Category: Dates That Changed the Western World

‘The Past is Not Dead’ – Confronting the British Past in the wake of Black Lives Matter

Recent events have really put our discipline on the front pages. The Black Lives Matter protests which have swept across the United States and Europe following the brutal murder of George Floyd, have seen statues of controversial historical…

‘Lest We Forget’ – Creating a First World War Community Archive

This post comes from Dr Matthew Kidd, who is currently working at the University of Oxford on ‘Their Finest Hour’, a Second World War digital archive project . Between October 2018 and July 2019 I was Research Co-ordinator…

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Thoughts on Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau

The Auschwitz Museum has just reported that the top ten countries from which visitors to the Museum/Memorial came in 2018 are: Poland (405,000), Great Britain(281,000), USA (136,000), Italy (116,000), Spain (95,000), Germany (76.000), France (69,000), Israel (65,000), Czech…

Memorial to Frank Foley

This post comes from undergraduate student at the University, Anna Cardy.  On 18 September 2018, HRH the Duke of Cambridge unveiled a statue commemorating the life of Frank Foley in Stourbridge. Foley is noted for saving 10,000 Jews…

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Uncomfortable Truths: Confronting the Reality of Our National Heroes

by Christian O’Connell The way nations remember, commemorate, and celebrate their national heroes and historical figures is a subject on which I have reflected a lot recently. Ever since the clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia over the statue of…

An American Historian visits Vietnam & Cambodia

By Neil A. Wynn Several things got me interested in U.S. history when I was a teenager – rock n’roll, blues, civil rights, John F. Kennedy (hard to believe now!), and the war in Vietnam.  By the time…

Votes for Women: the 1918 Representation of the People Act

The 1918 Representation of the People Act of 6 February 1918 is one of the cornerstones of our parliamentary democracy. It set the foundations of the principle of ‘one person, one vote’ and established the current, though often…

Race, ‘Britishness’, and History in Schools: reflections on another Black History Month in Cheltenham

This October marked the third consecutive year that myself and the University have collaborated with other organisations in order to celebrate Black History Month in Cheltenham. This local partnership, which includes the University’s History, and Equality and Diversity…

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The USA and World War I

One hundred years ago today, on April 6th 1917, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to approve Woodrow Wilson’s call for a declaration of war against Germany to “make the world safe for democracy”. Although the United States…

Holocaust Memorial Day

This post comes from our first year undergraduate student Anna Cardy. ‘For the survivor death is not the problem. Death was an everyday occurrence. We learned to live with death. The problem is to adjust to life to…