Category: Archive

  • Revisiting Kipling’s Kim

    Revisiting Kipling’s Kim

    By Jeremy Wikeley Over the summer I read Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim for the first time. I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting to. Kim tells the story of an Irish orphan who, growing up in India, has a series of adventures, first as the protégé of an elderly Buddhist monk and…

  • Fostering Research Communities

    Fostering Research Communities

    By Matt Tibble on behalf of Inciting Sparks @IncitingSparks ‘Public engagement’ and ‘research communities’ – these are the new buzzwords from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, one of the largest funding bodies for historical research in the UK. Their message is that the gulf between the ivory tower of academic research in higher education institutions and…

  • Remember, remember…

    Remember, remember…

    By Harriet Lyon @HarrietLyon On 5 November 1605, Guy Fawkes, one of a number of Catholic conspirators against the Protestant king of Scotland and England James VI and I, was caught emerging from a vault beneath the Houses of Parliament that had been stacked with barrels containing almost a ton of gunpowder. The scheme having…

  • EEBO, the RSA, and #proquestgate – the open resource debate

    EEBO, the RSA, and #proquestgate – the open resource debate

    By Tom Smith and Alex Wakelam @A_Wakelam Something strange happened last month for members of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA). On Wednesday the 28th October members of the 61-year-old historical society were informed that one of the major benefits of membership –subscription to the research tool EEBO (Early English Books Online) – had been cancelled. The…

  • The ‘Re-making’ of Great British Class

    The ‘Re-making’ of Great British Class

    By James Dowsett Britain is a nation peculiarly obsessed with social class. And not, perhaps, without reason, as Professor Mike Savage’s new book Social Class in the 21st Century argues: “classes are indeed being fundamentally remade.” [1] Really, one might argue that social class never really went away. Those of us wise to the cynicism of…