Notes from the archive

Although most of our discussions and deliberations on HIST3275, ‘A Short History of Exploration’, have taken place in lecture theatres and seminar rooms, this week we decided to do something different. On Wednesday morning, an intrepid band of third-year historians and tutors gathered at Avenue Campus preparing to embark on our very own expedition of discovery. Our aim was to navigate our way to Greenwich in South East London in search of the National Maritime Museum. Continue reading →

History’s Charlotte Lydia Riley has won a very prestigious award from the American Historical Association. The prize is for her the American edition of her book, Imperial Island: An Alternative History of the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2024). The prize is the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize for an author’s first book in European history from 1815 through the 20th century. The Awards ceremony will take place in Chicago, January 2026. Continue reading →

Blog Post – An Escape Room in a Box Last November, I began a Digital Humanities internship, investigating the possible uses of their Museum in a Box (MiaB) which had been previously rarely used. The project involved the Museum in a Box – an acrylic box designed to play audio clips when a programmed NFC is placed on it. Continue reading →

Department of History Colleague, Professor Tony Kushner, writes an important piece on the recent incident in Manchester for The Conversation: https://theconversation. Continue reading →

Maritime BritainHow did Britain become a global trading nation—and what can the lives of sailors, merchants, and coastal communities tell us about that story? On 16–17 September, the Maritime Britain team gathered leading voices in maritime history at the University of Southampton to explore these questions and to showcase a bold, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) -funded project that is redefining our understanding of Britain’s seaborne past. Continue reading →

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit (ICE) is detaining thousands of people on orders of the Trump administration. Despite claims that only the most violent of criminals are being arrested, in reality, many individuals have no criminal convictions and some of them are US citizens. The Japanese American community in California has been quick to draw comparisons between the alleged targeting of Latino communities by ICE and their own treatment during the Second World War. Continue reading →

On 13 August, Southampton University hosted ‘Political Witchcraft: Magic and the Politics of Representation,’ an evening of public talks exploring how magical beliefs and practices have been researched, debated, and distorted by various interested parties at different times and places in history. Continue reading →

Professor Neil Gregor has just published The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025), a study of how German musical worlds were remade – and remade themselves – under conditions of Nazi dictatorship. To accompany the book he has curated a Spotify playlist that seeks to open up the worlds of performing and listening that the book describes.  He writes:  In the 1930s and 1940s the recording of orchestral music was still very much in its infancy. Continue reading →

by Dr. Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah (University of Groningen) This blog was originally published on Past and Present.  From April 6-8 2025, the historic halls of the University of Warsaw became the vibrant meeting ground for sixteen scholars from across Europe converging to rethink and reframe Jewish histories through a Mediterranean lens. Continue reading →

On February the 15th the British Museum opened Rediscovering Gems, a new small exhibition displaying a range of prized ancient Roman and Greek artefacts. The prompt for this exhibition stemmed from an announcement last year which revealed that numerous pieces from the museum’s collection were missing, stolen or damaged. Some of the gems exhibited are among those previously classified as missing. Continue reading →