We are all familiar with the faces of the famous splashed across billboards, TVs and magazines dubiously endorsing all manner of products from face creams to funeral services. Alex Hulmes looks at celebrity branding through history.
Kate Ayling writes a potted history of the South American slave trade, often overlooked in favour of the more prominent trade in North America.
Slogans are some of the most memorable media we have, with most of us being able to repeat them at will. Alice Rigby explores where slogans come from and how have they changed over the last century and a half.
Megan Dina Garlick interviews Lecturer of Modern European History, Dr Christian Goeschel.
Michael Gove has recently suggested that the revisionist critiques of the First World War amount to no more than ‘undergraduate cynicism’. Vivienne Delliou-Daly defends the study of history and explains why the inconvenient truths of history cannot be ignored.
The canvas on which tattooing is etched on may only be skin deep, but the history of this art form goes much deeper. If, like me, you have partaken in the joy of the needle (having a professional doodler draw upon your skin not, I hasten to add, drugs) we are participating in a social Continue Reading
What first interested you in history? Studying ancient Egypt at primary school made me positive I wanted to be an Egyptologist. Quite how I then made the leap to the C18th I’m not sure, but my early love of ‘historical’ films of the 1950s and 60s (The Vikings, Robin of Sherwood, The Scarlet Pimpernel etc) Continue Reading
What first interested you in history? Studying ancient Egypt at primary school made me positive I wanted to be an Egyptologist. Quite how I then made the leap to the C18th I’m not sure, but my early love of ‘historical’ films of the 1950s and 60s (The Vikings, Robin of Sherwood, The Scarlet Pimpernel etc) Continue Reading
Throughout the High Middle Ages, various people, groups, and ‘worlds’ expanded their global horizons. Art, trade, and scholarly interests changed as Christians and Muslims encountered the ‘other’ and their religious brethren. For the Christian European, the story of Prester John resonated with them, the idea there was a Christian state lying beyond the lands of Continue Reading
Your supervisors will give you focused advice on content and methods, so here are five things you won’t be told about how to shine in independent study projects, but which will get where you want to be.
Some will be profoundly counter-intuitive, and all will mean challenging yourself and your views. But that’s the name of the game. However, all of these will transform your work over time in mystifying and almost magical ways.
1. Philosophise.
About half the marks available in all the work you do are for solving ‘thinky’ problems. What’s wrong with my argument? What is evidence like? What are states? Does gender matter? Are individuals real? What do historians do? Can objects speak? Brainstorm a list of ‘thinky’ problems in your project and take them to your supervisor’s office hour.
2. Explore the now. Why is Olympus potentially the most corrupt corporation on earth? Why did democracy campaigners in Egypt not want elections now? Don’t know? Oops. If you want to start to grow your appreciation for complexity, contested ideas and interconnectedness in a relatively painless way, then read a paper edition of a serious newspaper 3+ times a week.
Only paper editions count, because you can’t flippantly pick and choose what you read in them, and because they make you invest something in obtaining them and spend special time away from gadgets reading them. The reviews, comment, economics and society pages matter as much as the news.
3. Obsess about commas.
And paragraphs. And colons. Can you quote the rules for using these? They might seem marginal to the real business of your work, but they’re not. These are easy marks to throw away – and easy to win back, too. Explore the rules at http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tutorial/index.htm. Master the exercises, and your grades will improve – as will your salary after Uni.
4. Cheat.
You have to master a huge amount of material just to get started on your research – including dozens of difficult, long books. Eventually, you have to read the books that matter in detail, but you can identify those more quickly by reading book reviews in JSTOR. If a book crops up in your literature search, JSTOR will find reviews – you tick the ‘review’ box in ‘advanced search’. Then you’ll know what the book’s major arguments are without reading it. If they’re important – then you read the book.
5. Stop taking notes.
No-one can read, think and write at the same time. So when doing your research, put your pen down. Read a chapter of a book or a journal article, and when you have finished reading, write down what you remember. But not everything that you remember!
