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Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January 2020

Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January 2020 By Dr George Gilbert It is more or less impossible to fully understand the course of the twentieth century without reference to the Holocaust. For good reasons, this human tragedy has come to dominate the historiography of genocides across vast stretches of time and place. In recent decades, however, good scholarly work after good scholarly work has wrestled with genocides of other types. Continue reading →

History at the Stock Market

History at the Stock Market by Dr Jon Conlin Back on 15 November a group of students studying the history of Middle East oil visited the university’s Bloomberg Suite, normally the haunt of economics students. Their task: to price the IPO of the decade, Saudi Aramco, by bringing their historical understanding of long-term trends to bear on real-time market data accessible via the Bloomberg terminals. Continue reading →

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 →

Unit 31: Southampton’s Time Capsule

Last semester, Year Three History students and their tutors on the module, ‘Between Private Memory and Public History’ visited a Southampton space not usually open to the public, Unit 31. Unit 31 — sited on an industrial park between West Quay shopping centre and IKEA — is Southampton City’s Management Centre and houses some of the many objects that the city’s museums, including Southampton’s Sea City and Tudor House. 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 →

Interview with recent PhD graduate, Dr Louise Fairbrother

What was the subject of your research? My research looked in detail at how the town governments of Southampton and various other English towns organised their industry and trade in the sixteenth century.  It focussed specifically on the way in which they controlled the groups involved.  In Southampton’s case, this was by the use of devices such as licences, oaths and ordinances on the three groups of the burgesses, the freemen and the strangers. Continue reading →

The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, World’s Richest Man

  At a ceremony in Lisbon last Thursday His Excellency Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, President of Portugal, helped launch Jonathan Conlin's new biography of the Anglo-Armenian oil baron Calouste Gulbenkian (1869-1955). Published in English by Profile Books as Mr Five Per Cent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, World's Richest Man, Jonathan's book coincides with a year of festivities marking the 150th anniversary of Gulbenkian's birth. Continue reading →

Translating Darwin, Translating History

The history of science and of scientific knowledge offers lessons in many ways of thinking about the world we live in, past and present, scientific and beyond. Katalin Straner, Lecturer in Modern European History at Southampton, is writing a book on the translation and reception of Darwinism and evolutionary theory in nineteenth-century Hungary and the Habsburg Empire. Continue reading →