History Journal blog archive
The online offering of the official journal of the Historical Association
This website constitutes the archive of the History journal blog up to May 2023. For further information, please consult the new blog as well as the journal website.
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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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Everyday Decolonisation: the local museum in 2020
PIPPA LE GRAND A few Monday mornings ago, I stood outside Weston Park Museum, Sheffield, enjoying my job and welcoming visitors. There were few enough around that I was able to gaze at the frieze over the door and even discuss it at length with a colleague. The frieze, according to Sheffield Hallam’s Public Art Research…
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Feeling Sickness: Emotional responses to pandemic diseases
DR MONICA O’BRIEN It’s a wintery afternoon and, once again, I’m scrolling through news articles about Covid-19. Since countries entered their first lockdowns, much has been written on the pandemic’s emotional and psychological impacts. Loss, loneliness, fear, stress, anger; these emotions figure prominently in many narratives of the pandemic. It seems that emotional consequences will…
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Remembering English Saints in 2020: A Pilgrimage in Print
DR PAUL WEBSTER 2020 will be a year that lives long in the memory. For historians of the medieval saints, and at cathedrals and great churches across England, and for historians of the medieval saints, it began as a major anniversary year. The Association of English Cathedrals had declared 2020 to be a national ‘Year of…
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Deep Mapping Migrant Settlerhood: Unfolding histories of Finns in Canada
DR SAMIRA SARAMO At the turn of the twentieth century, Finnish migrants, drawn by the familiar landscape of lakes, forests, and rocky outcrop, settled in the rugged wilderness of Northern Ontario in Canada and overcame the harsh conditions of the early years through their inherent Finnish characteristic of “sisu” (determination, perseverance, guts)… or so the story…
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Role Theory and Protestant Spirituality in Early Modern Scotland
CIARAN JONES I recently submitted my PhD thesis on Protestant spirituality in early modern Scotland. Focussing on witchcraft trials, my thesis was mainly concerned with how your average seventeenth-century peasant articulated certain spiritual ideas. Using mostly manuscript records of witchcraft trial confessions as my source base, I compared how these ideas were expressed in different but related…
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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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Heritage or Highway: York’s city walls as tourist and civil infrastructure
Louisa Hood This blog explores two very particular histories of York’s city walls. Although known generally as Roman or medieval defences, the social, material, economic, and other histories of the walls are layered, obscured, or unknown. York’s extant walls are a key aspect of its historic environment and identity as a tourist destination, but they…
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John Stearne’s Confirmation and discovery of witchcraft
New Book Interview: Scott Eaton, John Stearne’s Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft: Text, Context and Afterlife (Routledge, 2020). History: How did this project develop? Where did your interest in the subject originate? Scott: My interest in the history of witchcraft started during my BA at Ulster University when I took a module on European witchcraft and completed a…
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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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