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  • Real Lives: Maharaja’s German: Anthony Pohlmann in India

      Historian feature
    Our series ‘Real Lives’ seeks to put the story of the ordinary person into our great historical narrative. We are all part of the rich fabric of the communities in which we live and we are affected to greater and lesser degrees by the big events that happen on a daily...
    Real Lives: Maharaja’s German: Anthony Pohlmann in India
  • Who were the Nuns? English Convents in Exile 1600-1800

      Public History Podcast
    An HA Public History Podcast featuring Dr Andrew Foster and Dr Caroline Bowden discussing the project: Who were the Nuns? A Prosopographical study of the English Convents in exile 1600-1800. 'Who were the Nuns?' is a funded project at Queen Mary, Universty of London that has been making a comprehensive study of...
    Who were the Nuns? English Convents in Exile 1600-1800
  • Films: Mikhail Gorbachev – Interpretations

      Film series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
    How much of what Russia is today, how its people behave, and how they are perceived is dependent on its history and those that have led it? Was it the first melting pot of the world? Do its broad range of cultural traditions and diversity play a part in its...
    Films: Mikhail Gorbachev – Interpretations
  • The War of American Independence

      Classic Pamphlet
    In the two-hundredth year of American Independence, it is proper to ask: why did it occur? It need not have happened; it was the act of men, not immutable forces. But once the tensions became acute, the three thousand miles of ocean were a difficult chasm to bridge. The War...
    The War of American Independence
  • Legacies of the Cement Armada

      Historian article
    Steven Pierce writes about Nigeria, long known for its flamboyant corruption, some of which stems from accidents of history. Its true international notoriety emerged in 1974–75, when half the world’s concrete supply was mysteriously diverted to the port of Lagos, paralysing it for a year. This article examines how the press coverage...
    Legacies of the Cement Armada
  • German universities under the Nazis

      Historian article
    In this article A.D. Harvey draws out the influence that Nazism and Nazi practices had on German universities and their staff. He explores how some university professors were active members of the party while others saw a chance of advancement by becoming conduits of the Nazi ideas. Finally he considers...
    German universities under the Nazis
  • Real Lives: Surviving the War in the Soviet Union: recollections of a child deportee

      Historian feature
    This 'Real Lives' piece is based on a series of interviews Annette Ormanczyk carried out in 2019 with Mrs Irena Persak, who was deported as a five-year-old child with her family in February 1940. As well as offering a fascinating personal account of life in the Soviet Union during the Second...
    Real Lives: Surviving the War in the Soviet Union: recollections of a child deportee
  • War Plan Red: the American Plan for war with Britain

      Article
    John Major discusses an astonishing aspect of past Anglo-American history. All great powers have developed contingency plans for war with each other, and the United States in the early twentieth century was no exception. Each of Washington’s schemes was given a distinctive colour. Green mapped out intervention in neighbouring Mexico,...
    War Plan Red: the American Plan for war with Britain
  • 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
  • Films: Brezhnev – Interpretations

      Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
    (Student and corporate secondary members can view these films in our Student Zone) Leonid Brezhnev was the second longest serving leader of the Soviet Union after Stalin, overseeing some of the most difficult relations between East and West, yet he does not have the popular cultural legacy of some of the...
    Films: Brezhnev – Interpretations
  • Film: Lenin, the 1905 Russian Revolution and WWI

      Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
    The founders of Communism, Marx and Engels, had created a set of social structures and industrial developments that were believed necessary for Communism to be achieved. Imperial Russia did not fit these conditions and yet at the start of the twentieth century Russian revolutionaries were some of the most active...
    Film: Lenin, the 1905 Russian Revolution and WWI
  • Recruiting volunteers to fight in the First World War

      Historian article
    ‘Your Country Needs You’ and other posters are still remembered today as a prominent vehicle by which men were encouraged to fight in the First World War. Virtually absent from the literature, however, is analysis of the impact of thousands of recruitment meetings and their speakers. Robert Bullard explores the contribution...
    Recruiting volunteers to fight in the First World War
  • Film: Khrushchev - Background

      Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
    In this film, Dr Alexander Titov (Queen's University of Belfast), provides a profile of Khrushchev’s background and personality and how these influenced his politics and ideas. Dr Titov takes us on a journey from Khrushchev's peasant beginnings in Kursk, his rapid rise in the communist party, his role in the purges, to...
    Film: Khrushchev - Background
  • Political and social attitudes underpinning the 1924 Olympics

