Britain & Ireland

What was it about industrialisation that led to the emergence of a woman’s movement in Victorian Britain? Why do we see so many people fighting for so many rights and liberties in this period and what are the origins of some of the issues we still campaign on today? This section includes our major series on Social and Political Change in the UK from 1800 to the present day. There are also articles and podcasts on the often violent relationship between England and Ireland during this period and England’s changing relationship with Scotland and Wales. Read more

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  • England Arise! The General Election of 1945

    Article

    ‘The past week will live in history for two things’, announced the Sunday Times of 29 July 1945, ‘first the return of a Labour majority to Parliament and the end of Churchill's great war Premiership.’ Most other newspapers concurred. The Daily Mirror, of 27 July, proclaimed that the 1945 general election...

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  • English first-aid organisations and the Provisional IRA mainland bombing campaign of 1974

    Article

    Barry Doyle reveals how the devastating Provisional IRA bombing of two Birmingham public houses in 1974 led to a resurgence in first-aid training and preparation, on the scale with which we are familiar today.

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  • Exploring Twentieth-Century History

    Article

    For a long time, history curricula on the 20th century prioritised the narrative of a slide from World War I to World War II and fascism above many other topics. But the history of the 20th century is both far more complicated and far more interesting than that. For the historians writing here, the...

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  • Fascism in Europe 1919-1945

    Article

    The importance of fascism in 20th Century Europe is beyond question. But what was - or is - fascism?It is synonymous with authoritarian rule or the totalitarian state, or with both? In political terms, is fascism ‘right-wing' or ‘left-wing', revolutionary or reactionary? Why did it develop? Was it truly only...

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  • Fascist behind barbed wire: political internment without trial in wartime Britain

    Article

    In the spring and early summer of 1940, the British government carried out a programme of mass internment without trial. On 11 May, the first of thousands of ‘enemy aliens' were interned. Many of these internees were refugees from Nazi Germany, often Jews who had fled Germany in fear of...

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  • Faster, Higher, Stronger: The Birth of the Modern Olympics

    Article

    As the leading athletes of all nations prepare to come together this summer in Atlanta, the global communications media of the late twentieth century are constantly reminding us that 1996 marks the first centenary of the modern Olympic Games. The worldwide impact now made by these sporting festivals is all...

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  • Film: Acts of Union and Disunion

    Multipage Article

    Professor Linda Colley CBE, FBA, FRSL, FRHistS is a British Historian and a Fellow of the Historical Association. At the start of 2014 she wrote and presented a BBC Radio 4 series about the Acts of Union and Disunion, now a book. Over the summer she came into the HA...

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  • Film: An Interview with Margaret MacMillan

    Multipage Article

    The HA are delighted to announce that the Medlicott Medal for 2015 has been awarded to Professor Margaret MacMillan. The Medlicott Medal is for outstanding contributions to the study and enjoyment of history. The award will be presented on Wednesday 8 July 2015 in central London, where she will also...

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  • Film: Bricks and the making of the city - London in the 19th century

    Article

    In this HA Virtual Branch talk Peter Hounsell drew on his recently published book Bricks of Victorian London, exploring the crucial role brick production played in the creation of Britain's capital and why the important place of bricks in the fabric of the city isn't always obvious. Peter Hounsell has published...

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  • Film: Medlicott Lecture 2022 - David Olusoga

    Article

    This talk was presented at the Historical Association Awards evening, 7 July 2022. The talk is by Professor David Olusoga on the evening that he received the HA Medlicott Medal for Outstanding contributions to History. It is not to be used for any purpose or publicly reported on without the...

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  • Film: Reimagining the Blitz Spirit

    24th August 2020

    Dr Jo Fox continued our virtual branch lecture series this July on the subject 'Reimagining the Blitz Spirit: the mobilisation of World War II propaganda in our own times'. Jo Fox is the Director of the Institute of Historical Research and a well-known historian specialising in the history of propaganda, rumour and truth telling.  This...

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  • Film: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War

    Article

    Historian Robert Sackville-West joined the HA Virtual Branch in November 2021 to talk about the topic of his book The Searchers: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War. By the end of the First World War, the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers were unknown. Most were presumed...

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  • Film: “The Talk Should Not Be Broadcast”: Homosexuality and the BBC before 1967

    Article

    In the centenary year of the BBC, this Virtual Branch talk from Marcus Collins relates the strange tale of how the BBC did and did not broadcast about homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s and what it tells us about sexuality, broadcasting and the origins of permissiveness in mid-twentieth century Britain.  Marcus Collins...

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  • Filmed Interview: The Women of Bletchley Park

    Multipage Article

    Bletchley Park was the most important of the top secret intelligence sites during the Second World War. The quiet Buckinghamshire village hosted 10,000 people dedicated to defeating the Nazis, 75% of those were women. In this podcast we are lucky enough to have some of those women talking about their...

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  • First Zeppelin shot down over Britain

    Article

    In the First World War Britain suddenly became vulnerable to aerial attack. Alf Wilkinson records a memorable turning-point in the battle against the Zeppelin menace. On the night of the 2-3 September 1916 Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson became the first pilot to shoot down a Zeppelin raider over Britain. He...

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  • Florence Nightingale and epidemics

    Article

    Richard Bates reveals how the expertise of Florence Nightingale is just as relevant now as it was in her own life-time. Late in 2020, the Merriam-Webster dictionary chose ‘pandemic’ as its word of the year, writing that, ‘it’s probably the word by which we’ll refer to this period [i.e. Covid-19...

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  • Folkestone in World War One

    Article

    Grahame Jones contributes to our determination to explore the wider involvement of the community in responding to the challenges of the Great War, in this case two inspirational women who provided refreshments for soldiers en route through Folkestone harbour. A fading Edwardian resort and handy for that trip through the...

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  • Football and British-Soviet Relations

    Article

    Following the recent ‘Euro 96’ championship, Jim Phillips looks at two earlier international football tours which had major political and ideological connotations. In November 1945 Moscow Dynamo became the first Soviet football team to visit Britain, playing in Cardiff, Glasgow and twice in London. With English, Welsh and Scottish crowds...

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  • Forbidden friendships: taverns, nightclubs, bottle bars and emancipation

    Article

    The modern gay-rights movement has its origins in a 1960s New York ‘bottle bar’, but as Ben Jerrit explains, drinking establishments have been centres of gay culture and social resistance for centuries. 

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  • Four faces of nursing and the First World War

    Article

    With the centenary approaching, article after article will appear on battles, the men who fought, those who refused, those that died, those who returned and those that made the decisions. There will be articles on the home front and the women that stepped into the men's shoes often to be...

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