For so many students this year, the cancellation of commencement meant the lack of an important milestone. And in this unsettling time, with it many demands on our attention, it’s possible to overlook the extraordinary accomplishment involved in completing a PhD in History. So we decided to take this opportunity to celebrate the 2019-2020 class […]
Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire by Jeffrey A. Auerbach (2018)
by Amina Marzouk Chouchene | First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum The British Empire has been firmly tied to myth, adventure, and victory. For many Britons, “the empire was the mythic landscape of romance and adventure. It was that quarter of the globe that was colored and included darkest Africa and the mysterious East.”[1] […]
The Curious Case of the Thomas Cook Hospital in Luxor
Cross-posted from Chris Rose’s blog, where he regularly tells us Important and Useful Things and makes us laugh along the way. In addition to his many other accomplishments, Chris is the brains and motor behind our podcast, 15 Minute History. By Christopher Rose Over the weekend, the Thomas Cook company went bankrupt and shuttered operations, leaving hundreds of […]
From There to Here: Indrani Chatterjee
By Indrani Chatterjee In 1947, when British India was carved into two states of India and Pakistan, many Hindu families relocated from eastern Pakistan (which became Bangladesh in 1971) to Indian Bengal. My parents came from two such families. My father was deeply curious about the world, and bought various Readers Digest and National Geographic publications on a meager […]
Did the British Empire depend on separating Parents and Children?
By Sumit Guha Empires ancient and modern are large, hierarchical organizations, structurally founded on deep inequalities of risk and reward. The British Empire in Asia was no exception. At the front lines of imperial power were, all too often, common men (and some women) who were tricked, cozened, misled, coerced, and whipped into serving as […]
The Public Archive: Indian Revolt of 1857
Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT […]
Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum by James Delbourgo (2017)
by Diana Heredia López A biography of an English scientist during the early Enlightenment may not seem like cutting edge scholarship.. In Collecting the World, James Delbourgo tells the multifaceted story of Hans Sloane, an Englishman who amassed a collection of nearly eighty thousand natural objects and curiosities through his work in natural history, commerce, […]
Victoria & Abdul: Simulacra & Simulation
by Gajendra Singh University of Exeter Posted in partnership with the History Department at the University of Exeter and The Imperial and Global Forum. One of the earliest films to be shot and then screened throughout India were scenes from the Delhi Durbar between December 29, 1902 and January 10, 1903 The Imperial Durbar, created to celebrate […]
An Apology for Propaganda
By David Rahimi Writing in the middle of World War II, Freya Stark, a well-known British explorer and Arabist working for the Ministry of Information in the Middle East, penned an unpublished – and ultimately unfinished – twenty-five page essay, which she entitled Apology for Propaganda. When we think of government propaganda, we typically think […]
A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks, by Stewart Gordon (2015)
By Cynthia Talbot The world’s attention was captured in 2012 by the disaster that befell the Costa Concordia, a cruise ship that ran aground off the coast of Italy leading to 32 deaths. This shipwreck is the most recent one covered in A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks, whose expansive gaze covers much of […]
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