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The secret diaries of William Wilberforce
Historian article
John Coffey shows us what insights can be gained from the diaries of leading abolitionist, William Wilberforce.
The diary is a distinctively modern genre... In English, the first diaries date from the Tudor era, but it is in the seventeenth century that the trickle becomes a flood. Alongside the famous...
The secret diaries of William Wilberforce
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The Poor Law in Nineteenth-century England and Wales
Classic Pamphlet
Variety rather than uniformity characterised the administration of poor relief in England and Wales, and at no period was this more apparent than in the decades before the national reform of the poor law in 1834. Unprecedented economic and social changes produced severe problems for those responsible for social welfare,...
The Poor Law in Nineteenth-century England and Wales
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The changing convict experience: forced migration to Australia
Historian article
Edward Washington explores the story of William Noah who was sentenced to death for burglary in 1797 at the age of 43. He, and two others, were found guilty of breaking and entering the dwelling-house of Cuthbert Hilton, on the night of the 13 February. From Newgate Prison he was...
The changing convict experience: forced migration to Australia
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The Northern Limit: Britain, Canada and Greenland, 1917-20
Historian article
Imperial ambitions during the First World War extended beyond the Middle East and Africa. In this article Ben Markham looks at the territorial wrangling over Greenland.
It is well known that the British Empire grew in size significantly in the wake of the First World War. In the course of...
The Northern Limit: Britain, Canada and Greenland, 1917-20
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Journeys Home: Indian forces and the First World War
Historian article
This article examines the importance of understanding the experiences of the Indian Forces during the First World War and how that can affect young people today.
One hundred and four years ago the British Empire was one of the largest global operations in existence. Roughly a quarter of the world’s population...
Journeys Home: Indian forces and the First World War
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Why the OBE survived the Empire
Historian article
An anomaly of the British honours system is the name of the award most frequently given - the Order of the British Empire created in 1917. Each medal carries the words: ‘For God and the Empire'. When the connection between the person honoured and the church is often very tenuous...
Why the OBE survived the Empire
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The development of the Department of Health
Historian article
Health as a specific feature of central government strategy is a relatively recent phenomenon and Hugh Gault identifies how this feature of everyday headlines in our newspapers has been managed until the present time.
At the start of the twentieth century Lord Salisbury’s Cabinet comprised four Secretaries of State –...
The development of the Department of Health
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Admiral Lord Mountbatten: man of science and royal role model
Historian article
Mountbatten was a controversial figure who died in tragic circumstances but Adrian Smith demonstrates that, behind his aristocratic facade, he was a very adept, talented and formative personality.
Four years have passed since the re-opening of Broadlands, the Hampshire home of Lord and Lady Brabourne. The house was subject to...
Admiral Lord Mountbatten: man of science and royal role model
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Promoting the First World War, 1914-16
Historian article
The popular image of the First World War is of young men leaving the tedium of the factory or the mine to volunteer for service on the Western Front in one of Kitchener’s new armies. Less well known is the background effort that went into maintaining and strengthening morale as...
Promoting the First World War, 1914-16
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Wellington's Soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars
Historian article
Wellington's Soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars
The war with France, which began in 1793, had moved to the Iberian Peninsula by 1808. This year is therefore the two-hundredth anniversary of the commencement of the Peninsular War campaigns. War on the Peninsula demanded huge resources of manpower in order to defeat...
Wellington's Soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars
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Disraeli, Peel and the Corn Laws: the making of a conservative reputation
Historian article
125 years after his death, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, still provides the political lode-star for generations of Conservatives. Lately, for the first time in 30 years, Disraeli's name and example has been enthusiastically evoked by the party leadership and David Cameron has projected himself as a Disraeli for the...
Disraeli, Peel and the Corn Laws: the making of a conservative reputation
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Memorial Oaks at Wolsingham School
Historian article
Our World War I commemorative series continues with Robert Hopkinson's introduction to what the Imperial War Museum believes is the oldest war memorial in Britain.
