Category: Biography
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Crowns and controversies: the politics of King Charles III’s coronation
Fig. 1 State opening of Parliament By Dr Jérémy Filet and Calum Cunningham With the release of Season 5 of The Crown on Netflix in November 2022, a worldwide audience gained access to a somewhat romanticised version of the adult life of the new monarch of the United Kingdom. The series depicts a reformer Prince…
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Black History is not just for Black History Month!
Fig. 1 Black History Month display at UEA Library How libraries – and librarians – are grappling with decolonisation and why this matters By Jenny Whitaker and Grant Young This is probably self-evident – especially to historians – but libraries are not neutral entities. They are highly constructed. They have legacies and biases and have…
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Surprising lessons from the 1980s: inspiration from anti-deportation campaign activism
Figure 1: Poster of the Campaign Against Racist Laws By Amy Grant Beginning my research into anti-deportation campaigns in Britain during the long 1980s was a depressing experience. I became enveloped by account after account of families and individuals being torn apart by ever-tightening and often arbitrarily administered immigration laws.[1] It became clear that the…
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Reflections on Black History in Black History Month
Figure 1: Sketch of the life of Frederick Douglass in Special Memorial Murder (1895) By Becky Taylor Black History Month is often a time when I reflect not only on how Black British histories inform my own research on histories of marginalised and racialised groups – Gypsies and Travellers, refugees, the vilified poor and migrant…
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HMT Dunera 80 years on: How rough justice changed the life of a child refugee to Britain
DR RACHEL PISTOL AND DR MELISSA STRAUSS 2020 marks the 80th anniversary of when 2,546 men were deported from Britain to Australia on the HMT Dunera. The convict ships of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may have ceased their travels some 70 years before but that did not stop the British government from again calling on Australia…
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Mo Moulton’s ‘Mutual Admiration Society’: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford circle remade the world for women
Mo Moulton. In 1912, Dorothy L. Sayers and five friends founded a writing group at Somerville College, Oxford; they dubbed themselves the ‘Mutual Admiration Society.’ Barred, initially, from receiving their degrees despite taking classes and passing exams, the women battled for a truly democratic culture that acknowledged their equal humanity, pushing boundaries in reproductive rights,…
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