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The Hanging Baskets of a Medieval German Prague: English Travel Literature from 1815 to 1848
By Jana Hunter @janakhunter At the heart of Europe lies Prague: a city centred around the River Moldau, embodying antiquity, mysticism and the sublime. Its imposing and grandiose scenes received little attention from travel writers up until the Napoleonic Wars. Through travel literature, Prague emerged as a fantastical city providing escapism, both physically and mentally,…
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Call for Papers: Reconsidering Illness and Recovery in the Early Modern World
By Rachel Clamp (@racheljclamp) and Claire Turner (@_claire_turner_) With many conferences being cancelled or postponed due to COVID-19, Rachel Clamp (Durham University) and Claire Turner (University of Leeds) have decided to hold an online interdisciplinary conference. Their aim is to provide a space for scholars at all stages of their careers to discuss and share…
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Cherry-picking the past: empire through a public lens
By Liam Grieve @LiamGrieve4 For all academia’s ‘independence’, historians remain tied to one immortal axiom: the past serves at the pleasure of the present. In this sense, history is underpinned by an informal social contract. Yet what happens when the terms of this contract are rewritten without the historian’s consent? Spike Lister recently did a…
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Reckoning with Britain’s Colonial Past: The Mau Mau Detention Camps and Dedan Kimathi
By Lauren Brown @LaurenBroon Britain has a complicated colonial history. Sadly, thousands of descendants from former colonial territories, still face the legacies of Britain’s hegemony. This is true for the Kikuyu, Embu and Neru people of Kenya. During the Mau Mau rebellion of 1952-1964, the British colonial government placed some 80,000 people from these ethnic…
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Book Review – Coffeeland: A History by Augustine Sedgewick
Jordan Buchanan reviews Augustine Sedgewick’s Coffeeland: A History (Allen Lane, 2020), £25.00. In Coffeeland, Augustine Sedgewick achieves the often-elusive goal of creating an academic history that is enjoyable for the non-professional history enthusiast. Coffee is a product so closely attached to complex historical themes that this history could easily have become an esoteric one. By taking the…
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