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A Distortion of History?: The Treaty of Versailles Revisited
By Shamsher Bhangal The 1919 Treaty of Versailles is arguably the single most significant document of the twentieth century. It was the peace treaty which marked the conclusion of the First World War and cemented a series of ultimately contentious territorial and political changes in Europe. The Treaty of Versailles has become a staple of…
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Historian Highlight – Benjamin Iago Gibson
interviewed by Jake Bransgrove, @Jake_Bransgrove Historian Highlight is an ongoing series sharing the research experiences of historians in the History Faculty in Cambridge and beyond. For our latest instalment, we sat down with Benjamin Iago Gibson, a first-year PhD candidate at Trinity Hall, to discuss mountains and their roots, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and…
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‘Even if we Go Without Bread…’: The Bunker-isation of Communist Albania
Socialist Albania was made by modernisation, and a political pursuit of its aesthetic and sociological derivatives. Enver Hoxha sought to transform Albania into a self-conscious nation-state via the transformation of the physical landscape. This was done according to contemporary discourses connecting modernity and architecture and informed by the acute sense of vulnerability that defined Hoxha’s…
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In Defense of Anachronism: A Historian’s Perspective
By Marlo Avidon (@MarloAvidon) Sitting in my first year of undergrad, I remember the stern admonishment of my seminar leader prepping us for the submission of our coursework: anachronism doesn’t belong in the study of history. As historians, there is a constant expectation to maintain distance from the figures we study and to be constantly…
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Vernacular material, opinion polling or social survey? Approaching popular testimony in the Mass-Observation archive
by Rebecca Goldsmith @relgoldsmith The field of modern British history has experienced a new ‘turn’ in recent years. Historians like Jon Lawrence, David Cowan and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite have pioneered the re-use of archived interview field-notes from post-war social science.[1] By and large, this trend has been motivated by an interest in the subjects of social…
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