The RHS is delighted to announce that today marks the release of the first volume in New Historical Perspectives, an Open Access books series for early career scholars commissioned by the Royal Historical Society and published as an imprint of the Institute of Historical Research by University of London Press.
The first book in the series is Ed Owens’ The Family Firm: Monarchy, Mass Media and the British Public, 1932-53.
The Family Firm presents the first major historical analysis of the transformation of the royal household’s public relations strategy in the period 1932-1953. Beginning with King George V’s first Christmas broadcast, Buckingham Palace worked with the Church of England and the media to initiate a new phase in the House of Windsor’s approach to publicity. The book also focuses on audience reception by exploring how British readers, listeners, and viewers made sense of royalty’s new media image. It argues that the monarchy’s deliberate elevation of a more informal and vulnerable family-centred image strengthened the emotional connections that members of the public forged with the royals, and that the tightening of these bonds had a unifying effect on national life in the unstable years during and either side of the Second World War. Crucially, The Family Firm also contends that the royal household’s media strategy after 1936 helped to restore public confidence in a Crown that was severely shaken by the abdication of King Edward VIII.
Download and buy copies of The Family Firm here.
All titles in New Historical Perspectives are published in print (hard- and paperback) and as Open Access (OA) from first publication, with no fees charged to the author or the author’s institution. Monograph authors receive a workshop with invited specialists to discuss their work before its final submission, and guidance from members of the NHP’s academic editorial board who also oversee a careful peer-review process.
Find out more about the New Historical Perspectives book series, including how to make a proposal, here.
We are delighted to make publicly available a podcast of Dr Sujit Sivasundaram’s Prothero Lecture for 2019, which he gave to a packed audience at the Royal Historical Society on Friday 5 July.
Judges’ citation: This year’s submissions for the Whitfield Award featured rigorous and innovative works of historical research, many of which will endure among classic studies in their fields. That said, Ryan Hanley’s superb study, Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c.1770-1830, stands apart for its audacious engagement with debates on the cultural positioning of black participants in British literary, political, and intellectual culture during a transitional period in British domestic and imperial history. Hanley’s rich and lively examination shows that black authors engaged in a comprehensive range of topics, from legal debates, the nature of celebrity, religious controversy, spiritual memoir, radical politics, to epistemology – extending far beyond the abolitionist paradigm that historians have long assumed and thus have tended to impose. Like their fellow intellectuals, black authors disagreed with each other, they led debate, cultivated their style, and courted new readers. We have Hanley to thank for drawing renewed attention to these voices, and for showing us why these authors mattered then and matter now.
Judges’ citation: This is an outstanding first book and it deserves the highest of praise. Hardy builds an ambitious and convincing thesis about the structure and workings of the Holy Roman Empire in the late medieval period, arguing that it is best understood in terms of various forms of political association. This is a significant and original contribution to the historiography of the period and region. It encourages scholars to consider sixteenth-century Germany not only through the lens of the Reformation but in terms of underlying late-medieval political structures and practices. The writing is clear and precise throughout, and the author reveals a deep knowledge of the archival sources. The organisation of the book allows its argument to build steadily, and the high quality of the writing and analysis is sustained from start to finish (it also has a gorgeous front cover). Associative political culture fills a gap in the existing literature and deserves to be very widely read.
Awarded to: Jake Richards for an article ‘Anti-Slave-Trade Law, “Liberated Africans” and the State in the South Atlantic World, c. 1839-1852’, Past and Present, 241 (2018), 170-219.
Judges’ citation: With a rich base in archival work, this article explores the position of Moroccan military veterans in Spanish policy under Franco. Wright demonstrates that certain categories of disabled Moroccan veterans actually received higher levels of state support than their Spanish counterparts, but that this reflected attitudes towards them shaped by paternalism and distinctive understandings of their masculinity. Ideas about race and gender also contributed to anxieties about relationships between Moroccans and Spaniards in the period after the Civil War, which Spanish bureaucrats even tried to sabotage on occasion. Wright argues that the treatment of Moroccan veterans can be read as part of Francoist heightening of the status of Spanish masculinity, and also as a part of its management of the Moroccan protectorate. The article is well written and grounded in detailed research, offering an original and well-articulated contribution to scholarship on modern Spain, gender, race and disability.
