Category: Historical methods
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Turning that blog post into a journal article: A quick guide
One of the popular blog posts for academics that I have seen over the last year has been on turning your journal article into a blog post. I am assuming this is aimed at academics who don’t blog regularly and may be considering contributing to multi-authored blog as an opportunity to showcase their research. This…
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How to navigate the Comintern archives online: A guide for the non-Russian speaker
In 2015, the Russian government made freely available the scanned papers of the Communist International that had been digitised in the 1990s. Access to this digital archive was limited to a number of universities in Europe, as well as the Library of Congress in Washington DC. The new portal made the thousands of scanned documents…
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Are labour historians still doing labour history?
#twitterstorians, @liz_beths and I are pondering, is labour history dead? #labourhistory — Evan Smith (@Hatfulofhistory) September 19, 2015 Today I have been having a discussion with several friends on social media over the question that an academic posited to me – is labour history dead? As part of that discussion, most of us have argued…
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The pitfalls of interdisciplinary research
Interdisciplinary research! Universities are apparently all for it and ‘breaking down silos’ is a mantra repeated throughout academia. However the reality is that the major venue for research outputs – peer-reviewed academic journals – are, for the most part, very discipline specific. Many editors and reviewers are often unable to embrace interdisciplinary research because it…
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New article: Thatcherism and The Young Ones
This is just a short post to let everybody know that my new article on depictions of Thatcherite Britain in The Young Ones has been published in Agora. A version of the paper can be found here. If you can’t access it properly, send me an email and I’ll ping one your way. As usual,…
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Deny, normalise and obfuscate: The Home Office in the 1980s and the abuse of South Asian women
The ‘missing’ files of the Home Office relating to an alleged child-sex ring given by Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens to Home Secretary Leon Brittan is not that surprising. We know that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office kept silent about a hundreds of thousands of files that were thought to be ‘missing’ or ‘destroyed’ during the decolonisation process…
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Mr Gove, film can never replicate historical ‘truth’
The last few days has seen a historiographical debate about the First World War played out in the media between Michael Gove, the Conservative Education Minister, and several different historians, including Richard J. Evans and Tristram Hunt, with plenty of others weighing in (see this article in The Guardian for a good summary). One of Gove’s…
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Why studying film helped me become a better historian
When I was an undergraduate, I planned to major in film studies, but I eventually switched to a double major in history and politics, keeping film studies as my minor. Although I didn’t keep up with my studies in film theory after I undertook my Honours and PhD in history, I look back on my…
New Historical Express 