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Virtual Branch Recording: The Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949
Diaries and Personal Experiences
In this talk Professor Henrietta Harrison uses diary records to think about the experience of living through the revolution in China in 1949, focussing on what it meant to Chinese people, how they learned about its practices and ideology, and how this changed their lives - whether they were radical intellectuals returning...
Virtual Branch Recording: The Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949
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Recorded Webinar: Robespierre and Danton: Heroes of the French Revolution?
Article
One of the oldest myths of the French Revolution is the lethal rivalry between Robespierre and Danton: Robespierre the cold, bloodthirsty dictator who ruled France through Terror, versus Danton, the warm, humane, inspirational orator who wanted to stop Terror. Throughout the 19th century Robespierre was mostly depicted as a villain,...
Recorded Webinar: Robespierre and Danton: Heroes of the French Revolution?
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American Liberalism: The Career of a Concept
Podcast
Jonathan Bell: Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of History at the University of Reading.What historians have come to term ‘liberalism' in an American context has taken on numerous meanings that provide a lens through which to examine broad trends in US history across the twentieth century. From the...
American Liberalism: The Career of a Concept
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The Jews of Medieval England: on-demand short course
Online self-guided short course for lifelong learners
A Jewish community was established in England shortly after the Norman Conquest. Initially confined to London, from the 1130s onwards Jews began to settle in other parts of the country, where they lived as English Jews for more than two centuries. Their life in England came to an end in...
The Jews of Medieval England: on-demand short course
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Recorded Webinar: ‘Drawing the Line’: the 1947 Partition of India
Article
August 2022 marks 75 years since British India was divided at independence into two separate states: India and Pakistan (the latter including today’s Bangladesh). As with the 70th commemoration in 2017, this anniversary will trigger a great deal of collective remembering in Britain just as in South Asia itself.
Freedom from...
Recorded Webinar: ‘Drawing the Line’: the 1947 Partition of India
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Film: The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania (1772-1795)
Repercussions for German-Polish Relations and their Legacy.
Karin Friedrich recently joined the Virtual Branch to discuss aspects of its complex history in her talk on the partitions of Poland, their repercussions for German-Polish relations and their legacy. Professor Friedrich is chair in Early Modern European History at the University of Aberdeen, co-director of the Centre for Early Modern...
Film: The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania (1772-1795)
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Lecture: Life at the edge of the Roman Empire
Annual Conference Podcast 2019
Lecture: Life at the edge of the Roman Empire
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Napoleon and the creation of an imperial legend
Annual Conference 2013 Podcast
Lecture from the Historical Association 2013 Annual Conference - Podcast
Professor Alan Forrest - University of York
Napoleon would become a nineteenth-century hero, the stuff of legend in a romantic age. This lecture examines the genesis of the Napoleonic myth, and shows how throughout his career he consciously burnished his...
Napoleon and the creation of an imperial legend
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Punk, Politics and the collapse of consensus in Britain
Podcast
2012 Annual Conference LectureShot by both sides: Punk, Politics and the collapse of consensus in BritainMatthew Worley: Reader in History, University of ReadingThis paper examines the way in which organisations of the far left and far right endeavoured to appropriate elements of British youth culture to validate their analysis of...
Punk, Politics and the collapse of consensus in Britain
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Recorded webinar: Black Germans: the last forgotten victims of the Nazis?
Article
In this webinar, Professor Robbie Aitken looks at the experiences of Black residents in Germany during the Nazi period. Why have they been largely written out of larger histories of the Third Reich? Professor Aitken suggests that there was a genocidal intent in Nazi policy towards them, signalled partly by...
Recorded webinar: Black Germans: the last forgotten victims of the Nazis?
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Recorded webinar: Britain's eighteenth-century tradition of popular riot and protest
Article
Eighteenth-century Britons were ruled by a restricted oligarchy of landowners and plutocrats. Yet the wider population had a proud tradition of assertiveness and readiness to protest. ‘Britons never will be slaves!’ as the chorus of 'Rule Britannia' (1740) announced pointedly (if somewhat ironically, in view of Britain’s role in the...
Recorded webinar: Britain's eighteenth-century tradition of popular riot and protest
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Film: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire
Age of Emergency
In the 1950s, Britain fought a series of brutal wars against insurgents in the colonies of Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus. How did people at home experience these wars? How did they learn about the use of torture and other unsettling tactics? And how did they respond to this knowledge?
In...
Film: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire
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Virtual Branch recording: The survival strategies of the Near Eastern powers facing Mongol invasion.
Virtual Branch Film
The Mongol invasions into the Near East had a devastating effect upon many societies, sultanates, empires and kingdoms. For decades, wave after wave of armies swept across the area, defeating every army sent against them and utterly reshaping the area’s complex political ecosystem. Some powers fell in battle; some submitted...
