History News

Professor J E Smyth's article, A Woman at the Center of Hollywood’s Wars: Screenwriter Mary C. McCall Jr., has been published in the latest issue of the Cineaste Magazine.
 

Dr Howard Chiang of the Warwick University History Department has had his paper, 'Mercurial Matter: Medical Science and the Transformations of Sex in Republican China', shortlisted for the 2016 Young Scholar Award of the European Association for Chinese Studies.
 

Melvyn Bragg and guests Catherine Clinton (Denman Chair of American History at the University of Texas and International Professor at Queen's University, Belfast), Susan-Mary Grant (Professor of American History at Newcastle University), and Tim Lockley (Professor of American History at the University of Warwick) discuss Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, ten sentences long, delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg after the Union forces had won an important battle with the Confederates. Opening with " Four score and seven years ago," it became one of the most influential statements of national purpose, asserting that America was "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" and "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Among those inspired were Martin Luther King Jr whose "I have a dream" speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial 100 years later, echoed Lincoln's opening words.
 

This week saw the launch of the Palgrave Macmillan book series, Europe's Asian Centuries. This series investigates the key connector that transformed the early modern world: the long-distance trade between Asia and Europe in material goods and culture. This trade stimulated Europe’s consumer and industrial revolutions, re-orientating the Asian trading world to European priorities. Europe’s pursuit of quality goods turned a pre-modern encounter with precious and exotic ornaments into a modern globally-organized trade in Asian export ware. Europe’s Asian Centuries engages with new historical approaches arising from global history; it develops subject areas grounded in skills and processes of production as well as material culture, and it demonstrates the new depth of research into diverse markets, quality differences and the development of taste. The books are groundbreaking in bringing the study of traded products, material cultures and consumption into economic and global history, and in making economic history relevant to wider cultural history. It has the vision of a history over a long chronology of two and a half centuries and wide European and Asian comparisons and connections.

Luxury: A Rich History is the latest book by Professor of Global History and Culture at the University of Warwick Giorgio Riello. Luxury is a rapidly changing global industry that makes the headlines daily in our newspapers and on the internet.

We live in a world obsessed by luxury. Long-distance airlines compete to offer first-class sleeping experiences and hotels recommend exclusive suites where you are never disturbed.

More than ever, luxury is a pervasive presence in the cultural and economic life of the West – and increasingly too in the emerging super-economies of Asia and Latin America.

Yet luxury is hardly a new phenomenon. Today’s obsession with luxury brands and services is just one of the many manifestations that luxury has assumed. In the middle ages and the Renaissance, for example, luxury was linked to notions of magnificence and courtly splendour. In the eighteenth century luxury was at the centre of philosophical debates over its role in shaping people’s desires and oiling the wheels of commerce. And it continues to morph today, with the growth of the global super-rich and increasing wealth polarization.

From palaces to penthouses, from couture fashion to lavish jewellery, from handbags to red wine, from fast cars to easy money, in Luxury: A Rich History Giorgio Riello and co-author presents the first ever global history of luxury, from the Romans to the twenty-first century: a sparkling and ever-changing story of extravagance, excess, novelty, and indulgence.
 

The Warwick History Department Postgraduate Conference 2016 has commenced with an opening address by Professor David Anderson, Director of Graduate Studies.
 

 
Dr. Katherine Foxhall, Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Leicester and former PhD student at the University of Warwick, has won the Harold D. Langley Book Award for Excellence in the History of Maritime Medicine for her book, Health, medicine, and the sea: Australian Voyages c. 1815-1860 published by Manchester University Press in 2012.

The Award announcement was made at the joint North American Society for Oceanic History, Naval Historical Foundation, North Atlantic Fisheries History Association and Society for the History of Navy Medicine conference held in Portland, Maine. The Award was created in honor of naval historian and retired Smithsonian curator, Dr. Harold D. Langley, who is also a Board member of the Foundation for the History of Navy Medicine. Board President RADM Frederic Sanford, MC, USN, RET and Dr. Kenneth J. Hagan made up the prize committe that selected Dr. Foxhall’s book.

Dr. Hagan writes, "Katherine Foxhall’s book cause[s] the reader emotionally to enter her poignantly depicted world of suffering souls making the seemingly endless sea journey from England and Ireland to Australia in the latter days of the age of sail. She has been able to paint her vivid verbal portrait by meticulously examining and digesting the hitherto largely ignored reports of surgeons who made the voyage charged with maintaining the health of free emigrants and convicts destined for a new life Down Under. It was a six-month’s travail of extreme hardship, seemingly endless deprivation and always-looming danger of death from disease. These surgeons were compelled to submit a report to the government upon reaching Australia if they wished to be paid for their services on the ship. Theirs are the reports that Katherine Foxhall has mined with the eye of a compassionate humanitarian poet living in the relatively antiseptic western world of the 21st century."

The 'Researching East Africa PG Workshop' was held on Friday 13th May 2016, with twenty-six papers from PG students based in UK and Europe in the history, politics and development of East Africa in one day.