Since 2019 a team of archivists, creative practitioners, curators, and researchers have been exploring the life and work of the little-known artist and devout Methodist James Smetham. In this blog post, Dr Ruth Slatter (IHR Lecturer in Historic Environment and Knowledge Exchange) introduces the new exhibition they have curated—Pre-Raphaelite Outsider: James Smetham (1821-1889)—which is currently on display at Bewdley Museum until 29 October 2023.    James Smetham (1821-1889) was an artist and devout Methodist. Born in Pateley Bridge (Yorkshire), at 16 he began training as an archite ..read more

Volume 6 During the month of August we will be sharing summer reading lists, experiences, and suggestions from the IHR community. If you’d like to share your own, please Tweet (X) us @ihr_history. In this blog, we hear from IHR Fellows. Philippa Joseph Although most of my summer will be taken up writing Designing Modern Italy, I have just returned from ten days in Cornwall, where I did lots of wonderful walking, but also lots of great reading, which included the following: Natalie Haynes, Stone Blind: Medusa’s Story Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya Natalia Ginzburg, Le Piccole Virtù (a re-read ..read more

Volume 5 During the month of August we will be sharing summer reading lists, experiences, and suggestions from the IHR community. If you’d like to share your own, please Tweet (X) us @ihr_history. In this blog, we hear from Neil Stewart, Head of the IHR Library. Willa Cather – Death Comes for the Archbishop I was lucky enough to attend a conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico this summer. Cather’s book is set there in the mid-19th century (before New Mexico became part of the USA), and relates the struggles and triumphs of a group of French Catholic priests. It really captures the unique atmosphe ..read more

Volume 4 During the month of August we will be sharing summer reading lists, experiences, and suggestions from the IHR community. If you’d like to share your own, please Tweet (X) us @ihr_history. Daniel Snowman has been a Senior Research Fellow at the IHR since 2004.  Among other books he has been reading over the summer break is France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain by Julian Jackson.  Pétain’s long and controversial career during both World Wars has led Daniel to speculate on how far the job of the historian is to try and explain the events and personalities of the past and ..read more

Volume 1 During the month of August we will be sharing summer reading lists, experiences, and suggestions from the IHR community. If you’d like to share your own, please Tweet (X) us @ihr_history. We launch the series with IHR Senior Fellow Virginia Crompton‘s summer reading. Next to my bed is The Low Road by Katharine Quarmby.  Katharine is an inspiring investigative journalist whose journalism has touched important themes including Asbestos, hate against people with disabilities, and environmental injustice against Roma and Traveller communities. This is her debut novel and i ..read more

By William D. Shannon The Gough Map Project has reached that ‘interesting’ stage where we are moving from either sitting on the fence and making no decisions, or making lots, but then rejecting them all.  It is now time to reach some firm conclusions, and start writing.  The Project has been funded by Leverhulme Trust  (RPG-2019-070) for the last three years, but started in 2012, when IHR Senior Fellow Catherine Delano Smith, the doyenne of map historians and long-time editor of Imago Mundi, the international journal for the history of cartography, decided that the only way ..read more

As historians we are often trained to remove emotions from our analyses of the past, whether this be our own emotions or those of the individuals whose lives and experiences we seek to recover. As a researcher whose work centres on the history of emotions, that training can sometimes seem to be in conflict with the retrieval of emotions in archival sources. When emotions are so often considered to be ambiguous in meaning, subjective in understanding, transient and fragmentary in nature, locating analyses of emotions in secondary literature can present an equally mammoth task. Yet, a resource s ..read more

John Chandler Between Chippenham and Calne, not quite the Marlborough Downs, not quite the flat Wiltshire claylands, lies Bremhill, a large parish of scattered hamlets and farms, connected by a network of minor lanes. It has its quirks – a kind of Nelson’s column topped by a bonneted woman with a shopping basket, an eccentric vicar who wrote poems admired by Coleridge, a pub called the Dumb Post. It also has a group of enthusiastic residents who wanted to celebrate their history, and were pleased to learn that Bremhill is to be included in a forthcoming VCH Wiltshire volume. Out of all this a ..read more

By Claire Langhamer I started my role as Director of the IHR in October, and already the Institute feels like home. As a historian of twentieth century Britain, there is something particularly lovely about working in Senate House, with its wartime history, its 1930s aesthetic, and its apparently endless supply of hat stands. The first glimpse of the building as I walk over from St Pancras Station remains a highlight of my working day and it was an early privilege to be taken up to the top of the tower one late afternoon to look over London as the sun set. Of course the Institute is much more t ..read more

Ahead of his new book The Control of the Past: Herbert Butterfield and the Pitfalls of Official History, senior Whitehall historian Patrick Salmon talks us through the dangers of government-mandated history and asks- can history ever be truly objective? ‘I do not personally believe that there is a government in Europe which wants the public to know all the truth.’ With these words, in 1949, Herbert Butterfield, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, launched the strongest attack on official history written by any British historian since the Second World War. In his article (repub ..read more