Latest Publications
from the Institute of Historical Research
Spotlight
#OpenAccess at the IHR: five new publishing initiatives
For OpenAccess Week 2018 (21-28 October), five initiatives from the IHR on disseminating its scholarly content and new forms of publishing for historians.
read moreHistorical Research
The genesis of ‘William Weston: early voyager to the New World’
By Evan T. Jones John Cabot’s 1497 ‘discovery’ of North America has been famous since Elizabethan times. When Richard Hakluyt published Divers Voyages (1582), the expedition took centre stage. Hakluyt argued that England had ‘title’ to North America because Cabot had...
Pollard Prize 2018: mixed race marriage in post-war Britain
The winner of the 2018 Pollard Prize for the best paper given to an IHR seminar by a post-graduate or early career researcher was Anna Maguire for ‘"You Wouldn’t Want Your Daughter Marrying One": Parental Intervention into Mixed Race Relationships in Post-War...
Correspondence as a historical source: Clare Makepeace on researching the experience of prisoners of war
By Clare Makepeace There is no historical source I enjoy reading more than personal correspondence. It is so deliciously intimate, being a private communication between two individuals. It must also must satisfy a slightly wicked streak in me because I take a certain...
Competition Open: Pollard Prize 2018
Entries are invited for this year's Pollard Prize (sponsored by Wiley) awarded for the best paper presented at an IHR seminar 2017-18 by a postgraduate student or by a researcher within one year of completing the PhD. First prize Fast track publication in the...
Victoria County History
Access to Archives: plans to introduce charges threaten serious research
By Adam Chapman of the VCH. Who would be an archivist, especially one working in a county record office? Always a profession under stress, often in inadequate buildings and seen as an easy thing to cut, trim or salami slice, running an archive under the aegis of...
VCH project widens expertise with new editor
The Victoria County History (VCH) project has just appointed a new editor, Professor Angus Winchester from Lancaster University. Brush any ‘waxed jackets’ notions of county aside because this august body publishes historical reference works on English counties – it...
New VCH volume – A History of the County of Durham, vol 5, Sunderland
Famed across Europe during Bede's time and the heyday of Wearmouth monastery, Sunderland found a less celebrated renown in the twentieth century with the distress of its heavy industries between the wars, and their final extinction in the 1980s. Between those very...
Revealing local history: a follow up
On 21 November, we held two simultaneous Wikipedia edit-a-thons in London and Leicester as part of the Being Human Festival. We did a lot of promotion of these events beforehand so we thought we should tell you how they went. An edit-a-thon is an event where editors...
Bibliography of British and Irish History
Is history repeating itself? Timely new additions to the Bibliography of British and Irish History
Does history repeat itself? The new entries to the Bibliography of British and Irish History have striking contemporary relevance.
Bibliography of British and Irish History October 2018 update
By Simon Baker An update to the Bibliography of British and Irish History was published on 4 October 2018. There are 3,447 new records. Some 398 new records relate to Irish history while 205 deal with the history of London, 215 with the history of Scotland and 115...
How to pretend you’ve read everything; or, making use of BBIH for reading lists
How to find content for your reading lists for courses at the start of the academic year.
Top 10 summer reading suggestions from the Bibliography of British and Irish History
Now that summer is definitely here, it’s time to share our BBIH top ten summer reads. We have compiled a list of some of the most interesting and/or surprising items that we have indexed over the last six months for the Bibliography of British and Irish History. We...
Reviews in History
New reviews: Spectral Arctic, Contested Reformations and WW2 Displaced Children
Latest reviews including polar exploration and cultural encounters in the Arctic, an indispensable addition to the historiography of the English reformation and two books on displaced children in post-Second World War Europe.
New reviews: Civil War citizenship, British migrants and histories of punishment
We start this week with The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America by Erik Mathisen. Tom Lawrie welcomes a book which expertly brings the reader’s focus in and out of the national scale, concentrating alternately on the...
New reviews: Early Modern Domesticity, Ulysses S. Grant and Black Colonization
We start this week with A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500-1700, by Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson. Sara Fox and the authors discuss a book which presents the complex issues surrounding early modern domesticity in an...
New reviews: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Greek Cypriots, responses to Mary Gladstone & Internationalists
We start this week with a review of the digital archive Gabriel García Márquez: An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center. Steven Hart believes this archive is a truly remarkable achievement for future research on Latin American culture and literature, and...
Open Access Publishing
#OpenAccess at the IHR: five new publishing initiatives
For OpenAccess Week 2018 (21-28 October), five initiatives from the IHR on disseminating its scholarly content and new forms of publishing for historians.
Open Access Week 2017: share and aware
Researcher awareness and engagement with open access data and sharing is increasing, that is according to a 2017 State of Open Data Report published by Figshare this week. This does not come as a surprise to me and, as a publisher of open access research in a variety...
A new open access series with the Royal Historical Society
The IHR has the great pleasure of announcing our partnership with the Royal Historical Society (RHS) to publish a new, open access series of monographs and shorter form works, further solidifying our commitment to open access. New Historical Perspectives will seek to...
Digital development: a commitment to OA
When I joined the IHR in early August, I did so with the challenging assignment of helping to further the Institute’s mission to embrace the opportunities of digital content delivery and enable greater access to knowledge, in line with the School’s Statement on Open...