On History
News, articles & research from the
Institute of Historical Research
Latest posts
Victoria County History Smartphone App: Retirement
In early 2020 we launched our VCH smartphone app, ‘A History of English Places’. It had been developed through a project funded internally by the University of London in 2014, and was produced in partnership with Aimer Media. In 2023, Aimer Media was bought up by...
Paternosters and Beads: Finding Devotional Objects in the London Customs Accounts
The IHR’s Centre for the History of People, Place and Community has been carrying out some exploratory research on the potential of analysing London’s medieval customs accounts digitally. Detailed, or ‘particular’ customs accounts recorded immense detail about the...
Uncovering Hidden Labour in the Victoria County History (VCH) Archive
In this blog post Adam Chapman (VCH General Editor) and Ruth Slatter (VCH Architectural Editor) explore the VCH Westmorland archive and reflect on how it helps uncover the hidden (and often forgotten) labour of researchers who contributed to the production of early...
Spotlight
On writing ‘Mother: An Unconventional History’
What is ‘unconventional history’? Feminist and historians Sarah Knott considers the intersection of form and function in her new book, ‘Mother. An Unconventional History’.
Features & Articles
Public History in Action: VCH Wiltshire and the Bremhill Parish History Project
John Chandler Between Chippenham and Calne, not quite the Marlborough Downs, not quite the flat Wiltshire claylands, lies Bremhill, a large parish of scattered hamlets and farms, connected by a network of minor lanes. It has its quirks – a kind of Nelson’s column...
At home in history: Claire Langhamer on her first months as IHR Director
By Claire Langhamer I started my role as Director of the IHR in October, and already the Institute feels like home. As a historian of twentieth century Britain, there is something particularly lovely about working in Senate House, with its wartime history, its 1930s...
Who controls the past? Herbert Butterfield and official history, then and now
Ahead of his new book The Control of the Past: Herbert Butterfield and the Pitfalls of Official History, senior Whitehall historian Patrick Salmon talks us through the dangers of government-mandated history and asks- can history ever be truly objective? ‘I do not...
Environmental history: an online reading list for History Day, 4 November 2021
The Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH) provides records of over 627,600 publications (books, journal articles, and chapters in edited collections) relating to British and Irish history. The Bibliography defines British and Irish history very broadly, and...
Publications News
New from the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire: The South Oxfordshire Chilterns: Caversham, Goring, and Area
The Victoria County History (VCH) is well known for its detailed studies of individual localities, which assemble (in the words of one recent reviewer) 'countless tiny parts to build a much larger whole'. This latest volume in the VCH Oxfordshire series turns the...
Public History in Action: VCH Wiltshire and the Bremhill Parish History Project
John Chandler Between Chippenham and Calne, not quite the Marlborough Downs, not quite the flat Wiltshire claylands, lies Bremhill, a large parish of scattered hamlets and farms, connected by a network of minor lanes. It has its quirks – a kind of Nelson’s column...
The Evil May Day riot of 1517 and the European Union elections of 2014: Writing about the history of anti-immigrant politics
Brodie Waddell’s latest article The Evil May Day riot of 1517 and the popular politics of anti-immigrant hostility in early modern London is published in the latest issue of Historical Research. Here Brodie explains the development of that research. In the Spring of...
Who controls the past? Herbert Butterfield and official history, then and now
Ahead of his new book The Control of the Past: Herbert Butterfield and the Pitfalls of Official History, senior Whitehall historian Patrick Salmon talks us through the dangers of government-mandated history and asks- can history ever be truly objective? ‘I do not...
Research & Resources News
Researching Black British History, Race, and Ethnicity in the Bibliography of British and Irish History
Gaverne Bennett, PhD history research student at Leicester University, has recently completed a three month internship at the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH) looking at Race and Ethnicity. He also created the Guardian newspapers bestselling black...
Emotions in the Bibliography of British and Irish History
This blog was written by Dr Sarah Collins, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Newcastle University. Emotions, as the saying goes, make us human. Without thinking, we are surrounded by consequences of emotional decision making—our families, our work, our environment;...
The Bibliography of British and Irish History in the classroom: teaching representations of queerness
Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH) Sexual and Racial identity intern, Dr Leah Veronese, discusses how the BBIH can be used in the classroom: she outlines an undergraduate seminar she has designed and taught on eighteenth century representations of...
BBIH June 2023 update
What’s new in BBIH? The June 2023 update to the Bibliography of British and Irish History adds 2524 new publications. The new update includes books, journal articles, book chapters and edited collections covering all areas of British and Irish history, from 55...