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Slavery, diplomacy, war: A Confederate propagandist in London
By Bennett Ostdiek On January 22, 1862, nine months into the American Civil War, Henry Hotze arrived in London. Hotze had come to London to serve as a propaganda agent for the Confederate States of America. His mission was simple – to convince Her Majesty’s Government to grant official diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy. Both…
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Why American politics hasn’t gone mad
By Bennett Ostdiek As an American living in the UK, I often get asked about the presidential election, particularly my views on Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. My British and European friends cannot understand why two polar opposite figures are becoming significant in American politics at the exact same time. To this question, I always respond that Trump and…
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The Wandering Historian: Reflections on a Year of Research Abroad
In the second of our posts on doing research abroad, Tom Smith (@TomEtesonSmith) traverses the United States. Working on American history from a British university as I do, it was inevitable that at some point during my PhD research I was going to have to spend some time abroad. Courtesy of two Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded…
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‘All Men are Created Equal’? Race and the Declaration of Independence in American Museums
Tom Smith (@TomEtesonSmith) The Declaration of Independence, approved on 4 July 1776 by the thirteen colonies which were about to form the United States of America, has returned to the headlines recently after a parchment copy of the iconic document, only the second known to exist, was discovered in the somewhat unlikely surroundings of the…
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Conflict, Memory and Reconciliation: ‘The Vietnam War’
By Helen Sunderland (@hl_sunderland) The recent success of The Vietnam War, a television documentary co-directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, shows the enduring legacy of the conflict in popular memory. Broadcast as a ten-hour series in the UK on BBC Four and originally aired with an even longer running time on PBS, the series…
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