African American educator and activist Booker T. Washington visited Britain in 1899 and 1910. This article uses these transatlantic encounters to reassess conventional notions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an era of rapprochement between Britain and the United States rooted in racial ideas of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. It shows how the visits exacerbated a rift between the two

This article discusses one of the main phenomena of the crusading movement: how preachers of the crusades to the Holy Land made the crusade indulgence attractive to would-be crusaders. Since a plenary indulgence for the participants of the crusades is likely to have been introduced by the papacy at the beginning of the crusading movement in the eleventh century, this was used in crusade preaching throughout

This article outlines the role and function of ‘service’ magic in premodern society, and suggests ways in which the study of magic can be used as a lens to investigate and understand broader historical questions. Magic studies is a marginalised field, and the supernatural generally is treated as an unusual aspect of the human experience. This article shows that there are major benefits to reintegrating

Over the course of the long nineteenth century, people in the United Kingdom signed a wide variety of petitions, addresses, testimonials, and related documents. Though many forms of subscriptional culture had medieval and early modern origins, their transformations across this period reveal the shifting perceptions of the crown, parliament, the administrative state, and local government. The article

In late 2019, a team of researchers and activists from Ecuador and the UK began a new oral history project, accompanying Afro-Ecuadorian women living in the province of Esmeraldas, as they interrogated and articulated their history and heritage. The impact of coronavirus, which has hit Ecuador particularly hard, delayed the workshops and oral history interviews we had planned, but also created the

This article challenges the widely held assumption that Thomas Robert Malthus was a lonely pessimist in the late eighteenth century. Interpreting the sources that Malthus had used to write his Essay on the Principle of Population as predictions of the future, the article argues that Malthus inherited a sense of looming doom from his predecessors. In the second half of the eighteenth century, David

This article explores the vocabularies of Amerindian languages published as part of the travel accounts written by explorers, traders and colonial policymakers in North America over the eighteenth century. Starting with the renowned Voyages by the Baron de Lahontan, the analysis takes as its endpoint the journals of the famous expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark at the beginning of

This article introduces a comparative element to the study of the fundamentalist–modernist controversies of the late 1920s, demonstrating that similar ideas are manifested differently in different spatial contexts. Although fundamentalism is primarily considered an American phenomenon, the article argues that the concerns animating fundamentalists in the United States also caused fierce debates elsewhere

The Act of Oblivion passed in 1660 was meant to signal how the fractured kingdom could heal after the Civil War. It aimed to ‘bury all seeds of future discords’ by wiping the slate clean, outlawing even ‘terms of distinction [and] … words of reproach any way tending to revive the memory of the late differences’. The act was created to draw a line under the past twenty years of civil war, regicide,

This article analyses Francesco Ottieri's historical work, his authority as historian, and his book's eighteenth‐century readers. During the seventeenth century, books concerning recent events and early newspapers informed an expanding European readership. Between 1716 and 1735, Ottieri authored the Istoria, an eight‐volume account of the War of the Spanish Succession. Although the book circulated

The focus of Karn's Kings, Lords, and Courts in Anglo‐Norman England is the transformation of the legal landscape of England, whereby the dominance of hundred and shire courts was replaced in the twelfth century by a more complex picture, caused by a proliferation of lords’ courts, alongside the hundred and the shire. The developments which led to the creation of these private courts have yet to be

Elizabeth I is regarded as having been parsimonious in creating new noblemen, allowing the nobility to decrease in size as she sought to maintain the exclusivity of the caste. In reality, the queen created a larger nobility than her Tudor predecessors had done. Her failure to sustain this high number was due not to a policy of limiting the number of noblemen but rather because she did not need so many

Life writing holds real potential for historians seeking to understand the construction of narrative identity, and enables a deeper understanding of histories of the everyday and lived experience. It provides a glimpse into personal relationships, experiences of work and leisure, and childhood memories. Using the life writing of eight Mass Observers and University of the Third Age participants, Growing

This article surveys the state of the field of material culture within the discipline of history. The study of material culture – the myriad layers of cultural meaning embedded within objects – has been adopted by historians from colleagues in anthropology, archaeology and museum studies, and continues to thrive as an interdisciplinary field in tandem with art history and literary studies. As inventive

