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Discussing Mark Twain's 'Jim'
The character of Jim in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain was written as a condemnation of the Jim Crow regimes that were springing up across the South as the Reconstruction Era slowly…
Published on 7 months ago
Melting Point: Russian Jews and the journey to Texas
In the decade before the First World War over ten thousand Russian Jews travelled across the Atlantic but instead of alighting in New York, where a large Jewish diaspora community was established, th…
Published on 7 months ago
The Contradictions of Thatcherism
Margaret Thatcher sought to revive Britain's fortunes during the 1980s, she was a social conservative and a free market fundamentalist; a contradictory set of ideological positions. The liberation of…
Published on 7 months ago
Trump's tariff capitulation
In a hundred years time will China offshore its manufacturing to poorer countries? Not if it has any sense. Today Trump's great retreat from the tariff war began in earnest as some cold economic real…
Published on 7 months ago
Britain, Germany and the Blitz
By the start of the blitz Britain didn't have enough anti aircraft guns, despite half a decade anticipating mass bombing as a means of war. Germany was ill prepared for the bombing of British cities …
Published on 7 months, 1 week ago
VE Day : London 1945
What was it like to experience the end of the Second World War in London, 80 years ago today? We read David Kynaston's Austerity Britain to find out how housewives, politicians, writers and diarists …
Published on 7 months, 1 week ago
Nazi wartime labour shortages
At the height of the Third Reich's war production there were nearly five million additional German and foreign workers in the war economy. Despite the efforts made by Albert Speer to rationalise the …
Published on 7 months, 1 week ago
Social change in American post war suburbia
What did the good life look like in 1945? Or more to the point, what did the good life look like to white working and middle class inner city families? The answer for many was suburbia, new out-of-to…
Published on 7 months, 1 week ago
The German invasion of Belgium: 1914
In the first weeks of the outbreak of the First World War, the outdated Schlieffen Plan required the German Army to rapidly cross Belgium to attack northern France. Instead of the anticipated 6-8,000…
Published on 7 months, 1 week ago
The historiography of Malcolm X
The way in which Malcolm X and the Black Power movement has been interpreted and understood over time has changed as academics grappled with his legacy and interrogated his autobiography, published p…
Published on 7 months, 2 weeks ago