History Journal blog archive
The online offering of the official journal of the Historical Association
This website constitutes the archive of the History journal blog up to May 2023. For further information, please consult the new blog as well as the journal website.
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History blog moves to HA website
The blog of History: The Journal of the Historical Association has now moved to the website of the Historical Association (HA). For up-to-date content, please go to our new site. We will retain the old blog as an archive of the content that had been generated up to the end of 2022.
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Crowns and controversies: the politics of King Charles III’s coronation
Fig. 1 State opening of Parliament By Dr Jérémy Filet and Calum Cunningham With the release of Season 5 of The Crown on Netflix in November 2022, a worldwide audience gained access to a somewhat romanticised version of the adult life of the new monarch of the United Kingdom. The series depicts a reformer Prince…
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Interview with Jessica A. Fernandez de Lara Harada on Othered Histories of Race
“Mexican and Japanese relations demonstrate the existence of an open, decentred world characterised by multiple overlapping structures.” By Jessica A. Fernandez de Lara Harada Iker Itoiz Ciaurriz: Firstly, for those who might be unfamiliar with the topic, can you give us a brief overview of the history of race and power in Mexican-Japanese Relations? …
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The Francoist appropriation of the popular festival
Fig 1: Franco and members of the Seville government in a Holy Week procession in 1940 By Claudio Hernández Burgos and César Rina When it comes to understanding contemporary cultural processes and political dynamics, the study of festivals and popular rituals has traditionally occupied a secondary and anecdotal position in historiography. It has been interpreted as…
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‘All Women United Fraternally against War and Fascism’: The Comité Mondial des Femmes contre la Guerre et le Fascisme
Fig 1: Demonstration of The Comité Mondial Des Femmes Contre la Guerre et le Fascisme demanding female vote By Dr Jasmine Calver Political discourse over the last few years has been dominated by discussions and warnings about extremism, particularly the rise of the new extreme right across the globe. How and why modern extremism attracts…
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Co-Rulership and Power in Medieval Europe
Fig. 1 Henry II and his children, Royal 14 B VI, Membrane 6, British By Gabby Storey For most scholars of royal studies, the concepts of corporate or composite monarchies, now fusing with ideas of co-rulership, are important – though not always essential – approaches to apply to the study of monarchy. However, for monarchical studies,…
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Japan’s Empire and the Crushed Hopes of the “Colored Races” of the World
Figure 1: 1938 pamphlet issued by the Negro Commission of the National Committee of the Communist Party, USA By Dr Sherzod Muminov For a few early decades of the twentieth century, Japan came to be seen as a champion of the colonized peoples around the world. Behind this image stood Japan’s meteoric rise as the…
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Reflections on Black History in Black History Month
Figure 1: Sketch of the life of Frederick Douglass in Special Memorial Murder (1895) By Becky Taylor Black History Month is often a time when I reflect not only on how Black British histories inform my own research on histories of marginalised and racialised groups – Gypsies and Travellers, refugees, the vilified poor and migrant…
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Egyptian? Or Nubian? Asking questions of objects
By Aaron de Souza For the last ten years or so I’ve been deeply interested in ancient Nubian cultures of the Second Millennium BCE – in particular the so-called ‘Pan-Grave’, ‘C-Group’ and ‘Kerma’ cultures.[1] I can’t tell you exactly what about them it is that intrigues me so much, but a big part is the…
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Interview with Adam Simmons on ‘Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Crusading World, 1095-1402 (Routledge, 2022’)
By Gabby Storey and Adam D. Simmons How did you get into the topic of the book? I developed my initial interest in earlier African history during my MA at KCL. I’ve always been more interested in the topics which are often not covered, to understand why not and to see how much history we…
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Finding Transgender Worlds in Late Medieval Iceland
By Basil Arnould Price Translations are the author’s own. On May 25, 2022, software engineer Helen Staniland streamed an interview with journalist Helen Joyce. During the interview, Joyce remarked: “…we have to try to limit the harm and that means reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition. That’s for two reasons –…
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The Zainichi: between two countries, two names, and two languages
By Bomi Choi The New York Times bestseller Pachinko (2017), written by Korean American author Min Jin Lee, and the screen adaptation of the English-language novel on Apple TV+ in 2022, tell stories of Japan’s ethnic Koreans. The Japanese term Zainichi literally means ‘resident in Japan’, but it is commonly used to address its Korean…
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The court chapel’s position in Early Modern Europe: a methodological approach
By Manos Vakondios The “court chapel across religious boundaries” is my PhD project, part of the wider MSCA project PALAMUSTO (Palace Museum of Tomorrow)[1]. Together with nine other PhD theses, palatial spaces, concepts, and infrastructures are addressed and explored by colleagues in universities and museum institutions across Europe.[2] The research focus of my doctoral project…