Wolsingham School and Community College, in Weardale, County Durham, celebrated its 400th anniversary in 2014. As part of the celebrations, there was an exhibition, a...
Memorial Oaks at Wolsingham School
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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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The great Liberal landslide: the 1906 General Election in perspective
Historian article
On 1 May 1997 the Conservative party suffered an electoral defeat so overwhelming that political commentators were left rummaging through the statistics of the previous two centuries to find anything similar. The Times concluded on 3 May that it was the party's worst performance since 1832, though 'The disaster suffered...
The great Liberal landslide: the 1906 General Election in perspective
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Lloyd George & Gladstone
Article
Lloyd George, who died sixty years ago on 26 March 1945, grew up and began his Parliamentary career in Queen Victoria's reign. In taking up a major Welsh issue, disestablishment of the Church of Wales, he memorably clashed with William Ewart Gladstone, perhaps the greatest of all Liberal Prime Ministers....
Lloyd George & Gladstone
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William Vernon Harcourt
Article
2004 marks the centenary of the death of Sir William Vernon Harcourt, on 30 September 1904, and this provides an opportunity to consider the extent to which Harcourt's beliefs and political attitudes are still relevant today. Although he is now almost forgotten Harcourt was regarded as a major figure in...
William Vernon Harcourt
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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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Pressure and Persuasion Canadian agents and Scottish emigration, c. 1870- c. 1930
Article
In February, 1907, the Canadian government’s most northerly regional emigration office in the British Isles opened for business in Aberdeen. Located near the city centre, only a stone’s throw from the docks and the railway station, it soon fulfilled the expectation that it would capture the attention of a large...
Pressure and Persuasion Canadian agents and Scottish emigration, c. 1870- c. 1930
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The British Union of Fascists: the international dimension
Article
Fascism failed in Britain in the 1930s – Europe’s decade of the ‘Brown plague’. Unlike in many European countries, fascists in Britain were never a serious threat to the democratic order. This was not for want of trying, especially on the part of Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union...
The British Union of Fascists: the international dimension
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Queen Victoria as a Politician
Article
Even had Queen Victoria not presided over the achievements of the age which bears her name, her career would still hold a fascination for the historian. She was, for one thing, the solitary woman in a male political world. She was possessed of a personality at once perceptive and simple,...
Queen Victoria as a Politician
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The Second World War
Classic Pamphlet
On 5 September 1939 the German Führer, Adolf Hitler, paid a surprise visit to the corps which was in the forefront of his army's ferocious assault upon Poland. As they passed the remains of a smashed Polish artillery regiment, the corps commander, General Guderian, astonished Hitler by telling him that...
The Second World War
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Chamberlain Day and the popular meaning of Tariff Reform
Historian article
Few Conservative institutions appealed to the Tory rank-and-file activist like the Tariff Reform League did in the opening two decades of the Twentieth Century. From its foundation in 1903, the League spearheaded Joseph Chamberlain’s crusade to grant tariffs on imported goods, acting as his grassroots organisation. This article attempts to...
Chamberlain Day and the popular meaning of Tariff Reform
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Lord Palmerston
Historian article
Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) has long interested (and confused) historians. A man of contradictions and paradoxes, he seemed both to embody modern Victorian Britain, and yet at the same time stand as a potent symbol of what had been lost.
Lord Palmerston
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A sense of occasion
Historian article
It is appropriate, in this bicentenary year of Mendelssohn's birth, to remember a great day in Birmingham's musical and social calendar. A day when the composer's Oratorio, Elijah, especially commissioned for the city's 1846 Triennial Festival to raise money for the Children's Hospital, was first performed in the newly refurbished Town...
A sense of occasion
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Catch me if you can: Trevithik vs. Stephenson
Historian article
Richard Trevithick & George Stephenson: a twenty firstcentury Reassessment
Two hundred years ago, a remarkable event took place in London. At the instigation of Richard Trevithick, engineer, polymath and inventor - who many regard as the greatest Cornishman ever - an elliptical circuit of cast iron rail was laid out...
Catch me if you can: Trevithik vs. Stephenson