Jot down: the argument; its relationship to other people’s arguments (same, similar, different); the types of evidence it used; the types of approach it used (economic history, anthropology, gender theory etc.). If you can’t remember it, it wasn’t that important – move on to the next item. Think more; write less.
King Alfred of Wessex (r. 871 AD – 899 AD) is an enduring individual in English History. Alfred’s Kingdom of Wessex weathered the Viking conquest when all other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms fell. In his subsequent liberations of land, Alfred is said to have laid the foundations of the political unification of England. His achievements are remarkable, Continue Reading
If you want to understand part of why the Middle East is such a volatile region today, a good place to start finding answers is the partitioning of the region between 1918 and 1920. The Allies defeated the Ottoman Empire in WWI, and needed to decide what would happen to areas previously under Ottoman control. Continue Reading
Britain’s referendum on 23rd June, popularly known as ‘Brexit’, will have profound impact on the UK. The uncertainty created by the nature of such a referendum will affect the UK economy for years to come until a comprehensive deal with the 27 EU leaders is signed. This can’t even take place until Article 50 of Continue Reading
If some sort of modern day Rip Van Winkle was to suddenly awaken from a slumber he fell into in 1996, he could be forgiven for initially thinking he’d only been out for the night and not twenty years. It seems that we just can’t let go of the ‘90s and for all this nostalgia Continue Reading
The Inca Empire expanded and flourished throughout the fifteenth century and continued to do so until Francisco Pizarro’s third expedition to Peru in 1532. The expansion of the Inca Empire is truly fascinating due to the incredible rate of which they incorporated other ethnic groups. Expansion began under Pachacuti in 1438 and continued to develop Continue Reading
Content warning: discusses physical/sexual violence and rape I’m sitting at my desk, on a dull, cloudy afternoon. I’ve just finished reading Sweat by Zora Neale Hurston — a short story, a set reading. It is about the tired Black American wife of a cruel husband who beats her out of pure hatred, for not satisfying Continue Reading
The literary creations of Elizabeth Gaskell have had an irrefutable legacy that, from the mid-twentieth century, marked her out amongst critics as one of the most important and esteemed writers of the Victorian era. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of her literary career was that she seemed to just fall into it at the age of 38. After the tragic death of her infant son William, her husband, also named William, suggested she start writing as a means of distraction from her grief.
When we think of xenophobia, often we are susceptible to oversimplifying it, without considering the intersectionality of gender and race. Historically, antisemitism has largely existed within a repressive hetero-normative framework of gender identity and sexuality. Considering Antisemitism in Victorian England then, it’s important to take on a gendered perspective, looking at the relationship between Judeophobia and conceived ‘masculinity’.
Toni Morrison, beloved American author and literary scholar, is best remembered for her razor-sharp prose. In the wake of her death in 2019, scholars have revisited her life’s works, revealing a depth of understanding of black American history previously unappreciated.
To be a woman is not a place of neutrality. To be a woman in literature, to read of your body as a site of battles and uprisings, of famine and protest, destroys any sense of impartiality. There is a long-standing tradition of gendering the nation: the motherland, the mothership, the innate feminine sense of home. But what happens when this sense of gender becomes so deeply tied in with a sense of nation that the two have become almost inseparable?
