It’s the school holidays and I was looking for a way to entertain the children on a rainy morning, so we went to the local cinema to see Horrible Histories: The Movie. Since they graduated from CBeebies to CBBC, Horrible Histories has been a reliable favourite and, thanks to iPlayer and Netflix, we have watched […]

Friday marks the bicentenary of the Peterloo Massacre. On 16 August 1819, a huge crowd of 60,000 men, women and children gathered in St Peter’s Field in Manchester to listen to radical speakers and demand parliamentary reform. At this time, only around a tenth of adult males had the vote and many new industrial centres […]

Dr Jim Beach recently contributed an article for the GCHQ blog, which begins: At five in the morning on 21 March 1918, Vince Schürhoff woke to the thunderous sound of a bombardment. After many false alarms, the much-anticipated German offensive had begun. Vince was a twenty-six year-old corporal in the British army’s Royal Engineers (Signal […]

The prospect of selecting a master’s dissertation subject can be a daunting one, particularly if, like me, you’ve had a 22-year hiatus since your last foray into higher education. I must admit I was in something of a quandary; it had been so long since I had undertaken any form of historical study that I […]

We’ve finished our most recent dissertation cycle here at Northampton. The marking is done and the results have been released. It seems a useful time to reflect as I prepare meetings to discuss projects with students for next year. We’ve had some great results, some fascinating dissertations, some of them first class. As the convenor […]

Starting university can be a bit overwhelming, and the last thing you want to do is worry that you are not getting the most out of the seminars, or that you are completing the prep in the wrong manner. Seminars can be a wonderful environment for debates that are enlightening, and the preparatory work is […]

Jim Beach of the University of Northampton reflects on a visit to the Czech Republic. Speaking neither Czech nor Polish, it was with some trepidation that I accepted an invitation to speak at a workshop on the Seven Days’ War between the Czechs and Poles in 1919.   The initial invite came from Tomáš Rusek, a […]

This is another instalment in my occasional series on history and children’s TV, following blogs on Thomas the Tank Engine and Teacup Travels. Which may give the reader an insight into what is mostly on our screen at the moment… Our five year old is currently obsessed with Go Jetters on CBeebies. (His older brother […]

In seems appropriate to be writing about racism and xenophobia this winter, appropriate but quite disturbing. I was prompted to write this blog post by one of my third year History students who had read my book London’s Shadows over the summer in preparation for his studies. In Chapter three I look at the mixed communities […]

Starting on Wednesday 13 March 2019, the University of Northampton will be hosting an exhibition about the life of Reverend Dr James Parkes (1896 – 1981). Parkes was one of the most remarkable figures within twentieth-century Christianity. Yet since his death in 1981, he has largely been forgotten by the church, by Jews, and by […]

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 […]

On the 8 May 1968 a series of dawn raids were carried out by ‘more than 100’ Metropolitan Police detectives, led by DS Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read. The target of these raids was organized criminal gang that surrounded two East End gangsters that have passed into London folklore and garnered more column inches, True Crime books […]

Immediately after their exams, seven members of the University of Northampton History Society travelled to Vienna.  A self-organised culmination to their studies, the visit focused upon the history and culture of what is now Austria from the Renaissance through to the end of the Second World War.  They were accompanied by Jim Beach, one of […]

As a historian who works on the eighteenth century, I am always interested when Georgian stories appear in the news. And right on cue for Valentine’s Day, various news outlets were covering the sale of a “banned Georgian sex manual” at an auction in Derbyshire. The book in question was an edition of a book […]