Based on various previous research projects, with UoN colleagues in History (Diana Popescu), in Computer Science (Paul Tennent), and others, Maiken and the team at the National Holocaust Museum and have curated an exhibition that is coming to Nottingham for one week, starting at 12 pm this Sunday. Location is Smithy Row, just off Old Market Square, in front of the Exchange. The exhibition is an experiment. The main concept is that traditional museum exhibition always talk to the same people: demographics who regularly go to museums, and also, on this particular topic, people who are already ..read more

Nathan Richards has completed a fascinating film that explores the legacies of the Biafran War (1967-70).  Please click on the first link to learn more about this project and on the second one to explore the film itself. A Sojourn to the Vault – FV https://intheshadowofbiafra.com The post Nathan Richards’s Film Project on Art and the Biafran War appeared first on History Past and Present ..read more

After being awarded his doctorate at the University of Oxford in 1966, Michael Jones taught for a year at the University of Exeter before joining the History Department at the University of Nottingham in September 1967 as an assistant lecturer. Promoted Reader in 1984 and Professor of French Medieval History in 1991, he retired in 2002 but has continued to be active in his main field of research, the history of the medieval duchy of Brittany. Thanks to particular political circumstances Brittany was able to develop into a largely independent and sovereign power within the kingdom of France at ..read more

In May 2023 the Jockey Club, organisers of the Epsom Derby, which has been run almost every year since 1780, gained an injunction against the animal rights group Animal Rising to try and prevent them invading the race when it is run on 3rd June. The group threatens to stop the race because of what they see as cruelty in horse racing, staging a second protest following their demonstrations at the Grand National steeplechase in April, which delayed the start of that race by fifteen minutes and led to several arrests. Horse racing has often been controversial, and the Derby was the scene of the ..read more

The wars which ravaged the British Isles between 1639 and 1651 took a huge toil on civilian communities. Staffordshire, located in the English Midlands, was unfortunate enough to be considered strategically important to both Charles I and Parliament. The petitions of maimed soldiers and war widows not only reveal the extent of suffering within Staffordshire but also offer insights into how and why the increased need for welfare provision continued to cause problems for the county’s rulers long after the fighting had ended. These problems were exacerbated in 1660 when the restoration of the mo ..read more

With support from the Institute for the Study of Slavery (ISOS), Cambridge University Press has launched an exciting new book series, “Histories of Slavery and its Global Legacies.” Like ISOS, the series is global in its remit and seeks to break down traditional geographical and disciplinary boundaries in order to advance the scholarly understanding of the history of enslavement and its many legacies. More information on the series, including editorial contacts for the submission of proposals, can be found on the announcement flyer or via the ISOS website. The post ISOS launches new book seri ..read more

Dr. Samantha Knapton’s new book on the history of migration and displacement in post-WW2 Europe has just been published with Bloomsbury Press.  The author, who is one of the new staff in the department, had this to say about the work: “At the end of the Second World War, up to 60 million displaced persons (DPs) were on the move throughout Europe. Jointly the responsibility of Allied governments and the newly created United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), they were sorted into transit and assembly centres and awaited their future to begin. Polish DPs were the lar ..read more

It was common in medieval Europe for kings to retain a number of household knights in their personal service. Doing so provided them with a small group of loyal servants who could perform a variety of valuable functions at the king’s command. In my recent book, I focus on the household knights of one of late-medieval England’s longest-reigning and most successful monarchs, Edward III, to ask three fundamental questions of this often under-studies and under-appreciated group: who was chosen to serve as a household knight? What did they do? And how were they rewarded for their time in service ..read more

Questions of belonging, particularly in relation to the process of decolonisation in Southern Africa, remain an enduring research interest of mine. Yet scholars of the end of the empire have been remarkably slow in embracing gender as a serious category of analysis. Challenging this orthodoxy, my 2020 open-access article, ‘“We wanted to be free as a nation, and we wanted to be free as women”: Decolonisation, Nationalism and Women’s Liberation in Zimbabwe, 1979-1985’ opens up a new way to understand one of the most intractable problems that a newly independent nation encounters: the dissonance ..read more

Even after the final demise of the Britain’s coal industry some seven years ago, the figure of the miner continues to exert a special hold on the cultural imagination. Miners are depicted as both admirable and pitiful. They represent the lost world of industrial Britain that was swept aside by the de-industrial revolution of the Thatcher years. Much of this popular image revolves around the miners’ alleged social conservatism. In feature films such as Billy Elliot and Pride, miners are trapped by their own unreconstructed masculinity just as much as by the inevitability of the industry’s demi ..read more