Manchester University may have produced more Nobel Prize winners than any other non-Oxbridge city, yet we can also make a claim no less necessary in retaining the peace and happiness of the human race; the university has produced a veritable bundle of comedy greats over the last 30 years. Where would TV comedy be without Continue Reading
Arguably one of the greatest mechanical engineers of the late Industrial Revolution, was born in Stockport in 1803 to a congregational minister. Sir Joseph was developing his knowledge of machinery and engineering during an age of great technological advancements, alongside his renowned civil engineering contemporaries, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and George Stephenson. One great innovation of Continue Reading
The Jarrow Crusade remains one of the most evocative emblems of the interwar period. It captures something of the resilience of the interwar British population in the face of unemployment, hunger and depression. In October 1936, 207 hungry and bedraggled marchers travelled to London from Jarrow in the North East to protest against the terrible Continue Reading
At the turn of the nineteenth century when the Industrial Revolution was transforming Britain’s economy, manufacturing and commercial enterprises needed credit and investment; hence the proliferation of financial institutions across the country. Lloyds and Barclays were but a few of the banking giants that began in the nineteenth century and still exist to this day. Continue Reading
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is centred around Thomas Cromwell, a man widely hated in his lifetime and distrusted by his peers. He served as a high-ranking advisor to Henry VIII and played an important role in Henry’s break from Rome and both the rise and downfall of Anne Boleyn. Mantel, despite this,still attempts to portray Cromwell as the true hero archetype, having escaped the harsh cruelties of a drunk and abusive father and into the learned culture of the sixteenth century. His claim to omnipotence at times makes him a loathsome character and Mantel’s acknowledgment that he looked “like a murderer” only pushes Cromwell further from the reader’s sympathies. Despite this, Mantel is keen to juxtapose this by attempting to portray him as an enlightened and appealing character in comparison to her depiction of other characters such as Wolsey.
The book on the most part is historically accurate and doesn’t stray too far into fantasy. It is able to successfully avoid a scandalous love triangle clouding the minds of the reader, which have otherwise become such a prominent feature in other early modern historical novels. Instead Mantel focuses heavily on his complex relationship with Anne Boleyn, which she successfully pens as being fuelled by a jealous rivalry andportrays Boleyn as a fitting anti-hero.
When considering the book stylistically, it is understandable why the book has been panned by so many. It fails to highlight the sexual and more lurid aspects of court life and instead focuses on the formalities undertaken by a self-indulgent monotonous lawyer. It must also be noted that Mantel uses the pronoun “he” far too often and after reading the first 16 pages it becomes only becomes clear that she is talking about Cromwell, due to the fact one knows he is the protagonist.
Wolf Hall has been named as one of the “top ten best historical novels” by the Observer and has won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. On the surface then, it would seem this book is an excellent read. Mantel does shed light on a different aspect of Cromwell’s character and offers new ways of understanding the role other figures played in the course of Tudor politics, but ultimately for a reader not interested in the sixteenth century it is hardly the most thrilling page turner.
Summer is over, and the chill in the Manchester air is a reminder that winter is imminent. So we have provided you with some fantastic reading material for those long rainy nights as you settle back into academic life.
As the new editors we both thought it was important to bring something new to the magazine, which reflects both of us. We have achieved this by adding in two new sections to the magazine that favours each of our historical interests: war, and feminism. Guess whose is whose? We have paired up to bring you some strategy and tactics, alongside a historical revision from a woman’s point of view.
But the big theme this month is something that you could not miss this summer. 100 years ago, the great powers of Europe took part in one of the most devastating events of history; the First World War. Out of the 65 million combatants (including 8 million from Britain) that fought in World War One, 10 million of these soldiers died. So what better way to begin this year’s Manchester Historian than by marking the centenary of this conflict, and by commemorating all of those who lost their lives? We have covered some areas that are less well known or documented: from the Suffragette Split as a result of the war, to the Battles in the Skies.
2014 also marks 20 years since the Rwandan Genocide, which we have included in the ‘History You Should Know’ section alongside other important historical events such as Magdalene Asylums across the world and the Islamic Revolution. We are also bringing you ‘History Behind the Headlines’, from a history of Scottish Independence to the war on Isis.
Finally, we’ve got the classic new staff interview so you can read all about Eloise Moss’s love of the history of British crime. And for those of you looking for a good TV series or book, you will find a couple of reviews here.
If you have any suggestions for any articles or want to write for us, please get in touch by emailing us at:[email protected]
We hope you enjoy reading Issue 15 of the Manchester Historian!
Zoey and Xan
‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime’. – British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, August 1914
Summer is over, and the chill in the Manchester air is a reminder that winter is imminent. So we have provided you with some fantastic reading material for those long rainy nights as you settle back into academic life.