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The English Domestic Servant in English History
Classic Pamphlet
The history of domestic service in England has yet to be written. Hewers of wood and drawers of water there have always been, but historians have usually been little concerned with them. The material for their history is scattered and difficult to assess; even the word ‘servant' is not easy...
The English Domestic Servant in English History
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From Sail to Steam
Classic Pamphlet
From the time when primitive man first went adrift on a bundle of reeds or learnt to balance himself on a floating log, to the days where his descendants, no more than a few generations ago, raced scrambling aloft to trim the towering sails of a full-rigged ship, the skill...
From Sail to Steam
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Myth and Reality: A Necessary Marriage at Twelfth Century Glastonbury
Article
It is the habitation of strangers and the domination of foreigners. There is today no Englishman who is either earl, bishop or abbot. The newcomers devour the riches and entrails of England, and there is no hope of the misery coming to an end…the fatal day for England, the mournful...
Myth and Reality: A Necessary Marriage at Twelfth Century Glastonbury
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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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Upwards till Lepanto
Article
Ottoman society centred on the Sultan. He was lawgiver, religious official, leader in battle-and until the late sixteenth century an active field commander on campaign. The Law of Fratricide of Mehmet (Mohammed) II, 1451-81, urged each new Sultan to kill his brothers in order to produce a capable ruler and...
Upwards till Lepanto
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Polychronicon 150: Interpreting the French Revolution
Teaching History feature
For most of the last two centuries, historical interpretations of the French Revolution have focused on its place in a grand narrative of modernity. For the most ‘counter-revolutionary' writers, the Revolution showed why modernity was to be resisted - destroying traditional institutions and disrupting all that was valuable in an...
Polychronicon 150: Interpreting the French Revolution
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The National Insurance Act 1911: three perspectives, one policy
Historian article
Sandwiched between the Parliament Act and the Home Rule Act, the National Insurance Act 1911 is easily overlooked and often forgotten. Yet, as Gilbert has pointed out, it was critical both of itself and as the foundation for social legislation up to current times. It came into force on 15...
The National Insurance Act 1911: three perspectives, one policy
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Central and Local Government in Scotland Since 1707
Classic Pamphlet
This pamphlet provides an interesting approach to a historical topic which has been too frequently covered from a single viewpoint. The pamphlet delivers a thoroughly Scottish approach to the nature of the 1707 Union and the changing nature of Scotland in the following centuries. It highlights the disparity of the...
Central and Local Government in Scotland Since 1707
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Bristol and America 1480-1631
Classic Pamphlet
This pamphlet addresses the relationship between Bristol and America, charting the rising and waning interest the city and its merchants had in discovering new lands and profiting from them, and the success or more often the failure of these voyages. It provides an interesting argument which may be seen to...
Bristol and America 1480-1631
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What's New About New Labour?
Historian article
In the 1980s it was often argued that the Labour party was finished as a major force in British politics. Yet on 1st May 1997 it won a landslide victory, securing an overall majority of 179 in parliament. Two years into its term of office, it retains a strong lead...
What's New About New Labour?
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Presenting Naseby
Historian article
The summer of 2007 saw the completion of new visitor facilities on and near the battlefield of Naseby. The two locations are the first to be created since the Cromwell Monument was finished in 1936 and they stand more than 5km (3 miles) apart, one of them 2km south-east of...
Presenting Naseby
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William the First and the Sussex Rapes
Classic Pamphlet
During his reign, and in particular in the five years after the battle of Hastings, William I carried out the most thorough reallocation of land in England ever to take place in so short a period of time; the results were summarized in Domesday Book in 1086.That great record shows...
William the First and the Sussex Rapes
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Polychronicon 143: the Balfour Declaration
Teaching History feature
In a letter from the British Foreign Secretary, A.J. Balfour, to Lord Rothschild, the Anglo-Jewish leader, on 2 November 1917, the British Government declared its intention to ‘facilitate' the ‘establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people'. The Balfour Declaration, as it became known, was endorsed by...
