Regular readers of the blog will know that I am currently travelling around the country visiting museums as part of my project ‘Shoes and the Georgian Man’, funded by the Society for Antiquaries. I am studying surviving examples of shoes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to explore the social significance of footwear… Continue Reading →

Our second year students taking the Dissertation Research Skills module were given an assignment to write a 500-word blog post that would serve as a  how-to guide for using a particular online archive or library catalogue. With the students’ permission, we’ll share some of the best posts here. This one is by Tom, who writes… Continue Reading →

Collision report: Bletchley Park, Folklore, and Academic History

Jim Beach reveals Army reporting on the local political situation in 1919. Over the past year I have been rummaging through some not-very-exciting government documents.  But for an intelligence historian, that’s pretty much par for the course. As I say to students who take my third-year module, Secret State: British Intelligence, 1558-1945: “Just because it’s… Continue Reading →

Our recently graduated (July 2019) PhD student, the newly-minted Dr Paul Stewart, writes about his project, ‘Medmenham: Anglo-American Photographic Intelligence in the Second World War’.   During a thirty six year career as an RAF intelligence officer, specialising in imagery intelligence, I had the honour to meet many of the photographic intelligence unsung heroes from… Continue Reading →