Event Archive

Select this category for information about events after they have taken place, such as videos of lectures, reports on the event or a transcript of the lecture.

Professor Elizabeth Harvey ‘Last resort or key resource? Female foreign labour, the Reich labour administration and the Nazi war effort’

RHS Lecture, Friday 25th September, 6pm, Gustave Tuck LT, UCL

Foreign labour was an essential resource for the Nazi war economy: by September 1944, around six million civilian labourers from across Europe were working in the Reich. Any initial readiness on the part of the peoples of Nazi-occupied Europe to volunteer for work in the Reich had quickly dissipated as the harsh and often vicious treatment of foreign workers became known. The abuse and exploitation of foreign forced labourers by the Nazi regime is well documented. Less well understood is why women formed such a substantial proportion of the labour recruited or forcibly deported from occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet territories: in September 1944, over 50% of Soviet civilian forced labourers and more than a third of Polish forced labourers were women. This lecture explores the factors influencing the demand for and the supply of female foreign labour from occupied Eastern Europe, particularly after the appointment of Fritz Sauckel as the head of labour mobilization in March 1942. It will consider the explanations offered hitherto for the large-scale deployment of female foreign workers from Eastern Europe, and examine the contradictions of Nazi policy towards them within two interlocking systems of control: the regime’s regimentation of labour and its racist mechanisms for controlling human reproduction.

Elizabeth Harvey is Professor of History at the University of Nottingham. Her publications includeYouth and the Welfare State in Weimar Germany (1993) and Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (2003). She is a member of the historians’ commission appointed by the German Federal Ministry of Labour to oversee the research project on the history of the Reich Labour Ministry under National Socialism.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B19880 / photo: Knoedler

License CC-BY-SA 3.0

2015 Prothero lecture: Professor Colin Kidd, ‘The Grail of Original Meaning: Uses of the Past in American Constitutional Theory’

RHS Prothero Lecture, Wednesday 1st July, 6pm, Gustave Tuck LT

Originalism has been a controversial presence in American constitutional jurisprudence since the 1980s. Reacting against the liberal ‘living constitution’ jurisprudence of the Warren and Burger Courts, conservative jurists urged fidelity to the original principles which had animated the Constitution in the late eighteenth century. However, the quest for original meaning is not as straightforward as conservatives have assumed. Not only is original intent tantalisingly elusive, it raises major issues of historical interpretation. How far do the assumed historical underpinnings of originalism mesh with the findings of academic historians? To what extent has the conservative invocation of the Founding Fathers obscured a lost American Enlightenment? Nor is ‘tradition’ in American constitutional law an unproblematic matter. How far does a desire to restore the original meaning of the Constitution ignore the role of ‘stare decisis’ (precedent) in America’s common law heritage? Colin Kidd explores the tensions between originalist jurisprudence and historical scholarship since the 1980s, and examines the various usable pasts in operation in American constitutional theory. Originalism, it transpires, has many mansions. Moreover, the various schemes of historical interpretation in American constitutional jurisprudence do not map easily onto a simple liberal-conservative divide. The lecture will also interrogate more general issues about the relationship between academic and ‘applied’ history.

Colin Kidd FBA is Wardlaw Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of Subverting Scotland’s Past (1993), British Identities before Nationalism (1999), The Forging of Races (2006), and Union and Unionisms (2008), all published by Cambridge University Press

Wellcome Miscellanea Medica XVIII, dating to 14th century

RHS Lecture: Dr Patricia Skinner, ‘Better off dead than disfigured’? The challenges of facial injury in the premodern past’

Gustave Tuck LT, 6pm, Friday 8th May 2015

People with disfigurements remain one of the last, under-represented minority groups in history. Their faces, often telling stories of violence and/or ravaging disease, present an uncomfortable subject for study. Modern surgical practices, capable of creating the most ‘realistic’ facial prostheses and thus ‘saving faces’, cannot repair the psychological damage of a changed face, nor address the prevailing social attitudes that either register and then ignore the person completely in the cause of ‘not staring’, or express horror or even disgust at the mis-arranged features confronting the gaze. This lecture is concerned with the historical continuities visible in such responses, suggesting that – as today – only those with a particular story to tell about their disfiguring injuries were ‘accepted’ for themselves and were able to ‘change face’. Victims of criminal acts and war veterans did – and still do – elicit a sympathetic response. But facial disfigurement in the premodern past – when surgery was not yet an option – was also a sign of punishment and/or dubious morality, meaning that the right story mattered. The lecture traces some examples, and argues for a better understanding not only of the challenges of disfigurement history, but of disfigurement itself.

Patricia Skinner is Reader in Medieval History at the University of Winchester. She is currently completing a project sponsored by the Wellcome Trust on medical and social responses to disfigurement in medieval Europe.

RHS Lecture: Dr John Maddicott ‘Who was Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester?’

RHS Lecture at De Montfort University, Leicester, 6pm, Thursday 12 March 2015

Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, was one of the most famous men of the English middle ages, and one whose historical reputation has been vigorously contested. He began his political career as a French adventurer at the court of King Henry III, the king’s favourite and, soon, his brother-in-law. He ended his life fighting in battle at Evesham in 1265, with the king a captive at his side and the king’s eldest son, the future Edward I, as his killer. Denounced as a traitor and regarded by some as a public nuisance, he was seen by many others as a hero, saint and martyr. This lecture will survey his career as politician, devout Christian and experienced warrior, and will try to discover how he came to be seen in such extraordinarily different ways. In the foreground will be the political reform movement of 1258-65, which Montfort came to lead and which for the first time subjected the country to a quasi-republican constitution going far beyond the restraints imposed on the monarchy in 1215.

