In perhaps Sappho’s most quoted fragment, a preoccupation with her reputation to prosperity is immediately and ironically apparent. Most likely addressing a lover, Sappho writes: ‘someone will remember us / I say / even in another time,’ (trans. Carson). Yet the ways in which Sappho’s work has been interpreted and conceptualised throughout time has been […]
Santa Claus is the beloved figure of Christmas; his iconic look of a large man with a portly belly, wearing a red coat and hat, with a big white beard is recognised across the world. However, this holiday figure hasn’t always been pictured the way he is today and his origin is a complex story […]
Mid-February, the University of Manchester was graced with the special appearance of the president of the American Historical Association: Kenneth Pomeranz. A leading China expert, Professor Pomeranz delivered a guest lecture to students and faculty evaluating the weaknesses, and addressing criticism, of his famous thesis in The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of […]
Nearly two thousand years ago, Queen Boudicca of the Iceni tribe led an uprising against the oppressive Roman Empire, fighting for the freedom of her people, the British Celts. Although ultimately unsuccessful, her name is still remembered by many Britons for her might and bravery in facing one of the strongest Empires the world had […]
She had planned on becoming a doctor, this woman. This politico. This artista. However, in 1925 Frida Kahlo became not a doctor but a perpetual patient, for during a bus ride in September of that year she was impaled by an iron handrail. In the midst of her long recovery, Frida began to create what critics would argue to be life-affirming […]
The last editors’ notes from 2012/13 editors Ata Rahman and Charlie Bush. We got in touch with some of last year’s Manchester Historian team and found out what post-undergraduate life has brought them… Florence Holmes, co-creator of the Manchester Historian and one of the editors from last year’s team kept on rolling after University has […]
Arguably the most famous Tudor monarch, the legacy of Henry VIII is famous – or infamous, as some would argue. In schools up and down the country, children are often taught about his gluttonous lifestyle, and the rhyme “divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived” is relatively common when it comes to remembering the fates of […]
Thank you everyone who made it to our annual Staff/Student Pub Quiz! We had a great turnout, filling the entire of 256, and some great competitive spirit among you all. It was great to see staff and students engaging with each other! Following on from this, we have some more socials and events we are […]
For over 100 years, the concept of Zionism has sparked heated international debate, which shows no indication of diminishing. Now-a-days, most people are somewhat familiar with the concept of Zionism – the movement which seeks to unify the Jewish race into one nation and return them back to the Holy Land of Israel. However, Jewish […]
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 […]
Manchester’s Arndale covers 1,500,000 square feet of retail floor space, making it Europe’s largest city-centre shopping mall. How Manchester’s streets see over 750,000 shoppers flocking to the city centre on a weekly basis, a step backwards into history is necessary. Mass consumerism as we know it developed from the late Victorian period, in which the […]
The French Revolution symbolises possibly the most important political change in early modern Europe. The revolution spanning from 1789 to 1799 saw mass social and political change in France culminating in the abolition of the French monarchy and replacement with a secular and democratic republic. The outcome of the revolution, especially the rise of Napoleon […]
By the early sixteenth-century, sixty-thousand Europeans were executed for witchcraft, four-fifths of whom were female. Biological sex did not offer exclusive protection against accusations of witchcraft, but let us discuss the sex-related reasons that compelled an overwhelmingly female majority of witchcraft accusations in early modern Europe. Angela Buckley’s The Real Sherlock Holmes is Jerome Caminada, […]
On December 17th 1903, the Wright brothers accomplished the world’s first heavier-than-air flight, and set global militaries on a new path. Great Britain, throughout its history, had famously relied on its natural moat and superior naval forces to defend its people from invasion, but this was soon to change. The First World War heralded a […]
