Professor Simon Ditchfield
Baroque around the clock: Daniello Bartoli SJ (1608-1685) and the uses of global history
RHS Virtual Lecture
21 September 2020
RHS Podcast & Video Archive
Virtual Lecture
Professor Derek Peterson
The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin: Making History in a Tight Corner
RHS Virtual Lecture
23 July 2020
A full recording of the lecture, slide presentation and live Q&A.
RHS Awards 2020
The winners of all the 2020 RHS Publication, Fellowship and Teaching Awards, were announced in a virtual awards ceremony on Wednesday 22nd July.
The ceremony included joint announcements with the Institute of Historical Research for the RHS Fellowships and IHR Prizes.
Watch the video and read full details and citations of the winners and runners up.
Podcast
Dr Andrew ArsanPodcast
Professor Margot FinnPodcast
Professor Penny RobertsPodcast
Dr Sujit SivasundaramPodcast
Professor Mary VincentPodcast
Professor Lynn Abrams
Pursuing autonomy: self-help and self fashioning amongst women in post-war Britain’.
RHS Lecture
11 May 2018
A podcast of Prof. Abrams’ lecture is available here.
Abstract. The 1960s has been dubbed the ‘do-it-yourself decade’. This was the era when the women of the so-called ‘transition generation’ began to discover the gap between their expectations and the realities of their lives and in most cases took it upon themselves to fill that gap with autonomous activity rather than looking to existing organisations or the state to act on their behalf. This lecture examines the place of do-it-yourself women’s organisations – the National Housewives’ Register, National Childbirth Trust and Pre-School Playgroups Association – in the emerging history of postwar womanhood in the United Kingdom and seeks to rescue them from the condescension of those who have regarded them as not being sufficiently critical of gender relations and thus not part of the postwar feminist narrative. I argue that these organisations which emerged at a grass roots level from women’s dissatisfaction and frustration, came to offer thousands the opportunity for self-development, self confidence and independence.
Lecture Video
Professor Diana Paton
Mary Williamson’s Letter, or: Seeing Women & Sisters in the Archives of Atlantic Slavery
RHS Lecture
9 February 2018
Watch the lecture and read Prof. Paton’s abstract below.
“I was a few years back a slave on your property of Houton Tower, and as a Brown woman was fancied by a Mr Tumoning unto who Mr Thomas James sold me.” Thus begins Mary Williamson’s letter, which for decades sat unexamined in an attic in Scotland until a history student became interested in her family’s papers, and showed it to Diana Paton. In this lecture, Paton will use the letter to reflect on the history and historiography of ‘Brown’ women like Mary Williamson in Jamaica and other Atlantic slave societies. Mary Williamson’s letter offers a rare perspective on the sexual encounters between white men and Brown women that were pervasive in Atlantic slave societies. Yet its primary focus is on the greater importance of ties of place and family—particularly of relations between sisters—in a context in which the ‘severity’ of slavery was increasing. Mary Williamson’s letter is a single and thus-far not formally archived trace in a broader archive of Atlantic slavery dominated by material left by slaveholders and government officials. Paton asks what the possibilities and limits of such a document may be for generating knowledge about the lives and experiences of those who were born into slavery.