history archive
Unhappy Parliamentarians in the 17th and 21st centuries: posts of the week
Welcome to my weekly round-up of two blogging highlights from the past week: the post that I found most interesting or enjoyable to write and the post from someone else that I found most interesting or entertaining. A post from me… 1688 – The First Modern Revolution by Steve Pincus The traditional picture of 1688 [...]
Book review: 1688 – The First Modern Revolution by Steve Pincus
The traditional picture of 1688 is of a rather English revolution – one much politer, less violent, more limited and rather more sensible and rational than the bloody versions of revolution seen in other countries. In this work Steve Pincus sets out to challenge that view. In his view the Glorious Revolution was not simply a quick and painless transfer of [...]
The technical details of electoral reform matter: Philip Salmon on electoral reform
The central thesis of Philip Salmon’s Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties 1832-1841 is that the details of the 1832 Great Reform Act matter because they had large and significant effects on the development of national politics and the embryonic modern party system. Salmon investigates and illustrates how usually over-looked provisions, such [...]
Forgotten Liberal heroes: Charles Masterman
Listen to Liberal Democrats make speeches and there are frequent references to historical figures, but drawn from a small cast. Just the quartet of John Stuart Mill, William Gladstone, David Lloyd George, David Penhaligon corner almost all of the market, especially since Bob Maclennan stopped making speeches to party conference. Some of the forgotten figures [...]
The 2010 election in historical perspective
The following meeting report appears in the latest edition of the Journal of Liberal History – sent free to members of the Liberal Democrat History Group: Conference fringe meeting, 19 September 2010, with Professor John Curtice, Professor Dennis Kavanagh and James Gurling. Chair: Tony Little. Report by Dr Mark Pack. It has become a Liberal Democrat [...]
Today’s the anniversary of the Limehouse Declaration
On 25 January 1981, four senior Labour politicians – Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams – issued the Limehouse Declaration, so called after David Owen’s East London home. It set out their plans which were to result in the formation of the SDP. As you can see, many of their policy concerns [...]
The Great Reform Act of 1832: its legacy and influence on the Coalition's reform agenda
That’s the title for the next Liberal Democrat History Group meeting, on Monday 24 January, for which I’m one of the speakers. Here are the details: The Great Reform Act of 1832: its legacy and influence on the Coalition’s reform agenda Soon after becoming Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg promised “the most significant programmes of [...]
Forgotten Liberal heroes: Margaret Wintringham
Listen to Liberal Democrats make speeches and there are frequent references to historical figures, but drawn from a small cast. Just the quartet of John Stuart Mill, William Gladstone, David Lloyd George, David Penhaligon corner almost all of the market, especially since Bob Maclennan stopped making speeches to party conference. Some of the forgotten figures [...]
Crowdsourcing meets academia as public enlisted to transcribe Jeremy Bentham's papers
From the New York Times via a friend’s Facebook feed: Since University College London began transcribing the papers of the Enlightenment philosopher Jeremy Bentham more than 50 years ago, it has published 27 volumes of his writings — less than half of the 70 or so ultimately expected. The painstaking job of transcribing often hard-to-decipher [...]
The most boring day in history…
… was April 11, 1954 it would appear. Or at least so says a group of computer experts who have been crunching the data: According to the results of the search machine, called True Knowledge, on that day a general election was held in Belgium, a Turkish academic was born and an Oldham Athletic footballer [...]
