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Saving Face? Masculine Prowess and Facial Wounds in Medieval Christendom
By Fiona Knight (@fionalillian_) Sarah Covington writes that the wound of a soldier is not only an ‘embodied record of warmaking’, enshrining the conflict in memory, but also a locus of the soldier’s identity, representing ‘heroism, personal shame, or public burden’.[1] Facial wounds have a unique status in this regard, especially in relation to masculinity…
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“Help Me, Rhonda”: The Beach Boys and the Labouring of Popular Music
By Grant Wong (@wongpopscholar) The Beach Boys’ 1965 album Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) looks and sounds like your typical early Beach Boys record. Its tracks, hits like “California Girls” and “Help Me Rhonda,” celebrate the simple joys of being a teenager in postwar America. Its album sleeve beams with summer fun, depicting the Beach…
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Harry Parker – Historian Highlight
By Harry Parker, interviewed by Cherish Watton Historian Highlight is a new series sharing the research experiences of historians in the History Faculty in Cambridge. We ask students how they came to research their topic, their favourite archival find, as well as the best (and worst) advice they’ve received as academics in training. History is…
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Brexit, the Blob, and Global Britain
By Niles A. Webb Defending Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq, historian Andrew Roberts invoked the man who told Britain to fear Hitler but was scorned until events vindicated him. ‘For Churchill, this apotheosis came in 1940 [when Hitler invaded France]; for Tony Blair, it will come when … hundreds of weapons of mass destruction…
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24. ‘Morality’ Broadcasts by a Dictator
By David Crowther Jose Efrain Ríos Montt (1926-2018) was a complicated figure, to say the least. President of Guatemala for a brief period in the 1980s, and an influential figure in Guatemalan politics thereafter, Ríos Montt was an uncompromising Protestant moralist in a country that increasingly followed his path of conversion. As leader of the…
