British History Research Articles

Two London fires and a critique of grievability: Mournful protest, the Black elegy, and Jay Bernard’s Surge (2019)

ABSTRACT Although as a response to the New Cross and Grenfell Tower fires Jay Bernard’s collection Surge (2019) engages with the themes of loss and mourning, no critical attempt has been made to approach this complex sequence of poems from the perspective of the poetic elegy. This paper argues that reading Surge as a neo-elegy sheds light on Bernard’s intervention in current discourses on the grievability of Black lives in order to carry out their work of mournful protest. I intend to show the ways in which Surge endorses and enhances the ethico-political purpose and innovative expansiveness – regarding time, voice, and place – that characterize the contemporary Black elegy to address the past and ongoing struggles of the Black British community. Even if rooted in British postcolonial history, Bernard’s project in Surge resonates with the concerns of the Black Lives Matter global movement and the body of Black elegiac poetry developing around it.

Violence in the History of England's Christianity: A Study on the Basis of Religious and Literary Discourse

The current article is concerned with the dialectics between power, society and religion at a most dramatic period of the English history – the Tudor Reformation, a time when prevalent Catholic ideas were challenged by the new faith creating a conflict which could not be reconciled for centuries. The transition to a new social order took a strongly religious character. The schism triggered a tsunami of violence that permeated and shaped all aspects of life, polity, and culture. In the current article, politico-theological foundations of violence are viewed in historical perspective including both ideology and practice. Making violence a focal point of the research, we study all the means mobilized to justify it as well as mechanisms and venues of propaganda whose aim was to exert influence on people's mind-set.

Welsh and British Histories in Higher Education

Welsh and British Histories in Higher Education

Forum: The Past, Present, and Futures of Modern British History

Abstract For the first issue of the renamed journal, Modern British History co-editor Erik Linstrum convened a group of scholars to reflect on the past, present, and possible futures of the field. The resulting contributions make no claim to provide a comprehensive or representative survey. Rather, they offer a variety of perspectives on where modern British history has been and where it might be going. Several contributions, written by former editors of Twentieth Century British History, drawn on the history of the journal as a way of thinking about the direction of the field and its subfields. Others consider the place of modern Britain in the wider discipline of history, grappling with questions of temporality and embodiment; the institutional and material contexts of scholarship; the role of national histories in a transnational world; and the response of historical writing to epidemiological, humanitarian, and ecological crisis. The sequence of contributions mirrors the evolution of the journal since its founding in 1990, beginning with political history and gradually encompassing a much broader range of subjects and methodologies as well as an expanded geographical ambit. Here are archive stories, pleas for new subjects, roadmaps for new approaches to old subjects, and attempts to identify master narratives. Taken together, these contributions demonstrate that modern British history has many houses—which is both a sign of intellectual vitality and a challenge for anyone wishing to generalize about the ‘state of the field’. If British modernity remains an abundant resource for ‘thinking with’, its contours and frontiers are tantalizingly up for grabs.

Finding the Historical Imagination: Teaching Modern British History in a Social Sciences Context

Finding the Historical Imagination: Teaching Modern British History in a Social Sciences Context

Forum: Teaching Modern British History

Forum: Teaching Modern British History

Towards a More Inclusive Modern British History? Reflecting on Barriers, Challenges, and Opportunities in Twenty-First Century UK Higher Education

Towards a More Inclusive Modern British History? Reflecting on Barriers, Challenges, and Opportunities in Twenty-First Century UK Higher Education

Teaching Modern British History at the University of Derby

Teaching Modern British History at the University of Derby

On Jim Tomlinson’s ‘De-industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-narrative for Post-war British History’ (2016)

On Jim Tomlinson’s ‘De-industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-narrative for Post-war British History’ (2016)

Modern British History—First Issue Editorial

<i>Modern British History</i>—First Issue Editorial

Teaching twentieth-century British History to French undergraduates

Teaching twentieth-century British History to French undergraduates

On Jim Tomlinson’s ‘De-industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-narrative for Post-war British History’ (2016)

