| History
| History
Not far up the M5 from Cheltenham is the Black Country town of Stourbridge. The town is perhaps most famous for its glassmaking (the process of using glass to make a range of vessels, from bottles to bowls), and was…
Are there limits to the intellectual inquiries historians may make? Our knee-jerk reaction to this, of course, would usually be – should usually be – ‘no’. I wrote a few months ago about Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch’s recent Silence: A Christian…
In an age in which historians have long since abandoned the ‘great men’ theory of history, how do we define – should we even use – the term ‘world historical figure’? Our discipline now rightly prefers to complicate our vision of…
Not unlike the actions of the cottars and crofters who are its subjects, it has taken some time to bring this work to fruition. Indeed, we might push this analogy even further and suggest that the trajectory to final publication…
By Christian O’Connell: This weekend I caught this BBC documentary on the 1970s in Britian. Dominic Sandbrook, author of White Heat: a history of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (2006) and State of Emergency: The way we were, Britain 1970-74…
I have just published an article in the journal Modern Intellectual History, entitled “Sanguinary Amusement”: E.A. Freeman, the Comparative Method and Victorian Theories of Race. This article seeks to revise the conventional portrait of the historian E. A. Freeman (1823–92)…
The life, death and now funeral of Margaret Thatcher is a proper subject of debate – both contemporary and historical. Historians have already begun to pick anew over the former PM’s legacy, but the early modern blog Parthenissa offers a…
Readers of earlier posts on the blog (and some of my students!) will know that I urge people to read the “quality” press in order to follow the news and also to get book (and other) reviews. Two reviews in…
Oh yes! Now here’s an exciting topic! There’s no reason why I should choose to post this today, no anniversary; no re-opening of a historic but recently refurbished station; beyond the fact that I’ve seen quite a few of them…