Preparing teaching materials for a new term can lead to some surprising discoveries. My highlight this year, while getting things together for my history of Communism module, was coming across the Revolting Russians episode of Horrible Histories on Box of Broadcasts, the video streaming service for schools and universities. The show takes a typically light-hearted,… […]

CPD Training Event at the University of Northampton in partnership with UKAT UK Academic Advising and Tutoring! The History team at Northampton and the East Midlands Centre for History Teaching and Learning in HE is pleased to announce that booking is open for our upcoming inspiring workshop, ‘Managing Students in Distress’. Working with trainers from… […]

On 13 November, David Renton gave a History Research seminar based on his work on the history of fascism and National Front. In this blog he reflects further on issues of free speech raised in his presentation: For years, I’ve written about the battle between left and right. My interest hasn’t been so much in […]

It’s Euro 2021 so we are organising a sweepstake on our twitter account, @HistoriansUON. It’s just for fun. Free to enter and no prizes, except glory among the historical community! We might even do some football blogs and historically themed facts along the way. To enter, just follow us on twitter and reply to our […]

The Cratchits sit down to Christmas dinner  If, like me, you tuned in to watch the BBC’s latest adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol, I’m sure it will have left a lasting impression.  Over three nights a star-studded cast presented a much darker version of the tale of Scrooge than we are used… […]

As we approach the end of another year I thought I’d reflect on what, if anything we might learn from the events of 2017. This has been (another) tumultuous annum with terrorism, the threat of nuclear war, and political turmoil at home and abroad. What I’d like to discuss though, is the value of History […]

By Dr Daniel Jones, Searchlight Archivist The front cover of Lewisham: What Are You Taking Pictures For?, which explores the photo journalism around Lewisham and the editorial choices of major newspapers to focus on police injuries rather than the context of the National Front march. A recent donation to the Searchlight Archive was a fascinating… […]

Even a cursory engagement with British history would be enough to remind us that we are a fairly rebellious people when we are told what we should or shouldn’t do. There is a proud tradition of standing up for our ‘rights’ even if, for the most part, those rights are nowhere defined in a written… […]

Image by James Meades, Unsplash Recognising that we are committed to more deeply embedding Black history into our teaching, the History team have put together a suggested reading list for the summer – for our students and for ourselves! To make this list as accessible as possible, we have selected texts that are either available […]

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 Joseph, who has […]

I recently made a visit, with my colleague, Dr Caroline Nielsen, to Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire. Kelmarsh was built in the 1730s to a Palladian design by Francis Smith with the architect James Gibbs for the Hanbury family. The Hall retains many of its original features and 1000 acres of the original estate, including working… […]

In my last post I promised to give you some examples of interesting medieval women, whose experiences pushed beyond the misogynistic limitations they were theoretically subject to in a patriarchal society. As I’m a specialist in the fifteenth century, and I teach a third year undergraduate module on the Wars of the Roses, I thought… […]

This blog post is by our undergraduate student Joseph Price. Image from It’s A Sin The recent Channel 4 drama series ‘It’s a Sin’ directed by Russel T Davies offers a terrifying and heartbreaking insight into the experiences of gay men in the 1980s. The series follows the lives of a group of friends where… […]

Whatever new fads and fashions there are in the study of history (and believe it or not there are many happening all the time) one thing has remained in place since the revolutionary work of Leopold Von Ranke and the German school of history in the late nineteenth century: the use of primary sources dating […]