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Found 278 results matching 'brief history' within Student > Historical Periods > Modern > Britain & Ireland   (Clear filter)

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  • World War 2 Letters

      Link
    Lt. Richard (Dick) Kelner Williams volunteered for the Dorset Regiment in June 1940.  He trained in Wiltshire with the 6th and 70th Dorsets in 1940 and 41.  After a period in the Intelligence Section of the Dorsets he volunteered for the 1st Air Landing Squadron and the 43rd Reconnaissance Regiment before his commission...
    World War 2 Letters

  • 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

  • Towards Reform in 1809

      Historian article
    Two hundred years ago it must have seemed to some as if the time for political and economic reform in Britain had arrived. A number of the necessary conditions appeared to be in place: recent examples from America and France showing how readily and rapidly established systems could be overturned...
    Towards Reform in 1809

  • 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

  • The 'Penny Dreadful'

      Historian article
    "I wish I know'd as much as you, Dick. How did you manage to pick it up?" "Mother taught me most, and I read all the books I can get." "So do I; sich rattling tales, too ---‘The Black Phantom; or, the White Spectre of the Pink Rock.' It's fine,...
    The 'Penny Dreadful'

  • The Road to Dunkirk

      Historian 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

  • The Evolution of the British Electoral System 1832-1987

      Classic Pamphlet
    During the last 20 years our perspective on the great Victorian question of parliamentary reform has noticeably changed. We have acquired a comprehensive picture of the organisation and political socialisation of those who won the vote; and some interesting debates have developed about the social characteristics of the electors and...
    The Evolution of the British Electoral System 1832-1987

  • The League of Nations

      Classic Pamphlet
    It is common to see the failure of the League of Nations in its inability to stand up to the crises of the inter-war years.Peter Raffo shows that the League was flawed from the start. Never more than a voluntary association of sovereign states hoping to create ‘an atmosphere capable...
    The League of Nations

  • Fascism in Europe 1919-1945

      Classic Pamphlet
    The importance of fascism in 20th Century Europe is beyond question. But what was - or is - fascism?It is synonymous with authoritarian rule or the totalitarian state, or with both? In political terms, is fascism ‘right-wing' or ‘left-wing', revolutionary or reactionary? Why did it develop? Was it truly only...
    Fascism in Europe 1919-1945

  • The Oxford Movement and Anglican Ritualism

      Classic Pamphlet
    The English Reformation of the Sixteenth century had been a compromise, both politically and theologically. The administrative framework of the medieval church, with its system of church courts, private patronage, pluralism, the social and financial gulf between the lower and higher clergy, its inadequacy of clerical education and its hierarchical...
    The Oxford Movement and Anglican Ritualism

  • 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

  • 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

  • Anorexia Nervosa in the nineteenth century

      Historian article
    First referred to by Richard Morton (1637-98) in his Phthisiologia under the denomination phthisis nervosa as long ago as 1689, anorexia nervosa was given its name in a note by Sir William Gull (1816-90) in 1874. Gull had earlier described a disorder he termed apepsia hysterica, involving extreme emaciation without...
    Anorexia Nervosa in the nineteenth century

  • 'The end of all existence is debarred me': Disraeli's depression 1826-30

      Historian article
    During the years from 1826 to 1830 Benjamin Disraeli went through the slough of despond. His first major biographer,William Flavelle Monypenny, observed the ‘clouds of despondency which were now settling upon Disraeli's mind'. In his magisterial life of the great tory leader Robert Blake commented that ‘after completing Part II...
    'The end of all existence is debarred me': Disraeli's depression 1826-30

  • The snobbery of chronology: In defence of the generals on the Western Front

      Historian article
    Faced with the testimony of the huge casualty lists of the First World War, the desperate battles of attrition, the emotive evidence of the seemingly endless cemeteries and memorials, the moving war poetry of men such as Owen and Sassoon, and the memoirs of those who fought, it is not...
    The snobbery of chronology: In defence of the generals on the Western Front

  • The Northern Ireland Question 1886-1986

      Classic Pamphlet
    The nature of the rights of majorities and minorities is one of the most intractable of the issues raised by the Northern Ireland question, especially since much depends on definitions. Ulster Protestants are a majority in that province but a minority in both Ireland and the United Kingdom, while Catholics,...
    The Northern Ireland Question 1886-1986

  • The People's Pensions

      Recorded lecture
    Why did the British get pensions when they did? What part did the great social surveys (Booth and Rowntree) play? Was there something rotten at the heart of Empire? What part did fears of a Red Peril play? Was Britain slow, with Bismarck and even the Tsar providing some measures of...
    The People's Pensions

  • The Englishness of George Orwell

      Podcast
    George Orwell is best known for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four - one book an allegory of The Russian Revolution, and the other a science fiction dystopia about a globalized world. Before these two last works, the heart and soul of Orwell's writing had been about England and the...
    The Englishness of George Orwell

  • 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

  • Hat on headstones

      Historian article
    The grave markers in churchyards and cemeteries are for the most part depressingly unimaginative both in their design and in their inscriptions but one occasionally meets with an attempt at striking an individual note, such as a sculpted depiction of a motor vehicle, or an animal, or the head-gear worn...
    Hat on headstones

  • Child labour in eighteenth century London

      Historian 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

  • The Versailles Peace Settlement

      Classic Pamphlet
    This classic pamphlet takes you through the Paris Peace Conference and the 'German Question', Peacemaking and the Treaty of Versailles, Europe and the German question after Versailles.
    The Versailles Peace Settlement

  • The Enlightenment

      Classic Pamphlet
    Can a movement as varied and diffuse as the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century be contained within the covers of a short pamphlet? The problem would certainly have appealed to the intellectuals of that time. Generalists rather than specialists, citizens of the whole world of knowledge, they relished the challenge...
    The Enlightenment

  • 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

  • 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