John Maddicott is Emeritus Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford, where he was Fellow and Tutor in Medieval History.

RHS Lecture: Professor Alec Ryrie ‘ “Protestantism” as a Historical Category’

Gustave Tuck LT, 6pm, Friday 6 February 2015

In the past thirty years, the ‘confessionalization’ thesis has framed our understanding of the Reformation era, and has divided post-Reformation religion into distinct, parallel confessions. On the Protestant side, this has favoured – and produced a false equivalence between – the two confessions legally recognised by the Peace of Westphalia, Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism. In this lecture, Professor Ryrie argues that the broader term ‘Protestant’ remains the indispensable analytical category for examining the non-papal Christianities of the West after 1517. ‘Protestants’ were both more diverse than the confessionalization model’s statist parameters allow, and also united by fundamental common features which many of them tried hard to deny: features visible across Europe in the early modern period and remaining clear even down to more recent times.

Professor Alec Ryrie is Head of the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Durham.

RHS Presidential Address – Professor Peter Mandler ‘Educating the Nation II: Universities’

Gustave Tuck LT, 6pm, Friday 28 November 2014

In his first lecture, Peter Mandler argued that ‘meritocracy’ was an unstable basis on which to found universal secondary education, as from the early years of compulsory secondary education in the 1950s most people wanted one kind of education for their children – ‘the best’ – much as they only wanted ‘the best’ health service. The same cannot quite be said about post-compulsory education, the subject of his second lecture. A wider range of considerations went into the expansion of higher education – technocratic (what kind of higher education did the nation’s society and economy need?), meritocratic (who was capable of benefiting?), and democratic too (shouldn’t everyone have equal access?). This mixture of motives, as well as a complex set of economic, demographic and fiscal considerations, are brought together to explain the strange go-stop-go pattern of expansion of higher education in Britain from the 1960s to the present.

RHS Seminar on Gender Equality, Glasgow University

The second RHS gender equality seminar was hosted by the Centre for Gender History at the University of Glasgow on 17 November. Speakers included Nicola Miller, Bronach Kane, Jo Fox and Peter Mandler. The seminar offered an opportunity for further consultation to contribute to the RHS report on Gender Equality and Historians in UK Higher Education, with workshops on work/life balance, effective mentoring, invisible bias and promotion/career opportunities. The findings of our gender equality survey and consultation seminars will be published in the report early in 2015.

Glasgow Gender Equality programme

RHS Lecture – Dr Alex Shepard ‘Minding Their Own Business: Crediting Married Women in the Early Modern Economy’.

Dr Alex Shepard is Reader in Early Modern History and Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Glasgow. Here she reflects on a rare glimpse of a long term friendship between two London women in the early-eighteenth century. Elizabeth Carter and Elizabeth Hatchett were friends and partners in a pawn-broking business in London in the early eighteenth century. We know about them because of a property dispute over Elizabeth Hatchett’s claims to Elizabeth Carter’s goods after she died ‘of a fever’ in 1722.

Taking a micro-historical approach, this lecture explores the business activities of Elizabeth Carter, a woman who practised as a midwife and operated as a pawnbroker in London in the early decades of the eighteenth century first while a wife and subsequently as a widow. Based on a protracted inheritance dispute through which her extensive dealings come to light, the discussion assesses women’s lending activities in a burgeoning metropolitan economy; the networks through which women lenders operated; and the extent to which they could side-step the legal conventions of ‘coverture’ which restricted married women’s ownership of moveable property. It will be argued that the money-lending and asset management activities of women like Elizabeth Carter were an important part of married women’s work that did not simply consolidate neighbourhood ties but also fuelled early modern economic development.

This lecture was an RHS event held at Heritage Quay, Central Services Building, University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield. HD1 3DH

RHS lecture – Professor Mark Cornwall ‘Traitors and the Meaning of Treason in Austria-Hungary’s Great War’

Gustave Tuck LT, 6pm, 26 September 2014

Treason is a ubiquitous historical concept yet one that is singularly under-researched. This lecture explores the “landscape of treason” in the Habsburg Empire in its final years. It places it in a broader historical context, theoretically and legally, then explores how and why the legal weapon of treason as wielded during the Great War in Austria-Hungary. It especially seeks to understand what we can learn – the meaning of treason – from the notorious large-scale trials that were staged of Serb and Czech traitors. By 1918 most of the traitors had been amnestied and were turning the accusation of treason upon the Habsburg monarchy itself.

Mark Cornwall is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton and a leading authority on the Austro-Hungarian empire.

RHS seminar: Gender Equality and Historians in UK Higher Education

Gustave Tuck LT, 2-5pm, Thursday 18 September 2014

To accompany the RHS Gender Survey for historians in UK Higher Education, the RHS held a seminar to discuss its findings with a view to making recommendations to improve gender equality in the sector. Most of the afternoon was devoted to workshops discussing the policy recommendations which will inform the final report which is due to be published in early 2015.

CHAIR: Nicola Miller, Chair of the RHS Research Policy Committee and Professor of Latin American history, UCL

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Peter Mandler, President of the RHS and Professor of Modern Cultural History, University of Cambridge
Bronach Kane, Lecturer in History, Cardiff University
Jo Fox, Honorary Director of Communications and Professor of History, University of Durham

RHS Gender Seminar Programme