The Knights of Labor: An International Perspective
November 4, 2013
The Order of the Knights of Labor was the largest and most powerful organisation of American workers in the nineteenth century. Created by seven Philadelphian tailors in 1869, it was based on the fraternal practices and rituals of artisanal workers and secret societies such as the Freemasons. By 1886 the Knights and their assemblies, as …
Strongbow: the Anglo-Normans in Ireland
October 25, 2013
The first intervention of the Normans into Irish affairs resulted from a bitter local feud that, in 1171, allowed Henry II to become the first English monarch to set foot on Irish soil. This moment was portrayed by historians and writers of the early twentieth-century Irish national movement as a pivotal one: the first step …
Restoration Britain: A Post-Conflict Society?
October 10, 2013
The restoration of Britain’s monarchy in 1660 used to be thought of as just that, a return to social and political quietude after the tumult of the civil wars and Commonwealth. More recently, though, historians have shown that the restoration of the monarchy and the subsequent consolidation of royal power were by no means inevitable. …
Muslim Soldiers of France
October 1, 2013
In Rachid Bouchareb’s 2006 film Indigenes (literally meaning “natives”, but also the term for French colonial subjects – the film was released to English-speaking audiences with the more conventional-war-film title Days of Glory), four Algerian men, Yassir, Said, Abdelkader and Messaoud, sign up to fight for the Free French after the defeat of the Axis …
Public Opinion/Public Policy
September 6, 2013
According to Abraham Lincoln, “public opinion is everything.” A massive industry now exists to measure public opinion – organisations like YouGov, Gallup, and Ipsos MORI, as well as companies devoted to organising focus groups to test everything from instant soup to the policies of major political parties. And that is without mentioning informal (and misleading) …
The Chinese in Britain
August 5, 2013
In The Great Gatsby (1926), obscenely rich philistine Tom Buchanan obsesses over the latest racial theories, not least a book entitled The Rise of the Coloured Empires, by “this man Goddard.” This was a thinly-disguised reference to a popular work of 1920, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy by the American writer …
The Cathar Heresy: Fact or Fiction?
July 17, 2013
In the 11th century, the Western Christian church began to act against “popular” heresy, that is to say, dissident religious movements involving people at many social levels. By the mid-13th century in France this effort had solidified into the series of courts and inquiries known as “inquisitions ” (medievalists no longer call this collection of …
Weimar: Beyond Gloom and Glitter
June 27, 2013
Our view of Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919-1933) has been conditioned by its successor, the Third Reich. Weimar calls to mind images of decadence, the acidic cabarets of Berlin and the discordant songs of Weil and Brecht, not to mention the brutal visions of post-war degeneration and gluttony painted by George Grosz and Otto Dix. This …
The Cost of Marriage
June 18, 2013
How much money do you need to get married these days? According to The Guardian (7/8/2010) the wedding day alone is said to cost the average British couple £21,000 (up from £12,000 in 2003) and tales circulate of newlyweds hawking their wedding presents on ebay in order to recoup marital expenses. And that is without …
US Foreign Policy in the American Century and After
June 14, 2013
Two key arguments have dominated the historiography of international relations since 1945 – the last half of the “American century.” The first of these stresses that US foreign policy since that date has been guided mainly by economic interests, while the second supposes that the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the …
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