Search

In a recent blog post for the Women’s History Association of Ireland, Caitriona Clear reflected on how Irish women’s history had now reached a critical mass ‘whereby it does not need to be identified with any one historian or any group of historians’.

As Brian Lewis writes in his introduction to Wolfenden's Witnesses: Homosexuality in Postwar Britain, although the Wolfenden Report is one of the most well known documents pertaining to the history of homosexuality in Britain, the rich material gathered from which to prepare the report has often been overlooked.

The age of lesbian and gay, in which those were the dominant terms for homoeroticism and other things that seemed (sometimes arbitrarily) to be related to it, appears to be over.

In the latest of our occasional Reviews in History podcast series, Jordan Landes talks to Laura Beers about her recent biography of the Labour legend.
Laura Beers is Birmingham Fellow in Modern British History at the University of Birmingham.
Jordan Landes is history subject librarian at Senate House Library, University of London.

‘This book’, writes Jeffrey A. Auerbach in his Introduction to Imperial Boredom, ‘is very much about how people felt’ [his italics]. As such, it takes its place in a growing body of scholarship that explores through individual lives the mind-set that under-pinned the empire project, both individually and on a collective level.

In the preface of Catholic Nuns and Sisters in a Secular Age, Carmen M. Mangion admits ‘this was not a book I wanted to write. This was a book I thought should be written’ (p.xi).

Historians of the British Empire have long recognized the hunger strike—famously embraced by suffragettes in Britain, and by nationalists in Ireland and India—as a transnational tactic of democratic, anti-colonial resistance.

All historical actors ultimately defy our neat labels. Practically speaking however, some are more defiant than others. One such figure is the dynamo ‘social entrepreneur’, Michael Young. (1) It has become a cliché to rattle off the dizzying array of institutions, projects and ideas with which Young was involved in his long and energetic career.

In January 1988, hundreds of people gathered in Cardiff for a rally organised by ‘Wales Against Clause 28’. Held aloft ‘were signs identifying the places the mainly lesbian and gay marchers had lived and where they were from to disprove the popular notion that “there were no gays in Wales”.’ (p.
Writing in Macmillan’s Magazine a few years after the denouement of the Crimean War, Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s School Days, declared that this conflict’s ‘drama ...