Bloody Bunce: A Legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Sierra Leone
Four hundred years ago, in 1619, the first African slaves landed in the United States. The 1619 Project has made an important contribution to our understanding of the legacy of slavery in the United States, but there has been less conversation about the places where the slaves were taken from. In this post for the RHS Historical Transactions blog, Joseph Kaifala, founder of the Jeneba Project and co-founder of the Sierra Leone Memory Project, contributes a personal piece from Bunce island.
The RHS Race, Ethnicity and Equality Report: One Year On
It has been a year since the publication of the RHS’s Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change (2018). In this post, Shahmima Akhtar, Past and Present Fellow, reflects on the work that has been done in this area, and our hopes for the future.
Getting Heads Together: Reflections on the first RHS History HoDs Meeting
What’s it like to head up a History department? What challenges and opportunities do History HoDs face, and what’s the best way of responding to them? In May 2019, over 20 Heads of UK History departments gathered under the auspices of the RHS to compare notes, share good practice and brainstorm tricky issues. In this post, Professor Abigail Woods, Head of the Department of History at KCL, and organiser of the first meeting, reflects on the discussions.
Plan S and History Journals
Are History journals ready for Plan S? What are the implications for historians of cOAlition S’s mandate that all research they fund be published according to Plan S open access requirements?
Cataloguing the RHS Archive 2: The Quest for the 1583 High Commission
The Royal Historical Society is currently revamping its archive and updating its accompanying catalogue, a project that includes the digitisation of the academic and personal papers of George Walter Prothero, the first RHS President. In their second blog post on the project, our researchers Eilish Gregory and Imogen Evans examine how the papers make apparent Prothero’s methods as a historian.
RHS Update – Autumn 2019
It’s been a busy few months at the RHS. As we put the summer behind us, here is an update on the projects that we are working on at the moment, and how you can get involved with our work.
Teaching History in a Digital Age
Digital transformations in society and culture have fundamentally changed the historian’s relationship with the past. So how do we incorporate this into our teaching? In this post for Historical Transactions, Dr Sharon Webb and Dr James Baker, winners of the 2019 RHS Prize for Innovation in Teaching discuss their approach to teaching digital history.
The Economist and History: Economical with the Facts?
On 25 July 2019, Professor Jo Fox, IHR Director, and Professor Margot Finn, RHS President, sent the following letter to The Economist. It drew attention to both the factual errors and the problematic interpretation of a ‘Bagehot’ column published on 18 July 2019. This column significantly misrepresented undergraduate student numbers in History over the past decade. We are surprised that neither our initial letter to The Economist nor our follow up emails have received the courtesy of a reply. Here we print in full our original letter of 25 July.
Beyond Peterloo: The Founding of the Manchester Guardian
It is well-known that the events of the Peterloo Massacre, which occurred two hundred years ago today, on 16 August 1819, inspired the founding of the Manchester Guardian. These roots are today still recognised by the Guardian (which the Manchester Guardian would later become). However, a closer look at the original prospectus reveals that despite being founded in the wake Peterloo, the events of 16th August 1819 and the cause of parliamentary reform were not the only motives behind the newspaper’s establishment. In this post, Kathy Davies, a PhD student in History at Sheffield Hallam University, looks more closely at the Manchester Guardian’s long-standing concern with foreign politics.
Beyond This Day – 8 August 1940: Popular History and the Power Sisters
The historian Eileen Power died on 8 August 1940. In today’s blog post, Dr Laura Carter examines the historical legacy of Rhoda Power, Eileen’s younger sister (pictured above). In the decades following Eileen’s death, Rhoda continued to shape popular social history in Britain in quite distinctive ways that have been overshadowed by Eileen’s immortalisation as the emblematic twentieth-century woman historian.
A Cultural History of Irish Identity on Display
Shahmima Akhtar joined the Royal Historical Society in July 2019 as Past and Present Fellow: Race, Ethnicity & Equality in History. Over the next two years Shahmima will work with the Royal Historical Society and the Institute for Historical Research to advance the aims of the RHS Race, Ethnicity & Equality Report. She will also continue her research into the history of constructions of Irish identity in national and international fairs between 1851 and 1939, as she develops her PhD into a monograph. In this post for the RHS blog, Shahmima introduces her work.
Insta-Research: Social Media and the Historian
As a scholar working in a rural UK university, far from peers in her field of study, Dr Kate Strasdin decided to embrace Instagram and Twitter as a means of professional engagement, and to explore the potential for virtual communication when travel to conferences and urban-centric events was rarely possible.