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Desire between Men in the Byzantine Imperial Court: Some Evidence from Symeon the Logothete, Letter-Writer and Historiographer
By Mark Masterson All translations are the author’s own. The Byzantine Empire’s glorious Macedonian dynasty, beginning in 867 and ending in 1056 saw the empire experience both territorial expansion and an efflorescence in learning. The culture of men in the upper reaches of this society was a milieu that featured homoeroticism and same-sex desire. As…
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An ‘alt-ac’ career within the academy: working on Oxford’s National Trust Partnership
By Hanna Smyth Since finishing my PhD in Global & Imperial History in 2019, I’ve spent most of the last three years working on the Heritage Partnerships Team at the University of Oxford, specifically as the Support Officer for its National Trust Partnership. This was a career path I’d never known existed before the PhD,…
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The Cat in the Cradle: Conspiracy Theories and Credible News, 1688 – and Now
By Laura Doak On 10 June 1688 a new Prince of Wales was born at St. James’s Palace, London, and whispers swept across Europe. Some claimed that the baby, born to King James VII & II and his queen, Mary of Modena, was a fake. Stories circulated that it was a plot to engineer counter-Reformation…
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Researching (from) a Ducal Residence: the Tower Apartment of Mary of Hamal at the Castle of Heverlee
By Miara Fraikin In March 2020 – not the best timing to be honest – I started my PhD research within the Horizon 2020 funded European Training Network PALAMUSTO (Palace Museum of Tomorrow). Uniting ten researchers from nine hosting institutions in five European countries, this research project aims to investigate the court residence or palace…
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Portraits of Female Power in Argentina: Encarnación Ezcurra and Eva Perón
By Rachel Morgan The last three decades of the twentieth century have witnessed a boom in writings on Latin American women to the left of the political spectrum. When considering the topic of leftist Argentine women in power, the image of Eva Perón is inescapable: she was the impoverished and illegitimate child from Los Toldos…
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Replacing Ireland’s Lost Records: Doing Public History with the Beyond 2022 Project
By Elizabeth Biggs One hundred years ago, in the spring and early summer of 1922, the Public Record Office of Ireland in the Four Courts complex in Dublin was occupied by anti-Treaty forces, with Rory O’Connor as one of their leaders. They were opposed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of the previous year, which they felt…
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Narratology for Historical Research: Medieval Texts and Crusader Cannibals
By Katy Mortimer Historians use various methodologies to investigate the past. A particularly prominent feature of recent historiography, for example, is the exploration of social and cultural history, such as questions of gender, religion, power, and material culture. From the mid-twentieth century, moreover, the ‘linguistic turn’ and the development of narrative theory (narratology) led to…
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Reaching out to Re-enactors and Vice-Versa
By Jeff Berry In 2010, I was at conference organised by the Columbia University Medieval Guild (now the Medieval Colloquium) when one of the invited speakers threw up a slide of the Ft. Tryon Medieval Festival, held annually in pre-covid times at the top end of Manhattan. Staring out at me from the picture was my good…
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Blurring the lines of the two kingdoms: kirk and council in Scotland, 1689-1708
By Robbie Tree As the British Cabinet continues to run rough shod over its responsibilities, we hear grumblings over the effectiveness of our leaders and the legitimacy of central government intervention into the daily lives of the populace. These issues were relevant to early modern Scots as well, in terms of the government of both…
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Toppling Tyrants: Early Medieval Approaches to Regime Change
By Harry Mawdsley “[He] had very little sense. He conducted all his affairs without paying the slightest heed, till at length, employing a heavy hand against [his subjects], he was the cause of violent hatred and outrage among them” Such was the damning description of Childeric II’s reign in Francia by one early medieval chronicler.…
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A Sexual Tour of Venice: Mapping a Sixteenth-Century Catalogue of Courtesans
By Hannah Johnston Sometime around 1565, a price-list of Venice’s cortigiane oneste, or “honest courtesans,” who served the city’s upper echelons, was published in Venice.[1] Titled Il catalogo di tutte le principali et più honorate cortigiane di Venezia (“The Catalogue of All the Principal and Most Honored Courtesans of Venice,” hereafter “the catalogue”), the catalogue…
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Ghanaian Racial Citizenship in the Soviet Union and U.S., 1957-1966
By Nana Osei-Opare On May 25, 2020, a white American police officer, Derek Chauvin, and two other police officers murdered George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man. Floyd’s murder sparked global outrage and a reckoning on anti-Black racism. Even right-wing television evangelist Pat Robertson, a staunch pro-police supporter, criticised Chauvin’s actions. Floyd’s murder and the global…
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Women collectors, Lady Associates and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
