edessa - 1095-1153
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How Nelson Became a Hero
Article
The fittest man in the world for the command' of the Mediterranean, Lord Minto declared of Horatio Nelson on 24 April 1798, following Nelson's inventive assault on Spanish ships off Cape St. Vincent. 'Admiral Nelson's victory [at the Nile]… is one of the most glorious and comprehensive victories ever achieved...
How Nelson Became a Hero
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Saint Robert and the Deer
Article
It is almost a commonplace that there is an affinity between a holy man and the creatures of the wild. The archetype is St. Francis of Assisi but the phenomenon was well marked both before and after his time. I would like to consider briefly an episode in the life...
Saint Robert and the Deer
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The Friar's Bush
Article
Nothing on earth would have persuaded me to enter the place… it was the house of the dead. Paul Henry, artist (1876-1958)
The Friar's Bush cemetery on the Stranmillis Road in Belfast may only be two acres in size, but its history is far bloodier and grislier than you would...
The Friar's Bush
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The Spanish Collection
Article
For the art historian, a thorough study of works of art, their creators and the environment in which they were produced, as well as their significance then and now, is a specialised endeavour. This, nevertheless, does not exhaust the presentation of art to contemporaries, least of all in the context...
The Spanish Collection
