2017 will mark the 102nd anniversary of Edith Louisa Cavell’s death. Born on the 4 December 1872 in a small Norfolk town, Cavell began training to become a nurse at the age of 21 and finally qualified in 1896. After moving to Belgium, her career went from strength to strength; she became matron of The […]
In a momentous act of devotional citizenship and spirited patriotism, tens of thousands of Russian women volunteered to join the country’s ‘Battalions of Death’. They offered their allegiance, and even their lives, to protect ‘Mother Russia’ from the foreign aggressors of World War I. Russia’s female volunteers echoed history’s celebrated female warriors, the likes of […]
The Haitian Revolution (1791) was the first successful rebellion of enslaved people against colonial rule. Haiti became the first country to be founded by formerly enslaved people, resulting in the end of slavery throughout the former French colonial empire in 1794. Approximately 4000 enslaved people victoriously defeated colonial authorities in battle as the French attempted […]
Got to Be Real: A History of Drag For as long as people have worn clothes, they have been dressing in outfits designed for the opposite gender. However, drag as we know it began when it was adopted by LGBT pioneers who turned it into an art, rubbing more than a few people up the […]
In an English Literature Modernism module somewhere inside a Science Faculty building on Oxford Road in 2022, we are being asked to consider how much the Harlem Renaissance was a modernist movement. My lecturer notes that the likes of T.S Eliot, James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield were exiles from their home countries. By choice, they […]
With the theme of this issue being gender and sexuality, Manchester’s Steven Pierce, a senior lecturer in African history, talks to Dane Massey about one of his specialist research areas. Steven, this semester, you run a course on gender and sexuality in modern Africa. Could you tell us a bit about this course, […]
The River Tigris was said to have turned black from the ink spilled when the Mongols demolished the Great Library of Baghdad. Dresden’s Frauenkirche, an 18th-century church famed for its outstanding architecture, was ruined by British bombs during World War Two. The Great Sphinx’s nose was knocked off by a misfired cannonball from one of […]
Although we may be buried under a mountain of essays, dreading the thought of exams and dying from a medley of diseases, the debacle of the end of term does signal one good thing; Christmas is coming! In honour of this, we have devoted this issue to winter festivities, from the religious, to the pagan, […]
‘Som una nació. Nosaltres decidim.’ (We are a nation. We decide.) Catalonia is a region in limbo. Since the semi-autonomous province in north-west Spain held an illegitimate independence referendum in 2017, the population of 7.5 million has been in the dark, wondering what the Spanish government will decide for their long-term future. Unsurprisingly, the crisis […]
The April 1986 nuclear disaster of Chernobyl remains an infamous date throughout history. From this, the Whitworth Art Gallery’s latest exhibition of the works of British artists Jane and Louise Wilson seek to entice the attention and imaginations of students from a variety of academic programmes. One of the main focuses of the exhibit centres […]
If you were to ever ask any political or social commentator in India about the possibility of the whole country being ruled by a single despotic ruler, the chances are that you would get a resounding ‘NO’ as the answer. We are too diverse for any single ideology to convince each and every part of […]
“The Floating World” refers to the pleasure-seeking, urban lifestyle of the Edo period of Japan (1600-1868). This period of relative stability under Tokugawa Shogunate was one of prolific cultural output, especially in large cities such as the capital, Edo, which is now Tokyo. Haiku poetry found increased popularity during this period, propagated by master poets […]
At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II preached for the First Crusade as an ‘armed pilgrimage’: a penitential war that imitated the suffering of Christ whilst recapturing the Holy Land of Jerusalem from the Muslims. This appealed to many different members of Western European society, from lowly peasants who normally worked on […]
In an English Literature Modernism module somewhere inside a Science Faculty building on Oxford Road in 2022, we are being asked to consider how much the Harlem Renaissance was a modernist movement. My lecturer notes that the likes of T.S Eliot, James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield were exiles from their home countries. By choice, they […]