On Jim Tomlinson’s ‘De-industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-narrative for Post-war British History’ (2016)

The Imperial Politics of Time in the British History Classroom

The Imperial Politics of Time in the British History Classroom

Finding modernity in England's past: Social anthropology and the remaking of social history in Britain, 1959–77*

British historians drew on anthropological exemplars to remake social history between 1959 and 1977. Eric Hobsbawm's ‘primitive rebels’, Peter Laslett's World We Have Lost, Keith Thomas’s studies of witchcraft, and E. P. Thompson's ‘moral economy’ were all inspired by contemporary social anthropology, and they transformed historians’ understanding of the past. Reconstructing this moment of cross-disciplinary research contributes to our understanding of broader changes in the mid-century human sciences. This was a moment of grand theorizing about ‘modernization’, capitalism, and industrialization. Social historians responded to these concerns by drawing analogies between the past and the ethnographic present. The result was a number of hugely influential studies of social change that posed new questions to those seeking to create abstract models of modernization out of the English past.

Combining acoustic telemetry with archival tagging to investigate the spatial dynamic of the understudied pollack, Pollachius pollachius.

Combining fish tracking methods is a promising way of leveraging the strengths of each approach while mitigating their individual weaknesses. Acoustic telemetry provides presence information as the fish move within receiver range, eliminating the need for tag recovery. Archival tags, on the other hand, record environmental variables on tag retrieval, enabling continuous path reconstruction of a fish beyond coastal regions. This study capitalizes on the combination of both methods for geolocating pollack, Pollachius pollachius, an understudied species of the northeast Atlantic, where declining stocks are raising concern. Essential knowledge of population structure and connectivity between essential habitats is critically lacking and could help inform stock assessment and management. The aims of the study were (1) to evaluate the feasibility of double-tagging pollack, known for being challenging to tag, and (2) to track seasonal movements across the Channel to gain first insights into pollack spatial ecology. In 2022, an extensive network of acoustic receivers was been deployed in the Channel along the French, English, and Belgian coasts as part of the Fish Intel project. We tagged 83 pollack with acoustic transmitters, among which 48 were double-tagged with data storage tags. Post-tagging survival assessment, conducted on a subset of 35 individuals, revealed a successful procedure with a 97% short-term survival rate. By October 2023, the acoustic telemetry network detected 30 out of 83 pollack at least once, with no large-scale movements observed across the Channel. Presence in the network fluctuates seasonally, peaking in summer, particularly among immature fish. Integrating acoustic detections with temperature and depth time series in a geolocation model enabled trajectory reconstruction of 10 recaptured pollack, seven of which were detected by the network. This combined tracking approach revealed coastal movements along the coast of Brittany in France, highlighting the ecological significance of the Iroise Sea for pollack throughout the year, particularly in summer. The geolocation model also suggested movements towards the entrance of the western Channel. This study highlights the complementarity of acoustic telemetry and archival tagging in reconstructing fish movements in their natural environment. As data accumulate, these innovative tracking methods promise to continually unveil new insights into the spatial ecology of the understudied pollack, which is essential for the species' management.

William Blake’s The Ancient Britons: A Book and a Website (Now Vanished) Reviewed

The artworks created by the Ancient Britons team are the result of critically informed readings and imaginings of the painting as it is described by Blake in A Descriptive Catalogue. These works were first exhibited in Stuttgart from 29 October 2020, with the exhibition temporarily closed in November and extended to 4 December. After the exhibition, presented as an ironic inversion of Blake’s failure to connect with his audiences in 1809, came the website, launched in July 2021. The exercise culminated in a book, which synthesizes the materials and experiences shared via the website and also frames them with a scholarly essay. This review, moving between all aspects of the project, will discuss the aspirations of the exhibition and its afterlife online and in book form.

Sara Caputo. Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Modern British Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 320. $99.99 (cloth).

Sara Caputo. Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Modern British Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 320. $99.99 (cloth).

