Category: Political History
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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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The Francoist appropriation of the popular festival
Fig 1: Franco and members of the Seville government in a Holy Week procession in 1940 By Claudio Hernández Burgos and César Rina When it comes to understanding contemporary cultural processes and political dynamics, the study of festivals and popular rituals has traditionally occupied a secondary and anecdotal position in historiography. It has been interpreted as…
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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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Desire between Men in the Byzantine Imperial Court: Some Evidence from Symeon the Logothete, Letter-Writer and Historiographer
By Mark Masterson All translations are the author’s own. The Byzantine Empire’s glorious Macedonian dynasty, beginning in 867 and ending in 1056 saw the empire experience both territorial expansion and an efflorescence in learning. The culture of men in the upper reaches of this society was a milieu that featured homoeroticism and same-sex desire. As…
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The Cat in the Cradle: Conspiracy Theories and Credible News, 1688 – and Now
By Laura Doak On 10 June 1688 a new Prince of Wales was born at St. James’s Palace, London, and whispers swept across Europe. Some claimed that the baby, born to King James VII & II and his queen, Mary of Modena, was a fake. Stories circulated that it was a plot to engineer counter-Reformation…
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Portraits of Female Power in Argentina: Encarnación Ezcurra and Eva Perón
By Rachel Morgan The last three decades of the twentieth century have witnessed a boom in writings on Latin American women to the left of the political spectrum. When considering the topic of leftist Argentine women in power, the image of Eva Perón is inescapable: she was the impoverished and illegitimate child from Los Toldos…
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Replacing Ireland’s Lost Records: Doing Public History with the Beyond 2022 Project
By Elizabeth Biggs One hundred years ago, in the spring and early summer of 1922, the Public Record Office of Ireland in the Four Courts complex in Dublin was occupied by anti-Treaty forces, with Rory O’Connor as one of their leaders. They were opposed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of the previous year, which they felt…
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Blurring the lines of the two kingdoms: kirk and council in Scotland, 1689-1708
By Robbie Tree As the British Cabinet continues to run rough shod over its responsibilities, we hear grumblings over the effectiveness of our leaders and the legitimacy of central government intervention into the daily lives of the populace. These issues were relevant to early modern Scots as well, in terms of the government of both…
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Toppling Tyrants: Early Medieval Approaches to Regime Change
By Harry Mawdsley “[He] had very little sense. He conducted all his affairs without paying the slightest heed, till at length, employing a heavy hand against [his subjects], he was the cause of violent hatred and outrage among them” Such was the damning description of Childeric II’s reign in Francia by one early medieval chronicler.…
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Celebrating the Accession Day of Elizabeth I of England, 1558 and Beyond
By Aidan Norrie On 17 November 1558, Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, succeeded to the throne of England and Ireland upon the death of her half-sister Mary I. She was England’s fourth monarch in eleven years (or fifth, if Jane Grey is counted), and it is not unreasonable to claim that her…
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