The United States of America had always been a destination I wanted to travel to from a young age. Perhaps it was the appeal of metropolis-esque cities such as New York or Los Angeles I had seen on TV programmes, the beautiful scenery of national parks across the huge American landscape or possibly the vast […]
Lad culture is one of the hot social topics of the moment, with a multitude of (other) university’s societies and sports clubs being criticised due to inappropriate and sexist behaviour. Laura Robinson explores the alternative side of the chivalric knight as the medieval version of the modern lad. The commercialisation of Christmas is often lamented […]
During the second half of the 20th century, news media focus on the events in South Africa and the fight to end apartheid there greatly eclipsed the plight of the Aboriginal Australians and the incredibly harsh and violent apartheid they were also subjected to. The subjugation of the Aboriginal people started when the British began […]
This article will feature in Issue 37: Oppression and Resistance Classical Greece has long been perceived by modern Western countries as the birthplace of democracy, and has been used to shape and justify Eurocentric concepts of identity and political thought. When asked to imagine the Ancient Greek world, images of beautifully carved white marble statues, […]
Professor Paul Fouracre’s book Frankish History: Studies in the Construction of Power has recently been published in Ashgate’s Variorum Collected Studies Series. Dr Yangwen Zheng edited The Chinese Chameleon Revisited: From the Jesuits to Zhang Yimou which was also published recently. Dr Pedro Ramos Pinto wrote a chapter entitled ‘Why Inequalities Matter’ published in Reducing […]
For centuries, women in western Europe suffering from a long list of, sometimes vague, symptoms – including anxiety, loss of sexual desire, or too much sexual desire, insomnia and being ‘difficult’- could find themselves being labelled with the common medical diagnosis of ‘female hysteria’. Shockingly, this was a term still being used by medical groups […]
We usually think of protest as a collective act. Conventional wisdom tells us that to be a change maker you have to have other people standing behind you. The Napoleons, Mandelas and Lincolns of this world are considered exceptional individuals. However, in the last year, the use of twitter as a medium to express dissatisfaction […]
Professor Paul Fouracre’s book Frankish History: Studies in the Construction of Power has recently been published in Ashgate’s Variorum Collected Studies Series. Dr Yangwen Zheng edited The Chinese Chameleon Revisited: From the Jesuits to Zhang Yimou which was also published recently. Dr Pedro Ramos Pinto wrote a chapter entitled ‘Why Inequalities Matter’ published in Reducing […]
Within the collective memory of queer Britain, the Wolfenden Report – a 1957 publication that recommended the decriminalisation of private gay sex between men – could be seen to have lost much of its widespread recognition in recent years. Edward Carpenter was born in 1844 in Brighton to a middle-class naval family. He grew up […]
‘You’ll have to excuse my lack of voice’ says Dr Insley as I take a seat opposite him, on a desk stacked with papers. The office is crammed with books and paperwork, the hard labour of a university history professor, just returned, so he tells me, from a conference. Famous amongst students for his fantastic […]
‘The Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution’, better known as ‘The Cultural Revolution’, was a communist social-political movement established by Mao in an attempt to revive Communism in China and reassert his dominance within the Chinese Communist Party. Mao’s former attempt at revolution in the form of The Great Leap Forward in 1958 had seen the rapid […]
The Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in history founded by the infamous Genghis Khan. Alex Larkinson writes a potted history of this multicultural empire. Steven Wears writes a potted history of the events leading up to and following the partition in August 1947. Charlotte Johnson and Alice Rigby look at central London’s […]
Cinema is the ultimate form of escapism. Watching a film means enjoying a brief break from reality and, for a moment, engaging with another set of experiences from an entirely different time and place. Of course, the pinnacle of this ideal is found in the travel film, which, in its most successful incarnations throughout history, […]
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 […]