Navigating the complexities of learning history in English in two South African schools

Despite extensive research into the intersection between English aptitude and academic achievement, the challenges that learners for whom English is not their first language face when taught history in English are still underexplored. Underpinned by Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, this study investigates the linguistic challenges that South African learners face when taught history using the English language, and then explores how learners would want to be taught. Using semi-structured interviews and classroom observations, this phenomenological study adopting a qualitative approach generated data from 12 purposively sampled participants drawn from two rural schools. Themed findings explicate that learners had poor command of the English language used for teaching and learning, and hence misunderstood command words, lacked confidence, mispronounced words and did not read for comprehension. The learners proposed that history teachers must employ scaffolding and translanguaging approaches to enhance mastery of history concepts. These findings suggest the need for schools through the Department of Education in South Africa, and in any other countries in similar contexts, to embrace scaffolding and translanguaging as pedagogical approaches in teaching history for understanding, rather than for uniformity. These insights could inform policies and practice for the language of teaching for the history curriculum in countries that are multilingual societies.

Cecil Roth’s Torah scroll shoe soles: collecting Holocaust relics in Greece

ABSTRACT This essay examines two shoe soles cut from a Torah scroll which British historian and collector of Judaica Cecil Roth collected in Greece in 1946. As Holocaust relics, the Torah scroll shoe soles are, in turn, sacred and sacrilegious, texts and objects, Greek Jewish and non-Jewish Greek artifacts. Roth’s recovery of the shoe soles is compromised by occurring under the auspices of the British Army during the Greek Civil War and in the controversial climate of collecting Judaica displaced by the Holocaust. I discuss the ongoing story of the shoe soles: their separation, their use, and their best location.

АЛЬФРЕД ЛЕПЕШКА И ДРУГИЕ ГЕРОИ БРИТАНСКОЙ ИСТОРИИ О ЗНАМЕНИТОЙ ПАРОДИИ НА ШКОЛЬНЫЙ УЧЕБНИК (ЧАСТЬ 2)

В 1930 г. в Лондоне была опубликована написанная У. Селлером и Р. Йетменом книга «1066 и все такое» – сатира на современный школьный учебник истории, остающаяся одним из самых известных произведений английской сатиры ХХ века. Содержание этого произведения рассматривается в статье. Цель исследования заключается в выявлении способов достижения комического эффекта. Обращается внимание на то, что объектом иронии для авторов было намерение научить викторианской морали. Для этого использовалась антитеза хороших/плохих королей: отрицательным примером был Карл II, и напротив, Альфред Великий был примером хорошего короля, хотя почти все, что о нем было известно из школьных учебников, носило легендарный характер. Сатира помогает понять, что власть обычно принадлежит не выдающимся личностям, а весьма ординарным и даже никчемным персонам. Другой объ-ект для сатирической критики – ложное понимание героизма. Якобы древние бритты положили начало традиции героизма. Такой подход объясняется восприятием Первой мировой войны и войн в целом, характерным для "потерянного поколения". Сатира Селлара и Йетмана показывает: традиционный урок истории был полон мифов и домыслов. Эта книга подрывает представление о единственно верной версии национальной истории, отраженной в английских школьных учебниках по истории. A small book – satire on modern school history textbook was published in London in 1930. It was written by Walter Seller and Robert Yeatman, called “1066 and All that” and it is still one of the most famous satirical works in English literature of the XX century. The content of this writing is under regard in my article. The aim of the study lays in identification of the ways to achieve comic effect. The attention is given to the fact that for the authors the object of irony was intention to teach lesson in Victorian morality. For this the antithesis of good/ bad kings was used, and very characteristic negative example was Charles II. On the contrary Alfred the Great was an example of good king, though nearly all that was known about him from school textbooks had generally legendary character. The satire helps to understand that power usually belongs not to outstanding personalities, but to very ordinary and even worthless persons. The other object for satirical critics stands in false understanding of heroism. The ancient Britons allegedly began the tradition of heroism. This approach is explained by perception of WWI and wars in general, typical for “lost generation”. Satire of Sellar and Yeatman shows: the traditional history lesson was full of myths and speculations. This book undermined presentation about the one right version of national history as it was reflected in English school history textbooks.