2020 – Page 7 – Manchester Historian

In 1975, on the 30th of April, Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, was captured by the People’s Army of Vietnam and the Vietcong. Was the fall of Saigon an inevitability? Was there any chance that South Vietnam could have been an independent viable nation free from communist rule?

The French colony of Saint-Domingue (contemporary Haiti) was heralded as ‘the Pearl of the Antilles’, the slave-driven sugar economy making it the richest of the French colonies and a central component in France’s imperial vision.

Today, freedom of speech and action is seen as being central to western democracy. Yet, despite being one of the chief architects of the arguments for free speech and free will, and debating the importance of these issues for much of his career, John Milton remains an obscure historical figure.

In this episode, Wilf Kenning spoke to 2nd Year History and Arabic student Marco Dryburgh on the topic of Orientalism, and it’s relation to Colonial Britain. Marco discussed the key features of Edward Said’s seminal theory, as well as explaining its relevance and pervasive performance in Colonial Britain, and how we can even see traces of colonial Orientalism today.

The July 14th Revolution of 1958 led to the overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy and the creation of the Iraqi republic. One of the main leaders of the coup, Abd al-Karīm Qāsim, became the first prime minister of the republic. However, born out of violence and bloodshed, the Iraqi Republic was doomed from the start and, after only ten short years, the new republic, which had never been stable, crumbled.