By Hannah McCann On 1st May 1851, nestled between the elm trees of Hyde Park, a 564 m long and 33 m high glass structure was about to open to the public. This creation (later known as the Crystal Palace) housed something even more astounding than the building itself. Inside the glasshouse was the Great […]
Category archives: Volume 11
Underdog to African Success Story: Sir Seretse Khama and the birth of modern Botswana
By Kerry Lindeque In 1966, when Botswana asked to be granted independence by the British government they were labelled as “either brave or very foolish”. The British protectorate, known at the time as Bechuanaland, had 12km of paved road, a literacy rate of 25% and was one of the twenty poorest countries in the world. […]
Legacies of 1989; Can a Peaceful Revolution ever be Truly ‘Revolutionary’?
By Alex Cockhill ‘Revolutions’ are events that never fail to evoke images of uncertainty, upheaval and most of all violence. The legacy of the French Revolution on the popular memory has always been defined by the horror and scale of this revolutionary violence. This imagery has only been compounded by the other ‘great’ revolution, the […]
Uplifting Stories from History; a story of freedom and hope
By Steph Ritson The Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 saw a victory for freedom and the end of the division between West and East Berlin. The fall of the wall ushered in the reunification of Germany ending decades of separation and captivity for the East. Following the Second World War Germany was split […]
Uplifting Moments: 1980 ‘Miracle on Ice’ Provided a Miracle for the American Psyche
By Ellie Marlow ‘Do you believe in miracles?’ asked Al Michael in the dying seconds of what would come to be remembered as one of the most famous international ice hockey matchups in history. It was the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid and, contrary to all expectations, the US team were moments away from […]
‘Just let me hear some of that rock and roll music’: How Radio Caroline Transformed British Radio from 1964-67.
By Sam Gilder The ‘swinging sixties’ was characterised by rising living standards, increased sexual freedoms and the emphatic influence of the youth on British culture. Rock and roll had erupted in Britain, with bands such as The Beatles, The Kinks and The Rolling Stones characterizing the new shift in pop music. London was at the […]
Women Abroad: Female Travellers in Italy in the late Eighteenth-Century
By Jess Allen The flexibility of the ‘separate spheres’ ideology has been thoroughly demonstrated by historians due to evidence signifying women’s inherent role in public life. Whilst there was still a domesticated role seldom expected of women in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century, particularly after the French Revolution, women in public life further increases. […]