Category: Academic
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Monsters, Masks & Military Mutilation: The Influence of the First World War on Early Horror Cinema
Written by Scarlett Butler Image: Unknown. Anna Coleman Ladd fitting soldier with restorative face mask. 1918. Photograph. Rare Historical Photos. Accessed October 30, 2018. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/anna-coleman-ladd-masks-1918/. Suzannah Biernhoff has argued that the facial mutilation caused during the Great War was widely written about but “almost never represented visually” with the exception of medical documentation. Here I will contend…
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“How to tell the story of the slave trade without depicting bleeding dying Africans?”: A Question Posed by Lubaina Himid
Written by Scarlett Butler Image: Lubaina Himid, Naming the Money (2004), https://www.historytoday.com/ella-s-mills/lubaina-himid-naming-un-named, accessed 21 October 2018. As Black History Month draws to a close, I am sure that many people are considering that phrase, ‘Black History Month’. Torn between the necessity of raising awareness of histories of the African-diaspora, and the discomfort that all we…
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Cuba: Revolution on an Island
Written by Josh Newmark Image: Marius Jovaiša’s aerial photograph of Morro Castle and Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña, (Unseen Cuba / Marius Jovaisa), https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/unseen-cuba-first-aerial-photographs-reveal-islands-spectacular-beauty-1501542, accessed 21 October 2018. Why revolutions happen, and why some succeed when others fail, have been topics of great interest to generations of historians. Cuba has been no exception, and has long…
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Public Lecture Review: Janet Philp’s The Anatomy of Pirates
Written by Carissa Chew Image: Sketch of Jacque Alexander Tardy’s skull, front view Coinciding with ‘International Talk-Like-A-Pirate Day’, on 19 September 2018, Janet Philp delivered a compelling lecture that inquired into the University of Edinburgh Anatomical Museum’s collection of pirate skull casts. Philp set out to answer the two key questions on her audience’s mind:…
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Alfred Dreyfus and France: A Crisis of Identity
Written by Luke Neill Image: Devil’s Island, Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Devils-Island/media/160247/5196, accessed: 21 October 2018. On the 14 April 1895, Alfred Dreyfus arrived on the Devil’s Island, a French penal colony off the coast of French Guiana. He had been sent there for life imprisonment as its sole prisoner. Bound in chains in a small stone hut for…
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Austerlitz and an Empire’s End: Napoleon and the Dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire
Written by Daniel Sharp 2 December 1805: a battle takes place that was to enshrine Napoleon Bonaparte’s reputation as a genius military tactician and which would forever change the map and future of Europe. This battle would end the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire and would spell the end of the Third Coalition mounted by…
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The Meiji Restoration and its Consequences: 150 Years On
Written by Travis Aaroe True isolation was not possible for any country during the age of imperialism, although few tried harder than Japan under Shogunate rule. Ever since the decisive Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 which heralded the Tokugawa clan’s dominion over the country, Japan had been artificially cut off from the outer world…
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Understanding the foundations of India’s democratic tradition in the postcolonial era
Written by Shruti Venkatraman The recent release of Indian politician Shashi Tharoor’s book, Inglorious Empire, advocating for greater awareness of the blood-soaked history of India’s colonial past under British rule, and the release of the film Viceroy’s House, which was heavily criticized for portraying events covering the final months before Indian independence under Lord Mountbatten…
Retrospect Journal 