Recently, the internationally-renowned museum, The D-Day Story, published on their website a podcast recorded in 2021 by three second year History students, Joshua Bown, Angus Grieve and Shannen Smylie. The students worked with the museum’s archives as part of their assessment for the ‘Working with the Past’ module, coordinated by Mike Esbester. The second-year module encourages students […]
Tag Archives | Second World War
Suggestions for summer reading, listening and thinking
One of the questions we’re most frequently asked by students who will be joining us as first years in the autumn term is ‘”What reading do we need to do to prepare for the course?” All of the modules that you will be taking in the first year have reading lists, of course, but the […]
Name and shame: how I reclaimed a lost identity
The history blog is very pleased to host this guest blog. In it Jeremy Schultz explains the reasons behind his grandfather’s decision to change his Jewish surname at the outset of World War II, and his own recent decision to change his name back again. Jeremy is a psychotherapist, and the brother of Deborah Shaw, […]
‘An hour or two of welcome relaxation’: The cinema business in wartime Britain
On 12 January 2022 our own Dr Rob James, Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Social History, presented at the first History research seminar of the new year (Happy New Year everyone!) with a thought-provoking paper on the effect of world war on the cinema trade in Britain. If you missed the paper, the recording is available […]
Peter Misch (1909-1987): a holocaust survivor in wartime China
On 8 December 2021 our own Dr Rudolph Ng, Lecturer in Global History, presented a fascinating paper tracing the extraordinary journey of a young geologist who fled Nazi Germany in 1936 and then taught for a decade in wartime China, before making a successful postwar academic career in the United States. If you missed […]
Empire and its afterlives 2: How do you teach history with primary sources?
This is the second post in the Empire and its afterlives series. The introduction can be found here. Primary sources represent a wide range of materials which historians can draw on, and students made the most of this diversity. The podcast episodes included discussions of armed forces recruitment posters, political speeches and pamphlets, as well […]