Reflections on Studying the Past – Meddyliau ar Astudio’r Gorffennol
Recently, Dr. Michael Bresalier gave two public lectures from a project he’s developing on “Learning to Live with Covid-19: Historical perspectives on how humanity adapts to epidemics”. The first lecture, “Learning to Live with Covid-19: What can the history of influenza teach us?”, was part of the Hay Festival’s lunchtime talk series. It addressed a…Continue Reading Learning to Live with Covid-19: Perspectives from Past Pandemics
Dissertations are the culmination of an exhilarating journey which invariably demands days lost to fascinating yet redundant research, but which is also rich with discovery and presents fresh perspectives of the world we thought we knew. This construction of history as we know it became central to my research. How have we interpreted our past,…Continue Reading The perpetual evolution of a research project: Challenging Occupational Generalisations of the ‘Other’ in a Nineteenth-Century Welsh Industrial Community
The French and Indian War (1754-1760) was the last of the intermittent colonial conflicts that had erupted between Britain, France, their respective North American colonies and Native American allies during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unlike the conflicts that had preceded it, the French and Indian War proved decisive, resulting in the conquest of…Continue Reading An Introduction to the French and Indian War (1754-60)
Conflict, Reconstruction and Memory (CRAM) research group. 28-29 June 2021 This workshop will explore debates surrounding the cultural and political uses of monuments, reflecting upon their role in the memorialisation and imagining of the past. It considers artefacts such as war memorials, cenotaphs and public statuary as well as urban sites damaged through war, or…Continue Reading Contested Histories: Creating and Critiquing public monuments and memorials in a new age of iconoclasm
The Reformation had a great impact on many aspects of daily life and lived religion. It proposed to alter a system of rituals and worship that had evolved over centuries and which promised to ensure a better future in the afterlife; the Reformation denied established culture and brought the fate of many souls into jeopardy…Continue Reading Attitudes to Death and Dying During the Reformation
The persistent legacies of colonial domination have become a flashpoint in recent years. On the one hand, movements like Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall have provided a platform through which we can analyse how structural hangovers from imperialism continue to impact on the lives of underrepresented groups. On the other, that observation alone…Continue Reading The Welsh and Empire: Early Reflections on India
Hundreds of thousands of people were threatened by famine, disease, and displacement as a consequence of the First World War and the conflicts that followed in its wake. Around one hundred years ago, a wide range of humanitarian organisations were established which sought to cater for these civilian victims of war. Some of these organisations…Continue Reading Post-First World War Humanitarianism
In December 2020 there was a rare astronomical event at the winter solstice: a great conjunction. A conjunction occurs whenever two astronomical objects appear close together in the sky. A great conjunction is a conjunction of the planets Saturn and Jupiter, the slowest-moving planets visible to the naked eye. A great conjunction occurs every twenty…Continue Reading Kepler and the Star of Bethlehem
Professor Martin Johnes recently gave an online talk for the genealogy website FindmyPast about using the census to understand the history of the Welsh language. Drawing upon his research into the role of education in the decline of Welsh in the late 19th century, Martin explored how the census collected language data, questions around its…Continue Reading What can the census tell us about the history of the Welsh language?
Dr Gemma Almond writes: The Social Worlds of Steel project, which has been running since May 2019, has unearthed important new evidence of the impact of the steel industry on towns and cities in twentieth-century Britain. In the current phase of the project we are exploring how the heritage of the industry is represented to,…Continue Reading Identifying and Mapping the Heritage of Britain’s Steel Industry