Polychronicon 143: the Balfour Declaration
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Alexandra and Rasputin
Historian 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
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Polychronicon 138: The Civil Rights Movement
Teaching History feature
"He was The One, The Hero, The One Fearless Person for whom we had waited. I hadn't even realized before that we had been waiting for Martin Luther King, Jr, but we had."
So spoke the novelist Alice Walker in 1972, looking back on her teenage years. And so wrote...
Polychronicon 138: The Civil Rights Movement
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Tudor Enclosures
Classic Pamphlet
Tudor enclosures hold the attention of historians because of the fundamental changes which they wrought in our system of farming, and in the appearance of the English countryside. At the same time, the subject is continually being re-investigated, and as a result it is no longer presented in the simple...
Tudor Enclosures
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Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal
Classic Pamphlets
New Deal is the name given to the policies of the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1930s. Elected in 1932, at a time of great economic depression, he sought to alleviate distress by using the inherent powers of government, and the New Deal era come to be seen...
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal
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The Industrial Revolution in England
Classic Pamphlet
Revolutions of the magnitude of the industrial revolution in England provoke historical controversy: such a revolution is a major discontinuity which a profession more skilled in explaining small changes finds difficult to understand. A revolution that touches a whole society is so diffuse that its significant events are difficult to...
The Industrial Revolution in England
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The National Memorial to William Ewart Gladstone
Historian article
To stand amidst the books in St Deiniol's Library is an intimidating experience for it is an encounter with the restless, brooding intelligence that was William Ewart Gladstone.
Lord Runcie of Cuddesdon, Archbishop of Canterbury (18 May 1998)
The ‘Temple of Peace'
St Deiniol's Library was founded in 1894 by...
The National Memorial to William Ewart Gladstone
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'Right well kept': Peterborough Abbey 1536-1539
Historian article
Although the reasons for and the process of dissolution in Peterborough Abbey compare closely to all other religious houses, the consequences were unique. Peterborough received favourable treatment and so emerged from the dissolution as one of six abbeys to be transformed into new cathedrals. The changes imposed on Peterborough were...
'Right well kept': Peterborough Abbey 1536-1539
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Jacobitism
Classic Pamphlet
In recent years, the debate over the nature, extent, and influence of the Jacobite movement during the 70 years following the Glorious Revolution of 1688 has become one of the new growth industries among professional historians, spawning scholarly quarrels almost as ferocious as those which characterised ‘the Cause' itself.The term...
Jacobitism
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Stanley Baldwin's reputation
Historian article
Falsification of history is normally associated with dictatorships rather than liberal democracies. Yet tendentious accounts of the recent past are part of the armoury of all types of political debate. Such manipulation usually has only a limited and short-term influence, because it is neutralised by different political parties offering contending...
Stanley Baldwin's reputation
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The Great Exhibition
Article
‘Of all the decades to be young in, a wise man would choose the 1850s’ concludes G.M. Young in his Portrait of An Age. His choice is understandable. Historians and contemporaries have long viewed the middle years of the century as a ‘plateau of peace and prosperity’, an ‘age of...
The Great Exhibition
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The Reformed Electoral System in Great Britain, 1832-1914
Classic Pamphlet
The struggle for parliamentary reform between 1830 and 1832 has long been regarded as one of the decisive battles of British political history. The Tories lamented that the passage of the Reform Bill meant the destruction of the constitution.
Middle class Radicals welcomed the Reform Bill as the instrument that...
The Reformed Electoral System in Great Britain, 1832-1914
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Doomed to fail: America’s intervention in Vietnam
Historian article
Why did American military involvement in Vietnam fail? In this article, David McGill explains why the United States never had a realistic chance of defeating the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies.
The decision by the United States government to become involved in supporting the South Vietnamese government against the...
Doomed to fail: America’s intervention in Vietnam
