Category: Modernity
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Women collectors, Lady Associates and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
By Julie Holder When I tell people that I research the nineteenth-century history of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, a very specific idea of an ‘antiquary’ comes to mind: white, male, and middle or upper class. And to a great extent this view is correct. However, that does not mean that women were not…
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Face to Face Encounters: Letter-Writers and Portrait Photographs in the Russian State Archive
Hannah Parker On the final research trip for my PhD, I found some small portrait photographs of letter-writers in a file of between some hundred and a thousand 1925 letters to the editor of Krest’ianka – a series of biographies with enclosed photographs from their authors. Though, in my experience, group photographs were occasionally included…
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Will Africa be included in a global history of Covid-19?
ANNA ADIMA Over a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, one would be hard-pressed to deny that future history books will record this as a global milestone in the 21st century. Every individual around the world has in some way been affected by the virus; however, mainstream – Western – media remains guilty of underreporting the pandemic…
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Communications and Complaints: Revisiting Nineteenth-Century Germany
JEAN-MICHEL JOHNSTON We’ve all been there: a patchy Zoom connection, an interrupted online transaction, a YouTube video that just won’t load. We all recognise the everyday frustrations that come with the malfunctioning of the Internet, even as we celebrate ever faster broadband or cheaper mobile data allowances. Communications networks don’t always fulfil their promises, but…
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Reflections on ‘The World At War’
DANIEL ADAMSON I was recently intrigued to find a repeat of the 1973 documentary The World at War buried in the depths of Freeview television. Across 26 hour-long episodes, this series chronicled the course of the Second World War and charted the key experiences of the conflict. The reputation of The World at War preceded the programme: in 2000,…
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What It Feels Like for a Girl: Gendering the History of the Senses
SASHA RASMUSSEN When asked to describe my work, I tend to say that my research sits at the intersection of gender and sensory histories. Gender as a lens of historical analysis has by now been widely adopted, but the concept of ‘sensory history’ may need further explanation. To my mind, sensory history has an immediate…
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A Global History of Sex and Gender
DR HANNAH TELLING What is gender history and why does it matter? For me, it is a discipline that provides a fascinating insight into the often-overlooked aspects of history. I was first introduced to gender history as an undergraduate and the University of Edinburgh, when I enrolled on a course called ‘Gender and Sexuality in…
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Reading Russian Sources
George Gilbert Reading Russian Sources: creating a new edited collection When I was tasked with editing the collection Reading Russian Sources for Routledge, one of the first questions that came to mind – and the spirit I will be approaching this blog post with – is, in our current research environment that privileges beefy articles and monographs,…
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Gender, Nation and Decolonisation in Indian Cinema, 1947-1975
Lucy Inskip Cinema can help us to trace the process of decolonisation after 1947 in India. The direction of Indian cinema changed not only with independence but also in the decades that followed, while India’s post-independence modernity project wavered, especially during the cynicism and extra-parliamentary challenge of the 1970s. Whilst political commentary by cultural producers…
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