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Stalinism
Classic Pamphlet
Stalin's remarkable career raises quite fundamental questions for anyone interested in history. Marxists, whose philosophy should cause them to downgrade the role of ‘great men' as an explanation of great events, have problems in fitting Stalin into the materialist interpretation of history: did not this man ride rough-shod over the...
Stalinism
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Civilian expertise in war
Historian article
Philip Hamlyn Williams introduces us to the commercial and industrial background to modern-day warfare.
When I think of war, I immediately see men and women in one of three uniforms: Royal Navy, RAF and Army. My research over the past seven years into how the British army was supplied in two...
Civilian expertise in war
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Real Lives: Maria Rye’s emigration home for destitute little girls
Historian feature
Alf Wilkinson explores the controversial story of Maria Rye, who founded the Female Emigration Society in 1861 in order to take ‘surplus’ young ladies to Australia and New Zealand to work as teachers and governesses. As there was insufficient demand for these, she refocused her work on taking pauper children...
Real Lives: Maria Rye’s emigration home for destitute little girls
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Podcast Series: Religion in the UK
Multipage Article
In Part 5 of our series on Social and Political Change in the UK 1800-present we look at religion in the U.K. This set of podcasts features Dr Janice Holmes of the Open University, Revd Dr Jeremy Morris, Dean, Fellow, and Director of Studies in Theology at King's College, Andrew Copson,...
Podcast Series: Religion in the UK
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My grandfather's recollections of the invasion of Normandy
Historian article
16-year-old Daisy Black of Newcastle-under-Lyme School in Staffordshire was the Senior Award winner in the Spirit of Normandy Trust Young Historian competition in 2007. Having been judged the winner by the Young Historian panel, the Spirit of Normandy Trsutees were so taken with her entry that they gave her an...
My grandfather's recollections of the invasion of Normandy
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WWI and the flu pandemic
Historian article
In our continuing Aspects of War series Hugh Gault reveals that the flu pandemic, which began during the First World War, presented another danger that challenged people’s lives and relationships.
Wounded in the neck on the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Kingsley...
WWI and the flu pandemic
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The Pilgrimage of Grace: Reactions, Responses and Revisions
Article
Dr Michael Bush investigates the interpretations of the pilgrimage of grace. Our perception of the pilgrimage of grace has been largely created by Madeleine and Ruth Dodds and their magnificent book The Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536-7, and the Exeter Conspiracy, 1538 (Cambridge). Published in 1915, it has dominated the subject...
The Pilgrimage of Grace: Reactions, Responses and Revisions
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Driver Ben Cobey 8th Royal Field Artillery
Historian article
Alf Wilkinson asks why three men were awarded the Victoria Cross during the retreat from Mons in August 1914 and the fourth involved in the action wasn’t. What does that tell us about Britain during the arly days of the Great War?
In August 1914, when war broke out, the...
Driver Ben Cobey 8th Royal Field Artillery
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Medical aspects of the battle of Waterloo
Historian article
Michael Crumplin explores the medical facilities of the British Army and asks how likely soldiers wounded at Waterloo were to survive.
The road to Waterloo
One of the very few benefits of conflict is the advancement of medical practice. The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistanhave been dealing with relatively...
Medical aspects of the battle of Waterloo
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The Great Charter: Then and now
Historian article
Magna Carta is a document not only of national but of international importance. Alexander Lock shows how its name still has power all over the world, especially in the United States.
Although today only three of its clauses remain on the statute book, Magna Carta still flourishes as a potent...
The Great Charter: Then and now
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Home Rule for Ireland - For and against
Historian article
At a time when the United Kingdom continues to review its internal constitutional arrangements, Matthew Kelly explores how this constitutional debate can be traced back to Gladstone's decision to promote Home Rule for Ireland and how these proposals evolved over time and were challenged.
Irish political history decisively entered a...
Home Rule for Ireland - For and against
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The Rise and Fall of the Constitutional Press, 1858-1860
Article
Amy de Gruchy provides an account of a short-lived newspaper of the Conservative Right which published work by Charlotte Yonge. The Constitutional Press was born in March 1858 following the formation of the second minority Conservative government under Lord Derby. It was a weekly paper containing Parliamentary reports, British and...
The Rise and Fall of the Constitutional Press, 1858-1860
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‘Guilty pleasures’: Moral panics over commercial entertainment since 1830
Historian article
In 1866 the Select Committee on Theatrical Licenses and Regulations questioned Inspector Richard Reason:
Col. Stuart: What is the class of people who go [to penny theatres]?[Police] Inspector Richard Reason: I should think there is a great number of the criminal class, and some of the children of the working...
‘Guilty pleasures’: Moral panics over commercial entertainment since 1830
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Strange Journey: the life of Dorothy Eckersley
Historian article
Meeting in Berlin
Three days before the outbreak of the Second World War, William Joyce, the leader of the British Nazi group, the National Socialist League, was in Berlin. He and his wife, Margaret, had fled there fearing internment by the British government if war broke out. Yet as war...
Strange Journey: the life of Dorothy Eckersley
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Marcus Morris and Eagle
Historian article
Marcus Morris and Eagle: Approved reading for boys in the 1950s & 1960s
The National Art Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London's South Kensington held an exhibition in the first five months of 2012 devoted entirely to British adventure comics of the 1950s and 1960s, many taken...
Marcus Morris and Eagle
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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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The Fall of Singapore 1942
Historian 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
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How damaging to the Nazis was the Shetland Bus between 1940 and 1944?
Historian 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?
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Woodcraft Youth: the interwar alternative to scouting
Historian 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
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The Long Winding Road to the White House
Historian 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
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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
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Cyprus: another Middle East issue
Historian 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
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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?
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Have gun, will travel: The myth of the frontier in the Hollywood Western
Historian 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
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Nazi aggression: planned or improvised?
Historian article
Read more like this:
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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?
