On History
News, articles & research from the
Institute of Historical Research
Latest posts
The Return of Applied History
This blog post was written by Jacob Forward, History & Policy Project Support Officer In May this year, History & Policy celebrated the 20th anniversary of its foundation. It was a fittingly festive occasion, reuniting the many people who have played a part in...
At home and in the classroom: histories of science and technology in the IHR Library
This blog post was written by Michael Townsend, Collections and Metadata Librarian at the Institute of Historical Research Library. It is often surprising the breadth of subjects one can find in the Institute’s library. Previous surveys of the collections have...
Meet Our New BBIH Section Editor for 19th Century British History
This blog post was written by Ed Lyon, BBIH Section Editor My name’s Ed Lyon, and I’m a PhD candidate at Birkbeck and the new Section Editor for 19th century British history. My research focuses on Irish nationalists in Victorian London, from the foundation of the...
Spotlight
Conflict and climate change in the Arctic: what the seventeenth century suggests about the future
By Dagomar Degroot Environment & History, essay no. 13 In the final article of our ‘Environment & History’ series, Professor Dagomar Degroot looks to early modern climate change to ask whether arctic warming necessarily results in violent...
Features & Articles
The Gough Map Project: A Tale of Two Maps
By William D. Shannon The Gough Map Project has reached that ‘interesting’ stage where we are moving from either sitting on the fence and making no decisions, or making lots, but then rejecting them all. It is now time to reach some firm conclusions, and start...
The Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH): Recovering Emotions in Historical Research
As historians we are often trained to remove emotions from our analyses of the past, whether this be our own emotions or those of the individuals whose lives and experiences we seek to recover. As a researcher whose work centres on the history of emotions, that...
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...
Publications News
VCH Outstanding Contribution Awards 2022
On 12 October, 2022, we were delighted to make our inaugural round of VCH Outstanding Contribution Awards, nominated by the VCH community. They’re a chance for us to thank colleagues for their exceptional work on this national local history project, and to share...
Supporting Early-Career Historians: The Victoria County History
This post was written by Adam Chapman, the General Editor of the Victoria County History, and Lecturer in Medieval History at the Institute of Historical Research.[Working for the VCH] sparked my long-forgotten childhood curiosity around the history of place, what...
New from the Victoria County History: Launching Tamworth
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'. The 'Big Red Books' describing the histories of places large...
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...
Research & Resources News
The Return of Applied History
This blog post was written by Jacob Forward, History & Policy Project Support Officer In May this year, History & Policy celebrated the 20th anniversary of its foundation. It was a fittingly festive occasion, reuniting the many people who have played a part in...
Meet Our New BBIH Section Editor for 19th Century British History
This blog post was written by Ed Lyon, BBIH Section Editor My name’s Ed Lyon, and I’m a PhD candidate at Birkbeck and the new Section Editor for 19th century British history. My research focuses on Irish nationalists in Victorian London, from the foundation of the...
Bibliography of British and Irish History: October 2022 update
This blog post was written by Jenny Lelkes-Rarugal, Editor for the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH). What’s new in BBIH? The October 2022 update to the Bibliography of British and Irish History adds 3154 new publications. The new content...
Exploring collections for History Day
This blog post was written by Sophie Swann, history undergraduate student at the University of Leicester. Sophie completed a placement at the IHR in August 2022, working on the Bibliography of British and Irish History and in the IHR library. She explored History of...