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This is a video I recorded earlier today, focusing on the memory of the Holocaust in Europe and America. I’ve already done quite a lot on debates surrounding the origins of the Holocaust so this is more focused on the contested memory of the final solution:  

In 1918, at the end of the First World War, Thomas Edward Lawrence was unknown to the vast majority of the British population. Throughout the 1920s, however, his wartime activities were popularised and he became a military celebrity that ranked alongside Horatio Nelson. Lawrence had been British intelligence in Egypt’s liaison with the Arab rebelsContinue reading “Lawrence of Arabia”

In 1922 the Institute for Social Research was established in Frankfurt, bringing together many of the more disparate strands of leftist thinking in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. Here’s a video on a small part of the institution’s vast impact on 20th Century thought.

When I studied American history about 27 years ago, during the late 1980s, we gave a cursory look at the development of post war suburbia. In a packed syllabus there was little time to do the topic justice. Considering the many millions of Americans the development of suburbia affected, both positively and negatively, it should beContinue reading “Suburbia and Segregation”

One of the problems with the teaching of GCSE history is the tendency for narrative to insert itself into specific modules. This is perhaps unavoidable as history has been passed on as story for tens of thousands of years and taught as an intellectual discipline for a little over 200. It is important to beContinue reading “Teaching Happy Endings”

By 1934, Britain appeared to have survived the worst effects of the great depression. Unemployment had begun to decline and new light industries in the south and the midlands had developed, supplying consumer goods for an affluent middle class. Britain’s economic problems were regionalised, however, and in the worst affected areas such as South WalesContinue reading “The Jarrow March, 1936”

From 1943 onwards, long before the outcome of Britain’s war against Japan in Asia was certain, British colonial administrators pondered about what to do with French Indochina (occupied by Japan in 1941), once the Japanese were defeated. They knew comparatively little about the colony and believed it would be best to return it to theContinue reading “Britain’s involvement in Vietnam 1945”

Between the 1850s and the 1930s in Britain, women political writers and journalists saw a dramatic development in the opportunities available to them. As Victorian censorship laws changed in the mid century and as divorce and property laws became ever more contested and unjustifiable, political writing that linked women’s civil rights with their political rights abounded.Continue reading “Victorian Women’s political publishing”

In the inter war years both the British and French empires, the last two major colonial players after the First World War, struggled to contain economic and ideological storms that threatened to tear them apart. These sometimes allied, sometimes antagonistic imperial systems were fundamentally different from one another on an organisational and ideological level, watchContinue reading “France’s Colonial Empire”

In 1947 British rule in India came to an end and the subcontinent was partitioned into a Muslim East and West Pakistan and a majority Hindu India. The British Judge who drew the new borders of these states was Cyril Radcliffe, a secretive and territorial figure who had no prior knowledge of India. The resultContinue reading “The Partition of India”