Virtual Branch recording: The survival strategies of the Near Eastern powers facing Mongol invasion.
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Puritan attitudes towards plays and pleasure in the Age of Shakespeare
Presidential Lecture - Annual Conference 2014
In Twelfth Night Shakespeare gently mocked the Puritans, who objected to stage plays and other entertainments. Yet within four decades, the Puritans had closed the London theatres and were about to seize power from Charles I. Among their many reforms were the banning of Christmas celebrations and of Twelfth Night itself....
Puritan attitudes towards plays and pleasure in the Age of Shakespeare
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Virtual Branch Recording: Shylock's Venice
The remarkable history of Venice’s Jews and the Ghetto
This is the story of the Venice Ghetto, the corner of the city where Jews were exiled; free to walk the streets by day, locked behind gates and walls at night. Yet, gates and walls notwithstanding, from its establishment in 1516 until the fall of Venice in 1798, the ghetto...
Virtual Branch Recording: Shylock's Venice
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Recorded Webinar: Understanding Lenin’s Government, 1917-24
Article
In this webinar Dr Douds examines the nature of political authority in the nascent Soviet Republic and the institutional structures, practices and ideology of government in the Lenin period. She considers how Communist Party dictatorship and the monolithic party-state emerged in the early years following the October Revolution of 1917...
Recorded Webinar: Understanding Lenin’s Government, 1917-24
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Recorded Webinar: New Approaches to Classical Sparta
Article
This webinar starts with a basic overview of the city-states of Classical Greece (roughly 500 to 350 BC) and Sparta’s place within their geography and history. It then looks at some common myths about the nature of Spartan society and politics, focusing on areas where recent research has transformed our...
Recorded Webinar: New Approaches to Classical Sparta
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Round Table Discussion: Does Content Matter?
Annual Conference 2010
This round table discussion took place on Saturday 15th May 2010. The panel includes: Dr Katharine Burn (Editor of Teaching History), Dr Michael Riley (Director of the Schools History Project.); Colin Jones (President of the Royal Historical Society and Professor of History at Queen Mary, London); David Evans (Former Head of Eton).
Round Table Discussion: Does Content Matter?
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Virtual Branch Recording: From Pirates to Princes Normans in Eleventh Century Europe
Article
Normandy originated from a grant of land to Rollo, a Viking leader, in the early tenth century. By the end of that century Normans were to be found in southern Italy, then in Britain and, at the end of the eleventh century, in the near East on the First Crusade....
Virtual Branch Recording: From Pirates to Princes Normans in Eleventh Century Europe
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Recorded Webinar: African economic development in historical perspective
Article
Popular discussions of Africa often focus on the region’s relative poverty, and ask what role historical events like colonialism and the slave trade have played in shaping its development over time. For a long time, the absence of systematic data on African economies before c. 1960 meant these discussions were...
Recorded Webinar: African economic development in historical perspective
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Lecture: The doctor’s garden
Annual Conference Podcast 2019
The late Georgian British garden was a place of botanic and agricultural enquiry as much as a place of pleasure and leisure. This talk will highlight this use of gardens by medical practitioners. As a group of men who had access to botanical training and, for those at the top...
Lecture: The doctor’s garden
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The Norman Conquest: why did it matter?
Annual Conference 2013 Podcast
Keynote Speech from the Historical Association 2013 Annual Conference - Podcast
Dr Marc Morris - Historian, author and television presenter
1066 is the most famous date in English history. Everyone remembers the story, depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry, of William the Conqueror's successful invasion, and poor King Harold being felled...
The Norman Conquest: why did it matter?
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Recorded webinar: Henry VIII on Tour
Finding a new perspective on the Tudors
During his lifetime, Henry VIII journeyed throughout his kingdom in what are known as royal 'progresses'. In this webinar, Anthony Musson will share research from the AHRC-funded 'Henry on Tour' project which seeks to reassess these progresses by exploring archival sources, archaeology, music and material culture. In addition to contributing...
Recorded webinar: Henry VIII on Tour
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Virtual Branch recording: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom
The Black Crown
How did a man born enslaved on a plantation triumph over Napoleon's invading troops and become king of the first free black nation in the Americas? This is the forgotten, remarkable story of Henry Christophe. Christophe fought as a child soldier in the American War of Independence, before serving in...
Virtual Branch recording: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom
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Building St James's spire: Louth's guilds and popular piety in the later middle ages
Virtual Branch Lecture Recording
Medieval historian Dr Claire Kennan continued our Virtual Branch series with a local history talk on the building of St James's spire, Louth.
In her talk Kennan traces the important role that Louth's major guilds of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Holy Trinity played in the building of the St James’s spire. Throughout the...
Building St James's spire: Louth's guilds and popular piety in the later middle ages