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Teaching in an Age of COVID

Professor Neil Gregor Avenue Campus, where single and dual honours History students once congregated en masse. This year has brought its challenges for tutors and students alike.  But the need to rethink how we deliver our teaching has also brought its advantages. These are not only practical – they have also been intellectual. For me, this has been particularly the case at final year undergraduate level. Continue reading →

Reflections on teaching in the age of COVID

Dr George Gilbert Wholly or mostly online teaching throughout the academic year 2020-21 has been forced upon us as a result of a global pandemic, and not something any academic working in higher education chose willingly. It has meant in many cases quite radical reshaping of longstanding and more recent modules, and, to such an extent, quite substantially redesigning a well-established and (one would hope) fairly effective history curriculum. Continue reading →

To remember or not to remember: the Holocaust in Belarus

Dr. Claire Le Foll The Holocaust is not my area of expertise. However, I felt an urgency to write about it, and more specifically about the difficulty of remembering it in today’s Belarus. This urge resulted from a conjunction of circumstances: the foreword I wrote recently for the second edition of Bashert, a memoir by Andrea Simon on the fate of her family from the Belarusian shtetl of Volchin; a recent visit to Belarus; and recent news from the city of Brest. Continue reading →

How to review orphan books

It’s the time of year when those high profile history books not heavily discounted in December are available at half price in Waterstones.  With honourable exceptions, too many titles heavily promoted in the run up to Christmas were heavyweight stocking fillers, of which – with due predictability – a depressingly high number focused upon ever more arcane aspects of the Second World War. Continue reading →

David Lloyd George: Britain’s other iconic wartime leader

On 14th December 2018, the centenary of the ‘Coupon Election’, Adrian Smith, Emeritus Professor of Modern History, argues let’s not exclude Lloyd George from Britain's ‘nation story’. Cartoon by Leonard Raven-Hill for Punch, 1917 <https://punch.photoshelter.com/gallery/Leonard-Raven-Hill-Cartoons/G00002GdkHW9x2vk/> Polly Toynbee in the Guardian recently used the centenary of the Armistice to label the last Liberal government as ‘even worse’ than Theresa May’s. Continue reading →

What is Musical Germanness?

This month sees the publication of Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor, which Neil Gregor has co-edited with University of Southampton musicologist, Thomas Irvine. Here, Neil considers some of the ways the book rethinks both the histories of national identity and modern and contemporary music. Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor is a book about music and ‘Germanness’. Continue reading →

Envisioning Emperors

Alan Ross is currently a visiting scholar in the Classics Department at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, where he is working on Late Antique literary culture. He recently published a co-edited volume with Brill, entitled Imagining Emperors in the Later Roman Empire. Here, he tells us why we need another book about emperors. Continue reading →

World War One, Student Protests in China and the Foundation of the Chinese Communist Party

Within the centenary commemorations of the First World War, one history-making aspect that is often overlooked is what the war had to do with the foundation by young Chinese intellectuals of the Chinese Communist Party, the party that continues to govern China today. In this Blog post, Elisabeth Forster discusses what was fought over in China’s war of ideas. 'Chinese labourers at Boulogne August 1917', Ernest Brooks [Public domain], via Wikimedia. Continue reading →