Articles about 'history'

Jerry Toner, Director of Studies in Classics, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, discusses the stratification of Roman society.

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’.

Beards are back in fashion. But today’s hipster styles convey rather different  messages to the hair men cultivated in the early modern period. Historian Dr Stefan Hanß investigates the ways in which daily ‘performances of hair’ for men and women reflected the profound religious and social changes sweeping through Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.

David Reynolds (Faculty of History) and Kristina Spohr (London School of Economics and Political Science) discuss current relations between the US & Russia, and whether there are any lessons to be learned from the era of détente and the end of the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá (Department of Spanish & Portuguese) discusses the life and times of Anthony Knivet, a young soldier from Norfolk who spent nine years living in Brazil in the 16th century. She will be discussing Knivet's life on 22 October as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas. 

A stolen chest of letters – penned by an army wife to her husband on the battlefields of the Second World War – has helped a Cambridge academic and biographer trace the history of the women behind the men in uniform.

A new volume of essays looks afresh at women’s lives during the 600 years of the Ottoman empire. The book challenges the stereotypes of female lives confined to the harem and hamam – and reveals how women were surprisingly visible in public spaces.

The Almoravid and Almohad empires flourished in the western Mediterranean of the 11th and 12th centuries. Despite controlling vast tracts of land, these Berber dynasties are little known in the English-speaking world. In her latest book, Dr Amira Bennison looks at the rise and fall of Berber empires that made a lasting contribution to the history of Islamic culture.

How do you take your tea – with a drop of poisonous chemicals or a spoonful of sheep dung? Throughout history, the health benefits – and harms – of this popular beverage have been widely debated. In an article originally published in the student science magazine BlueSci, Sophie Protheroe, an undergraduate student at Murray Edwards College, examines the global history of tea and its effect on our health.

As they struggled to maintain their grip on India as the jewel in the colonial crown, the British attempted to mould the character of India’s princes. Research by Teresa Segura-Garcia into the remarkable story of Sayaji Rao III, Maharaja of Baroda, reveals the thinking behind his education and its practical implications. She presents her work in a talk tomorrow (1 June 2016).