Queer Codes: Gay Men in the Civil Service

Queer Codes: Gay Men in the Civil Service

In this fascinating blog, Dr. James Southern, a writer and researcher for the UK government, provides some startling insight into discriminatory policies which served as the basis of an official bar on gay men working as British diplomats that lasted until 1991. The...
Victoria County History: Outstanding Contribution Awards

Victoria County History: Outstanding Contribution Awards

Announcing a new way to honour exceptional service to this iconic historical project   For over 120 years, the Victoria History of the Counties of England, better known as the Victoria County History (VCH) has been working towards its goal of completing the...
Town before Gown – Oxford before the University

Town before Gown – Oxford before the University

This is the last in Joe Chick’s series of historic town walks using the Victoria County History’s app for mobile devices. ‘A History of English Places’ brings the VCH’s histories together with first edition Ordnance Survey mapping across England. Learn more...
Freedom Seekers in Restoration London

Freedom Seekers in Restoration London

Ahead of the publication of his new book Simon Newman explores the African and South Asian people who sought to escape enslavement in seventeenth-century London.   His name was Quamy. His Akan day-name suggests that he came from the region of West Africa that we...
Elizabethan Witchcraft, Sorcery, and a Very Troubled Marriage

Elizabethan Witchcraft, Sorcery, and a Very Troubled Marriage

Ahead of their new book ‘Star Chamber Matters’, Professor K. J. Kesselring (Dalhousie) dives into some of Star Chamber’s most riveting cases including this article on, marriage, ‘male witches’ and a grieving house-wife. An extraordinary court that ruled...
London coffee houses of the late eighteenth century

London coffee houses of the late eighteenth century

Anna Brinkman-Schwartz’s latest article ‘The heart of the maritime world: London’s ‘mercantile’ coffee houses in the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence, 1756–83’ (open access) is published in the latest issue of Historical Research. Here...