      Historian article
    The 1924 Olympics in Paris are best known to many British people through the ‘Chariots of Fire’ film from the early 1980s. The film touches on some of the political and social attitudes prevalent in the 1920s and Steve Illingworth explores these issues further in this article. It is argued...
    Political and social attitudes underpinning the 1924 Olympics
  • Bonapartism after Napoleon III: the Prince Imperial and Eugene Loudun

      Historian article
    Emperor Napoleon III of France was deposed in 1870 and then died three years later. His son, known as the Prince Imperial, lived in exile in south-east England. There he and his supporters kept alive ambitions for a triumphant return of the Empire. In this article, Ian Sygrave assesses the...
    Bonapartism after Napoleon III: the Prince Imperial and Eugene Loudun
  • The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

      Historian article
    The Nazis came to power in 1933 with an openly racist and antisemitic set of policies. In the years leading up to the start of the Second World War, those policies were carried out through legislation and governmental actions, with the support of many members of German society. Once the war started,...
    The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
  • Anti-Americanism in Britain during the Second World War

      Historian article
    The Second World War saw the development of significant anti-Americanism in Britain. This article locates the centre of wartime anti-Americanism in the politics of Conservative imperialists, who believed the USA was trying to deliberately dismantle the British Empire in order to fulfil its own imperial ambitions. The Second World War...
    Anti-Americanism in Britain during the Second World War
  • 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
  • The Spanish-American War revisited: rise of an American empire?

      Historian article
    Anthony Ruggiero reveals how United States foreign policy evolved from its effective adherence to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 into securing its own overseas ‘empire’. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was pivotal in launching the United States into recognition as an empire.  Following the war, the United Sates accepted its role...
    The Spanish-American War revisited: rise of an American empire?
  • Evelyn Waugh’s books on the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–36

      Historian article
    Philip Woods discusses Evelyn Waugh’s contribution to understanding the nature of journalism before the Second World War. This article compares the value to historians of the two books Evelyn Waugh wrote based on his experiences as a war correspondent covering the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935–36. The popular satiric novel Scoop (1938) is...
    Evelyn Waugh’s books on the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–36
  • My great-grandfather and the Italian Campaign

      Historian article
    This remarkable item by a student at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield was the winning Young Historian entry in the Key Stage 3 Spirit of Normandy Trust category in 2022. I’ve always known my great-grandfather fought in the Second World War, but never like this. When he left the army, he never...
    My great-grandfather and the Italian Campaign
  • Mountbatten in retirement: the abortive trip to rebel Rhodesia

      Historian article
    Adrian Smith investigates an abortive plan for the earl to intervene in Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Earl Mountbatten of Burma boasted a unique CV: Chief of Combined Operations, Supreme Commander South-East Asia, Admiral of the Fleet and First Sea Lord, Chief of the Defence Staff, and Viceroy of India. Yet somehow...
    Mountbatten in retirement: the abortive trip to rebel Rhodesia
  • Tourism: the birth and death of the little Welsh town?

      Historian article
    Millie Punshon is a sixth form student in North Wales and was one of this year's finalists in the HA's Great Debate public speaking competition.  It is no unknown fact that the Victorian city-slickers adored the north coast of Wales, and without them towns such as Llandudno, Beaumaris, and Betws-y-Coed may not have...
    Tourism: the birth and death of the little Welsh town?
  • The Duchy of Courland and a Baltic colonial venture across the ocean

      Historian article
    The Duchy of Courland’s attempts to establish outposts in the Caribbean and Africa were not the only Baltic ventures across the Atlantic during the seventeenth century. However, the expeditions of the small vassal dukedom were possibly the most unlikely. The article introduces the motivations behind the Couronian colonial project, as...
    The Duchy of Courland and a Baltic colonial venture across the ocean
  • How Sweden almost became a nuclear-armed state – and why it didn’t

      Historian article
    This article examines the conditions under which Sweden considered and subsequently pursued nuclear weapons. After failing to secure the establishment of a Scandinavian defence union, the Swedish government initially viewed nuclear arms as an effective means to safeguard the country’s neutrality. Owing to technical limitations, reassessments on the value of such...
    How Sweden almost became a nuclear-armed state – and why it didn’t