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Q&A with the author of Performing Worlds at the Baroque Court of Christine of France
Read more: Q&A with the author of Performing Worlds at the Baroque Court of Christine of FranceThis interview explores how Christine of France used Baroque court spectacles to shape political authority, global imagination, and cultures of consumption.
Viking Law and Order
My new book, Viking Law and Order, paints a rather different picture of Viking Age society from the one we are used to. We often hear discussions of violent raids and systematic pillaging by warriors arriving in long ships. It…
John M. MacKenzie on ‘Bogeys’ Past and Present
It would seem that elements of the Anglosphere have always required a bogey or a multiplicity of bogeys. Perhaps other spheres do too. It is certainly the case that the notion of coping with the feared evil ‘Other’ has also…
Appropriating Christian History in Fujian: Red Tourism Meets the Cross
In the early years of China’s Civil War, the Communist army and leadership sought refuge from Nationalist troops in the remote western district of Fujian Province known as Tingzhou. Here, for over three years, the leaders of the fledgling Communist…
Ford Madox Ford, music and the First World War
My research treats music as a crucial aspect of modernist literature, and the First World War was a crucial event for modernist writers, profoundly changing the fabric of social life. Ford Madox Ford served on the front line and wrote…
Don’t Just Build It, They Probably Won’t Come
By Ruth Mostern Here, Ruth Mostern gives some background to her article, “Don’t Just Build It, They Probably Won’t Come: Data Sharing and the Social Life of Data in the Historical Quantitative Social Sciences”. Her article appears in the October…
Human Rights Language in the 1890s
By Anna Clark It is widely assumed that the concept of human rights only emerged after 1945. However, I have found that the concept of human rights was deployed in Britain in the 1890s. For instance, in 1898 Hypatia Bradlaugh-Bonner…
Nineteen things you never knew about nineteenth century American letters
Thomas Jefferson maintained a flock of geese to supply him with quills for his pens. The fastest speed for a professional business-letter-writer in 1834 was 30 words in 60 seconds, with the pen travelling 16.5 feet per minute. Jourdan Anderson,…
Collaborations in Space: Memories of British Space Science, 1960–1980
By Peter Sanford Peter Sanford, now retired, is known for his contributions to the development of rocket and satellite instruments, for the observations of X-rays from binary stars and galaxies. Below is an extract from his Memoir in Britain and…