Category: Reviews
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Russia Strikes Back: A Postscript to ‘Is Stalin Really Dead?’
EDITORIAL NOTE: In our printed ‘Individuals and Communities’ edition of last year (no. 21) Deana Davis wrote a review of the film The Death of Stalin. Deana wrote a postscript to her review not long after for publication on our website concerning then-recent developments to the film’s status in Russia, which slipped through the cracks earlier this…
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Seminar review: ‘Franciscan Women as Architects of the ‘Heavenly Courts’ in Bohemia and the Polish Duchies, c.1234–1320’ by Dr. Kirsty Day
Written by Candice Maharaj On 31 October 2017, Dr. Kirsty Day, a teaching Fellow in Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh, conducted a seminar on her current work – Franciscan Women as Architects of the ‘Heavenly Courts’ in Bohemia and the Polish Duchies, c.1234–1320. Dr. Day’s research on this topic explores the close…
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A review of ‘The Whiskey Rebellion: Trump: One Year On’, a live podcast recording
Written by Daniel Sharp If you have never listened to The Whiskey Rebellion I can highly recommend it. Hosted by Dr David Silkenat and Professor Frank Cogliano of the University of Edinburgh – specialists in nineteenth and eighteenth-century American history respectively – it is a podcast which tries to put current developments in…
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Research Seminar review: Dr. Taylor Sherman’s ‘Does a democracy need elections? Jayaprakash Narayan and democratic doubt in 1950s-60s India’
Written by Carissa Chew ‘It is not only in the totalitarian countries that the ‘rape of the masses’ happens. The basic difference is that in a democracy there is a competition between the violators while there is no competition in totalitarianism.’ (Jayaprakash Narayan, ‘A Plea for the Reconstruction of the Indian Polity’, 1959). It…
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Lecture review: ‘THE WEIGHT OF THE PAST AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE FRANCO-BRITISH ENTENTE, 1919-1924’ by Professor Peter Jackson
Written by Lewis Twiby On 30 January 2018, Professor Peter Jackson of the University of Glasgow gave a lecture detailing his research on the collapse of the Franco-British Entente following the First World War, including how history became involved with this, and how this influences today’s politics. Professor Jackson began with an overview introducing…
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The Role of Colonial Legacies in the 2017 Zimbabwe Crisis
By Carissa Chew This article, which is informed by two public lectures about the Zimbabwean political crisis that were held at the University of Edinburgh in the week beginning 20 November, discusses the role of colonial legacies in recent Zimbabwean political affairs. Firstly, this article provides a summary of the Zimbabwean crisis for the reader…
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Virinder Kalra’s ‘Pondering on the Revolutionary Subject: From Ghadar to Kirti’
By Carissa Chew Professor Virinder S. Kalra’s latest research paper, entitled ‘Poetic Politics from Ghadar to the Indian Workers Association’, discusses the enduring legacies of the Ghadar Party, a short-lived Indian nationalist movement which was centred in California during the First World War. Following economic hardship, which was heightened in 1906 by the Land Alienation…
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Gombrich’s A Little History of the World
By Daniel Sharp Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001) was best known as an influential art historian, but in 1936 his first book published was an overview of world history for children and adolescents from prehistoric times to the First World War. Gombrich was Viennese by origin but lived in Britain for most of his life having fled…
Retrospect Journal 