The ‘Cold War’ is often seen as a confrontation between two major global powers: the United States and the Soviet Union. But it can only really be understood as a global conflict. This virtual study day considered the Cold War in a global perspective, exploring how deteriorating relations between the United States and the Soviet Union collided with surging anticolonial sentiment across the world. As empires collapsed, their former subjects started to imagine new futures, which challenged the idea of East-West conflict as the only way to organise the world.

The workshop consists of three short talks by specialists from the History department at the University of Southampton, followed by a Q&A session.

This workshop will be of particular interest to students taking the following A-level modules: ‘Mao’s China’, ‘Russia, 1917–1991’, ‘The Cold War in Europe’ and ‘The Making of a Superpower’.

February may be LGBT+ month, but what about the rest of the year? At the University of Southampton, we believe it’s important to pay attention to these often-marginalized histories all-year round. So on 21 April 2021, we held an online workshop exploring LGBT+ history and some of the different ways it has developed and evolved. The workshop involves three short talks by specialists from the History department, followed by a Q&A session. The talks cover a broad range of LGBT+ histories, from queer spaces in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and trans history in the mid-twentieth century United States to how the law has operated against homosexuality in the UK, Brazil and Russia.

As part of Black History Month 2020, Dr David Cox, Lecturer in Modern American History, spoke to Don John, Race & Diversity Consultant, about Black History in Southampton and the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Dr David Cox: ‘Histories of Racism’

Congratulations to our colleague, Dr Jon Conlin, whose book Mr Five Per Cent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian has just been awarded the 2020 Wadsworth Prize.

First awarded in 1978, the Wadsworth Prize is awarded annually by the Business Archives Council for an outstanding contribution to British business history published the previous year. Past recipients include Geoffrey Jones, Niall Ferguson and David Kynaston. The judges praised Mr Five Per Cent for the insights it offered into the origins of the world oil industry, as well as the depth of the underlying research in business archives, both in the UK and abroad. Published in 2019, Mr Five Per Cent has since been translated into four foreign languages and an audiobook.