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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
By Lewis Twiby On 14 November, as part of a series of lectures for the Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History (CSMCH) the University of Edinburgh’s own Dr. Jacob Blanc gave a lecture on his recent research. Dr. Blanc’s research focused on the construction of the Itaipu Hydroelectric dam along the Brazilian-Paraguayan…
Written by Grace Young Vikings and zombies generally are not things one would naturally think of in the same sentence. They are certainly not things most people would associate with Scotland, either. However, this is exactly what Dr. Clare Downham of the University of Liverpool gave a seminar on. For clarification, while Downham really was…
Written by Daniel Sharp On Monday 23 October, I attended a meeting presented by the Late Antique and Medieval Postgraduate Society. The society is conducting a series of research seminars this year, in which papers and research is presented and discussed. The meeting I attended was not, unfortunately, a seminar – it was a general…
Written by Lewis Twiby On Tuesday 31 October, Meg Foster, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New South Wales, gave a research seminar on the infamous bushranger Black Douglas. This was in an effort to highlight her research in this overlooked aspect of Australian national history. During Australia’s gold rush of the 1850s, a…
Written by Carissa Chew On Monday 2 October 2017, as part of the University of Edinburgh’s World India Day celebrations, acclaimed author, Member of the Indian Parliament and former UN Under-Secretary-General, Dr. Shashi Tharoor, delivered a forceful and poignant speech at McEwan Hall in which he made plain the exploitative, oppressive and violent nature of…
Written by Eleanor Hemming This semester, the Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History are putting on a series of fascinating and relevant seminars, where leading scholars from all over the UK and Europe come to Edinburgh to talk about their research. This week, the visiting speaker was Dr. Lorena De Vita, a…
