We are all familiar with the faces of the famous splashed across billboards, TVs and magazines dubiously endorsing all manner of products from face creams to funeral services. Alex Hulmes looks at celebrity branding through history. Kate Ayling writes a potted history of the South American slave trade, often overlooked in favour of the more […]
Between the 8th and late 11th century, the Vikings ventured from their Scandinavian homelands and began their assault on the memory of Europe. The name Viking is thought to derive from vikingr (pirate). Indeed, we use the term ‘Viking’ with little discrimination and it is now a term with great historical and pseudo-historical baggage. Traditionally, […]
The canvas on which tattooing is etched on may only be skin deep, but the history of this art form goes much deeper. If, like me, you have partaken in the joy of the needle (having a professional doodler draw upon your skin not, I hasten to add, drugs) we are participating in a social […]
What first interested you in history? Studying ancient Egypt at primary school made me positive I wanted to be an Egyptologist. Quite how I then made the leap to the C18th I’m not sure, but my early love of ‘historical’ films of the 1950s and 60s (The Vikings, Robin of Sherwood, The Scarlet Pimpernel etc) […]
Throughout the High Middle Ages, various people, groups, and ‘worlds’ expanded their global horizons. Art, trade, and scholarly interests changed as Christians and Muslims encountered the ‘other’ and their religious brethren. For the Christian European, the story of Prester John resonated with them, the idea there was a Christian state lying beyond the lands of […]
Your supervisors will give you focused advice on content and methods, so here are five things you won’t be told about how to shine in independent study projects, but which will get where you want to be. Some will be profoundly counter-intuitive, and all will mean challenging yourself and your views. But that’s the name […]
King Alfred of Wessex (r. 871 AD – 899 AD) is an enduring individual in English History. Alfred’s Kingdom of Wessex weathered the Viking conquest when all other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms fell. In his subsequent liberations of land, Alfred is said to have laid the foundations of the political unification of England. His achievements are remarkable, […]
Content warning: discusses physical/sexual violence and rape I’m sitting at my desk, on a dull, cloudy afternoon. I’ve just finished reading Sweat by Zora Neale Hurston — a short story, a set reading. It is about the tired Black American wife of a cruel husband who beats her out of pure hatred, for not satisfying […]
Manchester University may have produced more Nobel Prize winners than any other non-Oxbridge city, yet we can also make a claim no less necessary in retaining the peace and happiness of the human race; the university has produced a veritable bundle of comedy greats over the last 30 years. Where would TV comedy be without […]
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is centred around Thomas Cromwell, a man widely hated in his lifetime and distrusted by his peers. He served as a high-ranking advisor to Henry VIII and played an important role in Henry’s break from Rome and both the rise and downfall of Anne Boleyn. Mantel, despite this,still attempts to portray […]
Summer is over, and the chill in the Manchester air is a reminder that winter is imminent. So we have provided you with some fantastic reading material for those long rainy nights as you settle back into academic life. As the new editors we both thought it was important to bring something new to the […]
“Reality is as thin as paper, and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character. A hundred times I had to try and test its taut skin with my hands, and had found it hopelessly botched.” These are the words of Jewish Galician writer Bruno Schulz, a globally relevant artist and painter, particularly recognised among […]
Welcome Week 2012 may have seemed the usual riot of massive nights, thronging freshers’ fairs, and the now obligatory Student Union indignation at some fresh disgrace by club promoters. All fuelled by enough personal pizzas to pave the way to East Didsbury and back. Same old, same old. However, there was, of course, something very […]
South Africans will never forget the year of 1994, during which there was great cathartic change in the nation. Within a period of 12 months apartheid was abolished, the African National Congress (ANC), a social democratic political party, was introduced and the first ever black head of state was elected. Prior to 1994, the country […]