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Notes from the archive

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 →

Edgar Feuchtwanger, OBE

By Tony Kushner The History Department and the Parkes Institute are delighted to share the good news that Edgar Feuchtwanger has been awarded an OBE in the 2021 Queen’s Honours  List for services to ‘Anglo-German understanding and history’. Edgar, who was born in Munich in 1924 into a distinguished German Jewish family of bankers and culture (his uncle was the famous and influential novelist, Lion Feuchtwanger) came to Britain as a child refugee in February 1939. Continue reading →

Professor Chris Woolgar, Fellow of the British Academy

In this year of pandemic and distancing, the Southampton history department is united in pleasure and appreciation at the election of our colleague, Professor Chris Woolgar, as a Fellow of the British Academy. This is a rare and high honour, which is given to a few of the most influential, original and admired academics internationally across the fields of the humanities and social sciences each year. Continue reading →