History
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When I went there, I thought that Alta Loma terrace, in Hollywood, CA, was a pretty, rather enviable place to live. Unusually for any residential street in America the houses are arranged on either side of a footpath instead of a road (although reassuringly there’s vehicle access to the rear of the houses) and the
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I spend much of my professional life reading the words of people who were passionate advocates of Union, and, indeed, who declared their willingness to die for it. Last night I gave a talk about my new biography of Abraham Lincoln, who was the most articulate advocate of Union of all. The audience, at the
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Last year, the government’s proposed new history curriculum caused intense debate about what history children should learn. Should the black nurse Mary Seacole be taught, or (implicitly) is her inclusion in a school history curriculum a sop to political correctness? Should the content of history lessons be a story of Britain or of the world?
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If you were a teacher, would you take your children somewhere where you knew they were going to be shouted at and made to do household chores for no pay? Perhaps that’s best left as a rhetorical question. On school trips to Holdenby House in Northamptonshire, where Charles I was held prisoner by the Scots,
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I was on Radio 3’s Night Waves last night presenting a short package about the legacy of the Gettysburg Address. You can listen to it here. On Radio 4, James Naughtie presented a documentary on how and why Lincoln came to give the speech (I appear in that programme as well). Here is the text
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It is, I suppose, an unalienable truth that the American Civil War was, in some senses a Revolution. Certainly that was true for enslaved African Americans who were legally freed, often displaced, sometimes reunited with separated family members, and, in a few cases, managed to acquire new wealth and some improvement in their political status
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In the UCL History Department, we’ve been trying to work out how best to support the often difficult transition from school to university study. We’ve come up with (what I think is) an exciting new curriculum which is being introduced for new first years in September. I’ll be convening one of the new first year
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Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln is really a phenomenally good film. Usually historians go to gripe at historical epics like this. There is no shortage of dreadful films about US history that perpetuate horrible historical inaccuracies. This is not one of them. While I have plenty of quibbles with the detail, the big historical picture feels right.
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A couple of years ago I did some work on the image of Abraham Lincoln in England. It’s an interesting subject because at certain moments Lincoln has really mattered — not just in the United States but in England too. People cared about him. In the 1860s miners in Northeast England bought cheap portraits of
Adam Smith: Historian 