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...

There is a great deal of discussion at the moment about how we engage with and confront the history and legacies of slavery in twenty-first century Britain. A lot of attention has been placed on men like slave trader Edward Colston or merchant and slave-owner Robert Milligan, both of whom were memorialised...

Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India served the British during the Second World War.  Their experiences are little remembered today, neither in the West where a Euro/US-centric memory of the war dominates, nor in South Asia, which privileges nationalist histories of independence from the British Empire. What was it like...

This webinar with Dr Emma D Watkins explores the changing understanding of crime and responses to it in the nineteenth-century. It provides a brief overview on the general shift from punishment of the body, to banishment, all the way through to imprisonment. With a particular emphasis on the use of...

Join us for a journey through Georgian history, literature and society – all from the comfort of your own home. Celebrating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth, this rich, interdisciplinary webinar series from the Historical Association delves into the vibrant world of the Georgians through the lens of one of...

London has tended to dominate accounts of LGBTQ Britain… but how did local contexts beyond the capital affect queer identities and communities? This talk by Professor Matt Cook looks at Brighton, Plymouth, Manchester and Leeds to illustrate the difference locality makes to queer lives. * Please note: while this webinar...

The HA has worked with film-maker,  historian and Legasee ambassador Martyn Cox on a series of webinars looking at untold stories from the Second World War. Many of these stories are taken for the oral histories provided in interviews given to Martyn on film.  In this filmed webinar, Martyn goes...

The BBC News at 10 on Saturday 5 July included an announcement that Manchester's campaign to have a memorial erected to the victims of the Peterloo Massacre had ‘got under way'. That afternoon, a workshop organised by the Peterloo Memorial  campaign had encouraged members of the public to express their...

Brent Dyck is a Canadian teacher and a previous contributor to The Historian. In this short essay he offers us his objective interpretation of the achievements of Neville Chamberlain. For some what he says may seem surprising and for others it might even be controversial. However, editorially it seemed entirely proper...

On 4 March 1856, during a debate in the House of Lords on a motion to form a ‘Gallery of National Portraits', the Conservative peer Earl Stanhope quoted Thomas Carlyle's view that ‘one of the most primary wants [of the historian is] to secure a bodily likeness of the personage...

In this edition, we begin a new occasional feature, where we explore a classic text that had a major impact both at the time it was published, and since. Alf Wilkinson discusses a book first published in 1913, and still in print, and explains why he thinks it is as...

In June 2012 the Historical Association and Historic Royal Palaces joined forces to offer a fantastic CPD opportunity in line with the Queen's diamond jubilee. Two CPD events around the theme of Royal Women charted the private histories of queens of the past from within the walls of their palaces. What...

Hulks – former naval ships used as prisons for those convicted of serious crime and sentenced to transportation – were intended to be a temporary solution to a penal crisis caused by the American Revolutionary Wars. These ‘schools of vice’, or ‘floating hells’ lasted 80 years, casting a shadow over...

Sir Francis Patrick Fletcher Vane, fifth baronet (1861-1934), a man of wideranging but seemingly contradictory passions and interests, was an idealistic but also hard-working aristocrat who played a major role in shaping the early Boy Scout movement in London. While the name of the founder of the Boy Scouts, Robert...

On the north-western side of the City of London, directly in front of St Bartholomew's Hospital near the ancient church of St Bartholomew the Great, there once lay a ‘smooth field', now known as Smithfield. This open space of around ten acres had a long and turbulent history. In medieval...

‘Social Darwinism’ has been associated in academia and popular consciousness with negative concepts such as hyper-nationalism and eugenics. Geoffrey M. Hodgson challenges the notion that Social Darwinism or its proponents were ever well-defined. By tracing the use of ‘Social Darwinism’ across academic disciplines and globally over a long period, Hodgson...

The public man and his career Spencer Perceval's career as a public figure lasted from 1796 when he became a King's Counsel and MP for Northampton until his murder sixteen years later at the age of 49. He was shot in the lobby of the House of Commons at 5.15pm...

Are you interested in both history and sport and undertaking an EPQ project?   Sporting Heritage is a not-for-profit community interest company working specifically to support the collection, preservation, access, and research of sporting heritage in the UK and wider.   Part of their remit also involves fostering interest in and dissemination...

Stalin's remarkable career raises quite fundamental questions for anyone interested in history. Marxists, whose philosophy should cause them to downgrade the role of ‘great men' as an explanation of great events, have problems in fitting Stalin into the materialist interpretation of history: did not this man ride rough-shod over the...

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...