Sir Thomas More's account of the murder of the ‘princes in the Tower’ has been treated with varying degrees of scepticism over the past century and a half. More's History of King Richard III is notable, nonetheless, for the way it provides precise circumstantial detail and responsibility for the focal point of the succession crisis of 1483. More's account of those deaths is all the more striking because

This article seeks to analyse the political and diplomatic effects of the outbreak of the First World War in the Iberian peninsula, considering the relationship of two small powers, Portugal and Spain, in the context of the political and diplomatic instability caused by the Sarajevo assassination in the summer of 1914, and the debates between neutrality and belligerency that occurred in both countries

The 1917 revolutions and ensuing Russian Civil War (1918–22) resulted in a number of profound changes throughout the embryonic Soviet state. Greater ideological freedom and increased government support during the reconstructive period of the New Economic Policy (1921–8) led to the development of several professional organisations within the social sciences. One of the most prominent of these was a

Henry (Harry) Gullett, the press liaison for the Australian delegation at the Paris peace conference in 1919, was convinced that the valour and sacrifice of Australian soldiers had earned the nation the right to have its voice heard. In this, he was in complete agreement with the Australian prime minister Billy Hughes. Both were equally certain, however, that Australian interests were now ‘grievously

When the Scottish bishop Gavin Douglas (c.1476–1522) translated Virgil's ancient Latin epic the Aeneid into his vernacular tongue in 1513, he produced a literary monument which would go on to be appreciated and praised for centuries. The translation marked the first time that a major classical poem had been faithfully and entirely carried over into English, and even today the work preserves the power

This article uses broadside ballads to show that dynastic right was of central importance to the popular view of the accessions of Mary I and Elizabeth I, as well as that of the foreign king James VI when he acceded to the English throne in 1603. It challenges our view of Tudor iconography by showing that although popular songs were not afraid to tackle the gender implications of queens regnant, the

This article analyses the important role that food played in providing ‘comfort’ to the service personnel of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) serving in East Anglia during the Second World War. Current theories on comfort food will be discussed before moving onto an examination of letters, diaries, and memoirs held by the Second Air Division Memorial Library, Norwich, UK. It is clear that food

In July 1220, the boy king Henry III attended the translation of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury, whereby the saint’s body was transferred from its original tomb in the crypt of Canterbury cathedral to a splendid new shrine in the main body of the church. This article explores the continuing appeal of Becket’s cult at Canterbury for elite ecclesiastical and lay circles in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century

This is the introduction to a special issue on English Saints of the academic journal History, a publication of the Historical Association in partnership with Wiley. It discusses the significance of 2020 as a year for remembering saints whose cults were venerated in England in the Middle Ages, before introducing the articles included in this special issue.

Two notable late‐medieval images depicting St Edmund King and Martyr, or his shrine, associate his cult with prayers and intercession for the king. In Lydgate's illustrated verse life of the saint, Henry VI is shown kneeling before the shrine, while on the Wilton Diptych, Edmund is one of three saints presenting Richard II to the Virgin Mary. This article explores royal devotion to Edmund, examining

This article surveys the state of the field of the history of political thought The premise of the discipline is that political arguments and ideas have developed historically and thus have theoretical histories that can be located and traced But, as our survey of the field shows, what counts as ?context? is up for debate, and contextual methods have become more sensitive to present-day concerns The

The Franciscan custody of York comprised seven friaries located in two counties, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire: Beverley, Boston, Doncaster, Grimsby, Lincoln, Scarborough and York. Arriving in the north of England in the late 1220s, the Franciscans of the York custody saw the suppression of their last house, Scarborough, in March 1539. Using the biographical index compiled by the late John R. H. Moorman

This article re‐examines the causes of the May 1917 engineering strike, the biggest strike in Britain during the First World War. Besides official files, it uses private papers and the records of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. The stoppage began in sympathy with sacked employees at Tweedale & Smalley in Rochdale, who were resisting the spread of ‘dilution’ (replacing skilled by unskilled workers)

Computing and the use of digital sources and resources is an everyday and essential practice in current academic scholarship. The present article gives a concise overview of approaches and methods within digital historical scholarship, focussing on the question: How have the Digital Humanities evolved and what has that evolution brought to historical scholarship? We begin by discussing techniques in

This article examines a transformative moment in the history of British higher education. After the First World War, student numbers were boosted by the arrival of large numbers of ex-servicemen. Their access to university was facilitated by the government-funded Scheme for the Higher Education of Ex-Service Students, which provided grants to nearly 27,000 students between 1918 and 1923. The article

