India’s booming business centres and gleaming shopping malls mask a grimmer reality. While one section of the population gets richer, another section gets poorer. In the countryside, farmers and others ‘left behind’ by the economic surge find themselves in increasingly desperate circumstances. In many cases their plight, exacerbated by crippling debt, has led to suicide.
The journals and scrapbooks of Pierre de L’Estoile have for generations provided a vivid picture of France in a time of religious upheaval. Now Cambridge historian Tom Hamilton has written the first book devoted to the life of L’Estoile as a diarist, collector and man about town.
The University of Cambridge is celebrating the recognition of four of its most distinguished female academics in this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Professor Andrew Preston examines the origins of the first hundred days as a measure of presidential success in American politics.
Dr Emily Charnock, Lecturer in American History, delivers her verdict as the Trump presidency reaches its first major milestone.
The new film Denial dramatises the landmark libel trial when David Irving sued the academic Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier – a case Irving lost. Sir Richard Evans, Regius Professor of History and an authority on the Third Reich, was called as an expert witness in the trial. Here, Evans discusses the case and the film, the emergence of 'soft' Holocaust denial, and the statement put out by Trump's White House on this year's Holocaust Memorial Day.
An ambitious opera, telling the story of an infamous witch trial, was premiered in October. A film of Kepler's Trial the Opera is now available online. The project was conceived by historian Professor Ulinka Rublack whose recent research shines new light on a 400-year-old scandal.
Amid ongoing welfare cuts, researchers argue that investment in health and social care have been integral to British economic success since 1600.
Racism in the US has always run deeper than the electoral cycle, writes Nicholas Guyatt, University Lecturer in American History. Solving it demands education, dialogue, protest, activism and energy.
As Europe expanded its overseas colonies, fixed ideas of racial differences took hold. Historian Dr Mélanie Lamotte, whose forebears include a slave, is researching a brief period when European notions of ethnicity were relatively fluid. Early French settlers believed that non-white inhabitants of the colonies could be ‘civilised’ and ‘improved’.
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