Tag: 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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Japan’s Empire and the Crushed Hopes of the “Colored Races” of the World
Figure 1: 1938 pamphlet issued by the Negro Commission of the National Committee of the Communist Party, USA By Dr Sherzod Muminov For a few early decades of the twentieth century, Japan came to be seen as a champion of the colonized peoples around the world. Behind this image stood Japan’s meteoric rise as the…
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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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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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Egyptian? Or Nubian? Asking questions of objects
By Aaron de Souza For the last ten years or so I’ve been deeply interested in ancient Nubian cultures of the Second Millennium BCE – in particular the so-called ‘Pan-Grave’, ‘C-Group’ and ‘Kerma’ cultures.[1] I can’t tell you exactly what about them it is that intrigues me so much, but a big part is the…
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Interview with Adam Simmons on ‘Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Crusading World, 1095-1402 (Routledge, 2022’)
By Gabby Storey and Adam D. Simmons How did you get into the topic of the book? I developed my initial interest in earlier African history during my MA at KCL. I’ve always been more interested in the topics which are often not covered, to understand why not and to see how much history we…
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Finding Transgender Worlds in Late Medieval Iceland
By Basil Arnould Price Translations are the author’s own. On May 25, 2022, software engineer Helen Staniland streamed an interview with journalist Helen Joyce. During the interview, Joyce remarked: “…we have to try to limit the harm and that means reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition. That’s for two reasons –…
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The Zainichi: between two countries, two names, and two languages
By Bomi Choi The New York Times bestseller Pachinko (2017), written by Korean American author Min Jin Lee, and the screen adaptation of the English-language novel on Apple TV+ in 2022, tell stories of Japan’s ethnic Koreans. The Japanese term Zainichi literally means ‘resident in Japan’, but it is commonly used to address its Korean…
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The court chapel’s position in Early Modern Europe: a methodological approach
By Manos Vakondios The “court chapel across religious boundaries” is my PhD project, part of the wider MSCA project PALAMUSTO (Palace Museum of Tomorrow)[1]. Together with nine other PhD theses, palatial spaces, concepts, and infrastructures are addressed and explored by colleagues in universities and museum institutions across Europe.[2] The research focus of my doctoral project…
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An ‘alt-ac’ career within the academy: working on Oxford’s National Trust Partnership
By Hanna Smyth Since finishing my PhD in Global & Imperial History in 2019, I’ve spent most of the last three years working on the Heritage Partnerships Team at the University of Oxford, specifically as the Support Officer for its National Trust Partnership. This was a career path I’d never known existed before the PhD,…