The debate about the purpose (and uses) of studying diplomatic and international history are as old as the subject itself. This article traces the origins and development of diplomatic history as a specialized field within history as a wider discipline, before exploring more recent challenges to it. The article seeks to highlight both the scope for, and the opportunities to be found in, cross‐fertilization

On 6 February 1918, the Representation of the People Act was passed; it enfranchised all men over twenty‐one and women over the age of thirty if either they or their husband met the requisite property qualifications. In public and media history this legislation was regarded as a reward for women's contribution to the war effort and evidence that one of the legacies of the First World War was a range

This article analyses the first two decades of the flagship museum of revolutionary history in Petrograd/Leningrad following the October Revolution of 1917. The article discusses the purpose behind the efforts to enlighten the masses on the revolutionary movement and the methods employed to collect and display artefacts of the revolutionary period in Russia. Further examination is made of the communication

Book review of: Duncan Sandys and the Informal Politics of Britain's Late Decolonisation. By Peter Brooke. Palgrave Macmillan. 2018. xi + 271 pp. £67.99.

Samantha Smith came to fame by writing a letter to the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, in December 1982, expressing her fears about a potential nuclear war between the two superpowers. Her letter was quoted in the main Soviet newspaper Pravda in April 1983 and the Smith family was subsequently invited to visit the Soviet Union during the summer. Samantha’s trip captured the attention of the world media

A lightning victory by combined Austro-German forces in October 1917 threatened to knock Italy out of the war. This was the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo, often called ‘Caporetto’. General Luigi Cadorna, the chief of general staff, branded army units as cowards and blamed them for the disaster. His accusation met with dismay at home and sympathy mixed with disdain abroad. Investigation quickly gave

The article examines the career of the little studied James-Edward Ruffier, a physician who won commercial success as well as political and popular renown as a physical culturist and natural health practitioner in France in the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the importance of writing for Ruffier’s business model. Writing across a range of genres, largely in self-published

In 1792, James Gregory (1753–1821), Professor of the Practice of Physic at the University of Edinburgh, became involved in a highly public dispute with a family of man midwives. The row centred on a text attributed to ‘J. Johnson Esq’ entitledAGuide for Gentlemen Studying Medicine at the University of Edinburgh (1792). According to Gregory, this was ‘a knavish pamphlet, published under a false name

Anatomy is best taught visually and this book describes how anatomical modelling, mainly in wax or wood but later by injection, developed in the eighteenth century, particularly in Bologna and Naples. Models kept the messy and bloody aspects of dissection to one side, and were used for public and medical demonstration, artistic teaching, and eventually as destinations for the Grand Tour. The models

Robert Mills's generously illustrated new monograph is a welcome addition both to medieval studies and to gender and sexuality studies (including queer, transgender and feminist theory). Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages is an interdisciplinary study that brings together art history and literary analysis in order to explore ‘the relationship between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval

In the early Nineteenth-century, there was a concerted effort by the judiciary, media and the Home Department to close down official discussion and deny official recognition of same-sex relationships and sex amongst men. The crime that dare not speak its name became a literal description, given that the offence of buggery or sodomy was replaced with ___ in official records and media reports. The case

Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the

There is no shortage of opinions when it comes to ‘the idea of Europe.’ Since the 1950s, questions regarding the commonalities and shared historical experiences that have constituted a European community have remained central to the process of European integration and the formation of the European Union. Scholars largely supportive of European integration have accented the role played in this process

This article lifts the veil on the women who dressed as men during the English Civil War - and on contemporary reactions towards them. The piece begins by noting that - although it is often claimed that the armies of king and parliament were accompanied by many females who had 'counterfeited their sex' in order to march into the field - those claims rest on a surprisingly slim evidential base. Next

Abstract The Murder Act (1752) decreed that homicide perpetrators should be hanged and sent for post‐execution punishment. This article explores the event management of criminal dissections by penal surgeons in situ. It reveals that the punishment parade of the condemned did not stop at the scaffold, contrary to the impression in many standard historical accounts. Instead, ordinary people accompanied

This article focuses on the repression of erotic and pornographic imagery (artworks, statues and figurines) by the Inquisition in Madrid during the last six years of its existence between 1814 and 1820. This period in the Inquisition's history has tended to be overlooked and dismissed as insignificant. After tracing the history of the Spanish Inquisition's desultory attempts in earlier years to suppress

The expression 'political culture' is used in this essay in the narrow sense. It is strictly limited to the merely intellectual creations that, written down, serve to take power, to keep it and to impose it.