Judges’ citation: The judges thought that this was a very accomplished treatment of an ambitious topic, marked by a maturity of approach. It deftly analyses a substantial source base to advance new arguments about not only eighteenth-century legal history but, above all, the nature of the composite British state after the Union of 1707. The article investigates Scottish cases brought before parliament, as part of a wider body of 8,500 appeals over the period, a sample of which is analysed here. The analysis demonstrates that the number of Scottish appeals grew after 1745, and that from the 1760s Scots increasingly lobbied for legislation to promote their fisheries and linen industries. Appeals were often used as a way of forcing compromise on parties that ensured that Westminster affected only the localities and individuals involved in a case. The author convincingly argues that local interests co-opted the state in defence of their interests, thereby keeping their autonomy, as often in England too, and also briefly draws comparisons with appellate courts elsewhere in Europe, notably Castile.
Judges’ citation: This piece is beautifully written, and the prose shows real verve. In a well-argued way, it makes a significant historiographical intervention based upon the analysis activism around school textbooks. This allows the author to argue for a more germinal understanding of ideology, looking at the ways in which cultural shift occurs and redefining the scope of peripheral actors to influence that shift. There is a strong archival source base and the argument is strongly supported throughout. The dissertation features interesting discussions around the use of history, and the ways in which the shaping of narratives can influence conceptions of political norms and shape broader consensus. At times, I felt there could have been a little more agency shown for those who read the textbooks, though the focus was clearly on the authors and activists who altered the text. This was outstanding work and a real pleasure to read
Judges’ citation: Professor Julia Crick receives the Jinty Nelson Award in recognition of her superlative contribution to the teaching and mentoring of younger generations of historians. Palaeography is challenging but integral to the subject of history. It underpins so much else in the field, and manuscripts in particular are windows onto much that would otherwise be inaccessible. Professor Crick has spent a life time advocating the importance of Palaeography to the global academic community and has demonstrated this specifically through her teaching and mentoring. Throughout her career (including appointments at the universities of Cambridge and Exeter, and in her current position at King’s College London), Professor Crick has been a wonderful teacher, not just of Palaeography, but also in training students of any level to think critically, to ask questions, and to build historical arguments based on visual and physical evidence. Professor Crick’s classes at the undergraduate and graduate levels bring history and palaeography to life and she mentors research students in the same way, whether they are at King’s or elsewhere, in History or in another discipline. Crick treats her students more like peers than pupils, which creates a sense that the work can be valued and taken seriously even from a very early stage. Crick’s commitment to the transfer of knowledge from generation to generation is especially evident in her establishment of networks and events that highlight postgraduate research. She has frequently organised seminars, symposia and conferences which include equal space for early career researchers. Over the course of her career, Professor Crick has demonstrated a wide-ranging and sustained commitment to inspiring and training new generations of historians to excel.
Judges’ citation: Over the last four years Drs Webb and Baker have delivered a series of first-year digital history workshop/lectures taken by all undergraduates at the University of Sussex in either History or Art History. These radically update the notion of the ‘historian’s craft’ to include the skills and practices required to engage critically with online sources (both inherited and born digital). The programme is a unique response to the challenges posed by the changes in historical research and debate, designed to turn history undergraduates into digitally savvy, expert navigators of this new landscape of knowledge. What sets the series apart is the self-conscious way in which it seeks to intervene in the history curriculum more generally. By building a skills/apprenticeship model into first-year teaching, it lays the foundations for the development of advanced approaches in the second and third year. The guiding narrative is to move gradually from ‘Doing History in the Digital Age’ to ‘Doing Digital History’ – taking students from referencing, search, and using online databases to compiling datasets, digitisation, and making data visualisations. It is this accumulation of skills, and layering of multiple approaches, that creates a comprehensive and sophisticated understanding. Second-year students move on to modules on the analysis of historical networks and the technologies of print, and then in the third year to a co-taught module on digital archiving. These same skills are also re-enforced in teaching by colleagues across the degree. The first full cohort of students introduced to these skills in their first year have now graduated. Standards of research and practice have improved across the board.
RHS Marshall Fellowship 2019
Awarded to Helen Esfandiary (King’s College London) for her paper, given at the Life Cycles seminar, on Maternal Obligations and Knowledge of Smallpox Inoculation in Eighteenth-Century Elite Society. 
Awarded to Sarah Johanesen (King’s College London) for her essay ‘That silken Priest: Catholic disguise and anti-popery on the English Mission (1569-1640)’. 
