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

The author writes: Penguin Books and Political Change traces the social and political thought of those intellectuals and policy-makers who helped to shape post-war. In doing so, it tells a story about the rise and fall of what we might call Britain’s ‘meritocratic moment’. From the 1930s, I argue, thinkers from across the political spectrum began to construct a new consensus in relation to some key political questions. They continued to disagree with each other about all manner of things, but they shared the belief that giving all individuals an equal opportunity to develop their skills ..read more

Florence Nightingale at Home by Paul Crawford, Anna Greenwood, Richard Bates & Jonathan Memel This co-authored monograph, released in the year of Florence Nightingale’s bicentenary, proposes a new understanding of Nightingale’s life, work, and ideas by considering them through the prism of the concept of ‘home’. This was a key notion in the nineteenth century, when ideas of domesticity shaped attitudes towards health, class, gender, empire, faith, institutions, and much else besides. The book shows how Nightingale’s experience of and ideas about home life influenced her work both in the ..read more

This article examines the emergence of mass letter-writing in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial north India, a region marked by the growth of an unprecedented labour mobility, postal expansion, vernacular print, and workers’ literacy. It narrates how workers’ and their family members’ abilities and failures to read and write letters shaped their experiences of the emerging transnational labour mobility and explains how the letter-writing by the subaltern produced new sociabilities and anxieties that both colonial and indigenous elites feared and attempted to discipline ..read more

Dr. Sascha Auerbach has been awarded a one-year Leverhulme research fellowship to pursue his third book project on race, labour and migration in the 19th c. British Empire.  The project was featured this month in the Leverhulme’s “Grants in Focus” newsletter.   The post Dr. Sascha Auerbach’s new project awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship appeared first on History Past and Present ..read more