By Julie Holder When I tell people that I research the nineteenth-century history of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, a very specific idea of an ‘antiquary’ comes to mind: white, male, and middle or upper class. And to a great extent this view is correct. However, that does not mean that women were not…
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The Palace Museum of Tomorrow
By Esther Griffin – van Orsouw Stories of royal and noble courts capture the imagination of millions of people all over the world. If we look at the offer on streaming services, we see historical titles such as ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’, ‘Versailles’, ‘The Cook of Castamar’, ‘The Last Czars’, and ‘Downton Abbey’, to name…
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Celebrating the Accession Day of Elizabeth I of England, 1558 and Beyond
By Aidan Norrie On 17 November 1558, Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, succeeded to the throne of England and Ireland upon the death of her half-sister Mary I. She was England’s fourth monarch in eleven years (or fifth, if Jane Grey is counted), and it is not unreasonable to claim that her…
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![‘”A celebrated correspondence between the charming Mrs C- formerly well-known in the fashionable World – & her Amiable Daughter”’: The Historical Importance of the letters of Hitty and Bess Canning.[1]](https://historyjournal.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/rs-cover-image.jpg?w=1023)
‘”A celebrated correspondence between the charming Mrs C- formerly well-known in the fashionable World – & her Amiable Daughter”’: The Historical Importance of the letters of Hitty and Bess Canning.[1]
By Rachel Smith Whilst reading through the eighteenth-century Canning Family archive at the West Yorkshire Archive Service in Leeds, I came across a rather interesting letter from John Murray, a publisher, to a Mrs Butler. Dated 25th July 1912, he wrote that I gather from what Miss Routh and Mr. Duff told me that the…
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Face to Face Encounters: Letter-Writers and Portrait Photographs in the Russian State Archive
Hannah Parker On the final research trip for my PhD, I found some small portrait photographs of letter-writers in a file of between some hundred and a thousand 1925 letters to the editor of Krest’ianka – a series of biographies with enclosed photographs from their authors. Though, in my experience, group photographs were occasionally included…
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A History of Argument: Teaching Students Critical Analysis
By Andrew Struan Writing in 1808 when in office as President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson told his grandson: ‘I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument’. Continuing this line of thought in his letter, Jefferson explained that his fellow Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, was ‘the…
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‘Here terrible portents’: Famine as a Catalyst for the first Viking raids?
By Tenaya Jorgensen As an Environmental Historian, I am keenly interested in how humans have responded to climate pressures and weather extremes in the past, and what we can learn from these responses today. One aspect of my doctoral research compares periods of violence against temperature and precipitation during the early Viking Age, c. 790-920.…
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EARLY MODERN STUDENTS: NEW DIRECTIONS FOR THE STUDY OF MIGRATION AND IDENTITY
Dr Karie Schultz In recent years, the value of universities––and especially of a humanities education–– has been hotly contested. Discourse has focused on how the humanities might equip students to think critically about the contemporary problems with which they are faced. Turning our focus toward the history of universities, it is evident that these institutions…
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The History of Emotions: A Four Volume Sourcebook
KATIE BARCLAY, with FRANÇOIS SOYER, is editor of Emotions in Europe, 1517-1914 (Routledge, 2020), a four volume sourcebook. Here she talks to History about the work. History: What was the inspiration behind this project? Katie: I’ve been teaching History of Emotions courses for several years now and had been developing a series of resources to support students…
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Britain First: The official history of the United Kingdom according to the Home Office – a critical review
Frank Trentmann BRITAIN FIRST: The official history of the United Kingdom according to the Home Office – a critical review Following this summer’s open letter to the Home Office, this article by Frank Trentmann offers an analysis of the official history chapter in the ‘Life in the UK’ handbook that is required reading for migrants…
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Black History is not just for Black History Month!
Fig. 1 Black History Month display at UEA Library How libraries – and librarians – are grappling with decolonisation and why this matters By Jenny Whitaker and Grant Young This is probably self-evident – especially to historians – but libraries are not neutral entities. They are highly constructed. They have legacies and biases and have…
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Surprising lessons from the 1980s: inspiration from anti-deportation campaign activism
Figure 1: Poster of the Campaign Against Racist Laws By Amy Grant Beginning my research into anti-deportation campaigns in Britain during the long 1980s was a depressing experience. I became enveloped by account after account of families and individuals being torn apart by ever-tightening and often arbitrarily administered immigration laws.[1] It became clear that the…
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