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Virtual Branch recording: The Women's World Committee against War & Fascism
Connected and Competing Activisms
How did a group of women activists with varied ideological backgrounds construct several important campaigns against fascism in the interwar period? How did this Women's World Committee against War and Fascism (Comité Mondial des Femmes contre la Guerre et le Fascisme) undertake effective humanitarian and propaganda work and forge extensive...
Virtual Branch recording: The Women's World Committee against War & Fascism
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Film: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War
The Searchers
Historian Robert Sackville-West joined the HA Virtual Branch in November 2021 to talk about the topic of his book The Searchers: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War. By the end of the First World War, the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers were unknown. Most were presumed...
Film: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War
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Film series: Power and Freedom in Britain and Ireland, 1714–2010
New HA film series
From royal courts to radical protests, from industrial revolutions to global empires – this compelling new film series traces the dramatic evolution of power, rights, and freedom across three centuries of British and Irish history.
We will trace Britain and Ireland’s transformation from 1714 to 2010, unpacking power struggles, social revolutions, and...
Film series: Power and Freedom in Britain and Ireland, 1714–2010
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Film: Lenin's legacy
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
With his body was embalmed and building high statues were erected to him Lenin’s memory seemed secured for ever. Yet how did his memory and his actual legacy differ? Did he really set the course for a future better Russia, or were his ideas of revolution better on paper than...
Film: Lenin's legacy
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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
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Recorded Webinar: Mass-Observing Modern Britain
Article
Mass-Observation is probably the most consistently useful source for the study of mid and late 20th social lives Britain. It was established in 1937 with the aim of investigating ordinary life and developing an 'anthropology of ourselves.' It used a range of different methods to collect information, from recording overheard...
Recorded Webinar: Mass-Observing Modern Britain
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Film: What a strange place to be buried
Virtual Branch Film
Anna Cusack joined the HA Virtual Branch to discuss unique burial locations in London c.1600-1800. Anna recently completed a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London on the marginal dead of seventeenth and eighteenth-century London, focusing specifically on suicides, executed criminals, Quakers, and Jews and the treatment of their bodily remains...
Film: What a strange place to be buried
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Recorded webinar series: The power of maps
Multipage Article
Historians use maps a lot – or at least they should. They help us to understand global relations, environmental and social change and they help to reveal how the world was understood and explored in the past. This webinar series is an opportunity to hear three world class academics explore different aspects...
Recorded webinar series: The power of maps
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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
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Recorded webinar: Researching the history of migration and refugees in Europe
When the present informs the past
Research on the history of migration continues to flourish and grow, but scholarship is also becoming increasingly splintered, often focusing on particular settings or population groups. Migration is often used as a way to discuss questions of national identity or diverse religious, ethnic, religious and local identities in the UK,...
Recorded webinar: Researching the history of migration and refugees in Europe
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Virtual Branch Recording: Locating and Mapping the Jews of Medieval Lincoln
Article
As part of a project to identify and write biographies of all of the Jews of the medieval Lincoln Jewry, Natasha Jenman, Luka Liu, and Josh Outhwaite have been working on records of Jewish property ownership in the city across the thirteenth century. This allows them to identify those individuals who will be...
Virtual Branch Recording: Locating and Mapping the Jews of Medieval Lincoln
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Film: Brezhnev's legacy
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
In this film Dr Edwin Bacon looks back at Brezhnev’s 18 years and how is has been described as an era of stagnation, producing an appetite for change from younger leaders such as Mikail Gorbachev.
Dr Bacon reflects that this was a period of relative peace, stability and predictability which...
Film: Brezhnev's legacy
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Film: Brezhnev and Détente
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
In this film Dr Edwin Bacon blanks about the modernisation of the soviet union in the 1960s and 70s under Brezhnev, with some scholars predicting that as the East and West evolved, they would eventually converge as modern developed industrialised societies. The problem with convergence theory is that it didn’t...
Film: Brezhnev and Détente
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Film: Brezhnev's agenda
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
In this film Dr Edwin Bacon talks about Brezhnev’s change in direction and approach after Khruschev, making collective leadership work and the Kosygin reforms. Whilst there were changes from the era of Khruschev, Brezhnev’s response to the Prague Spring in 1968 showed that some things had not changed. The events...
Film: Brezhnev's agenda
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Film: From Khrushchev to Brezhnev
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
In this film Dr Edwin Bacon reflects upon the instability of the Khrushchev era and how Brezhnev positioned himself as the perfect replacement for a Soviet Communist party desperate for stability in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis. Brezhnev would be the first amongst equals looking to move forward...
Film: From Khrushchev to Brezhnev
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Film: Brezhnev's early life and career
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
In this film Dr Edwin Bacon takes us through Brezhnev’s early life and career: his birth in Ukraine in 1906, the opportunities brought by the revolution, his role in the battle of Ukraine and his eventual arrival to the Politburo at the end of the 1950s. Dr Bacon looks at...
Film: Brezhnev's early life and career
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Film: Lenin and the Russian Civil War
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
Revolution is never simple. Lenin and the Bolsheviks quickly found that not everyone in Russia or outside of it approved of their new radical agenda. Russia was plunged into a civil war of devastating circumstances. How would its new leader manage and how much were the needs of the people...
Film: Lenin and the Russian Civil War
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Film: Lenin and the birth of Soviet Russia
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
Having changed the course of Russian society Lenin now needed to secure his Bolshevik survival. Unlike his predecessor he saw no need to continue with the Imperialist policies of a war in Europe. Territory could be sacrificed for control, but would promises and rhetoric be enough to govern among people...
Film: Lenin and the birth of Soviet Russia
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Film: Lenin and the 1917 Revolutions
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
You wait a lifetime for a revolution and then two come along at once! Such was 1917 in Russia. As the world seemed in chaos and Russia and the Russian people began to collapse, Lenin and the Bolsheviks saw their opportunity and overthrew the government to create the first communist...
Film: Lenin and the 1917 Revolutions
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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
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Film: Lenin's early thought
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
As Lenin’s own political outlook and beliefs developed so did the European movements of Socialism and Communism. Groups emerged that wanted to radically change society and social structures. Lenin positioned himself as one of the leaders and crucially one of the thinkers behind these new ideas and movements.
Dr Lara...
Film: Lenin's early thought
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Film: A conversation on Goethe with A.N. Wilson
Article
In Goethe: His Faustian life, award-winning biographer, critic and writer A. N. Wilson tells the spellbinding story of the life of Goethe. From his youth as a wild literary prodigy, to his later years as Germany’s most heroic intellectual figure, Wilson hones in on Goethe’s undying obsession with the work he would spend his...
Film: A conversation on Goethe with A.N. Wilson
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Film: Lenin's origins
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870. This film takes us through his middle-class origins, how he was radicalised by the world he saw around him, especially following the execution of his brother, and how the future politician and revolutionary developed amongst the extremes of Imperial Russian society.
In...
Film: Lenin's origins
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Virtual Branch Recording: Vagabonds versus the Mendicity Society
Article
Red Lion Square was long one of London's most genteel addresses, home to nobles, scholars, and professionals. But on 25 March 1818, one house on the south side opened its doors to quite another class of person, as the Mendicity Society began its business. Set up to solve the growing...
Virtual Branch Recording: Vagabonds versus the Mendicity Society
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Virtual Branch Recording: The Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949
Diaries and Personal Experiences
In this talk Professor Henrietta Harrison uses diary records to think about the experience of living through the revolution in China in 1949, focussing on what it meant to Chinese people, how they learned about its practices and ideology, and how this changed their lives - whether they were radical intellectuals returning...
Virtual Branch Recording: The Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949