This article examines the term dominus Hibernie to argue that it provides evidence for political discourse at the court of King Henry II (1154-1189). The central argument is that, in 1177, Henry II created a modern twelfth-century kingdom of Ireland out the old-fashioned kingdom that had existed beforehand for his son John. Henry then sought papal approval for his plan so that his son might receive

In the aftermath of the opening months of the South African War, British imperialists considered the settling of retired soldiers in South Africa as an efficient way of creating a loyal colony. This article explores the 1900 South African Lands Settlement Commission, and specifically the role of its chairman, the Liberal Unionist politician Hugh Oakeley Arnold-Forster. It shows how the findings and

As a distinct generation, the first authors of the British black Atlantic – writers of African descent writing in English in the last half of the eighteenth century – bridged differing worlds. The authors shared common experiences, with most having suffered in the slave trade and having celebrated evangelical religious conversions. While scholars have tended to focus on the transoceanic connections

This article is a clarion call for the rehabilitation of works on intelligence in what Christopher Andrew once referred to as the ‘airport bookstall’ genre. It argues that a more fitting epitaph for the literature from intelligence history's earliest days is better designated as the ‘Muckraker Era’, rather than the ‘airport bookstall’. My argument proceeds on three fronts. First, these writers from

This article examines how concepts of mergers and acquisitions shaped potential horizontal mergers, namely stock swaps, and vertical mergers shaped oil and ranching on the Southern Great Plains in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

This article uses letters of advice, outlining key principles of royal power, to explore how abbots and bishops in high medieval Europe sought to demonstrate compliance with widely shared norms about the role and nature of clerical counsel when interacting with kings. It will show that the type of the remonstrating cleric was deeply engrained in epistolary culture. While this expectation may not always

This article analyses three extant sets of English disciplinary ordinances, issued by Richard II, Henry V and Henry VIII. It examines the progression of the English army throughout the period 1385–1513, discussing how the ordinances were necessary for the effective functioning of these armies, how discipline and the ordinances changed throughout this period in reaction to the context of the campaign

The war writings of the founding fathers of modern sociology in France (Durkheim) and Germany (Weber, Simmel, Scheler) on the one hand show the legitimization of the geopolitical situation of each country; on the other, they highlight the image of the relationship between individuals (the combatants) and their country. This article considers some lesser-known writings by Weber to highlight his will

In 1783 the British and Irish governments launched an experiment by funding the establishment of a settlement that was expected to become a new city. It was called ‘New Geneva’ and was situated on the site of a village called Passage, just outside the port of Waterford in Ireland. New Geneva was to be peopled by rebels, Genevans who had fled or were ready to flee in the aftermath of the failed revolution

The history of British relations with the states of pre-unification Italy is a neglected field of enquiry. The research that has been undertaken has tended to focus on the generally good relationship Britain shared with the Kingdom of Sardinia, the state which presided over Italy's national unification between 1859 and 1861. By contrast, the extent to which Britain's poor relations with the Papal States

First, the time-lapse has meant that Professor Gunn has produced a book of breathtaking scholarship and thoroughness. The list of sources consulted, many of them unpublished, should shame even the most hardened and assiduous of source-conscious historians. In his bibliography, I counted no less than 60 National Archives classes, 13 in the British Library and 56 public and private local collections

Extrapolating from a particular case, the article argues that experience of the Second World War was capable of broadening combatants’ minds, and of helping to shape their post-war attitudes. Before the war, Hector Davies was a Bank of England official. From 1940 he served in Nigeria and Chad, where he was responsible for British military liaison with the Free French Equatorial commander, Jacques Leclerc

Having been promoted to royal status in 1130, Roger II of Sicily sought to bind a set of disparate territories into one kingdom covering mainland southern Italy and Sicily. Scholarship has devoted much space to identifying Roger's royal strategy in its embryonic and contested state of the 1130s – with views ranging from tyrannical authoritarianism to control via negotiation and consensus – and also

The year 1558 was one of open war between England and Scotland. Previous scholarly accounts of this period have glossed over this conflict. This article first establishes the contours of the war. The failure of peace negotiations in the first portion of the year was linked to Scots’ hopes of an invasion of Berwick in t