Fly like an Eagle

My Study Abroad Year at Temple University in Philadelphia by Tom Golebiowski When I first applied to study history at the University of Southampton, the idea of going on a year abroad hardly crossed my mind. I was coming to Southampton for the fantastic course, the exciting social life and the amazing campus: I couldn’t picture being anywhere else. 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 →

Why Japanese American memories of US internment during the Second World War are stirring up protests in 2025 (a piece in The Conversation by Dr Rachel Pistol)

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 →

Political Witchcraft

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 →

The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany

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 →

British Museum exhibition exposes hypocrisy of new loan agreements for looted objects

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 →

Maud Cunnington (part 1)

In this blog post, Maddie Watson, a finalist Modern History and Politics student at the University of Southampton, introduces their work on Maud Cunnington as part of their Beyond Notability Internship, run by Southampton Digital Humanities. In this part, Maddie discusses their encounter with Maud via linked data and their exploration of her work as an archaeologist. The second part of the blog can be read here. Continue reading →

Global Challenges: History, Policy, Practice – a new departure

On 6 January 2020, protestors stormed the Capitol in Washington, DC. As an American citizen watching from afar, I felt powerless to do anything about the rending of the American body politic that was occurring. A year after these events however, as Congress began its investigation into the attempted insurrection, I was invited to submit a statement for the official record, placing the spread of the misinformation that had helped trigger the attack into historical context. Continue reading →

Monarchy and Democracy in Liechtenstein

by Dr Alastair Paynter In 2021, 44 states worldwide have a monarch as Head of State. Of these, sixteen are part of the Commonwealth (although this will be reduced to fifteen when Barbados becomes a republic). In Europe alone, there are twelve sovereign monarchies—Andorra, Belgium, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Vatican City. Continue reading →

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 →