From writer’s block to stiff competition, budding historical authors face a number of hurdles when it comes to getting their work published. So what, exactly, is the key to success? Here, we ask
Kent College History's insight:
Advice to aspiring authors originally published as part of BBC History Magazine’s Inspiring Writing competition.
A new book argues that the O. J. Simpson trial, the Oklahoma City bombing, and Monica Lewinsky invented the present.
Kent College History's insight:
A review of by Louis Manard of W. Joseph Campbell’s '1995: The Year the Future Began', descried as 'a worthy, informative, and sporting attempt to convince us that the world we live in was crucially shaped by things that happened in 1995.'
A superb online resource: digitized materials selected from the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (HPSSS). The digital collection consists chiefly of summary transcripts of 705 interviews conducted with refugees from the USSR during the early years of the Cold War.
In little more than a year as China’s president and head of the ruling Communist Party, Xi Jinping has made himself the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. Xi has demolished the collegial, consensus style of leadership put in place after the horrors of Mao’s self-aggrandizing Cultural Revolution. Xi’s campaign against corruption is being... Read more »
Kent College History's insight:
Canadian journalist, Jonathan Manthorpe, describes Xi Jinping's administration in modern China.
'Ferguson is Kissinger’s authorized biographer, and in 1,000 pages he begins the task of rescuing his subject’s tarnished reputation. It is a steep climb. The foreign policy chief for Presidents Nixon and Ford has been portrayed in dozens of books and by countless witnesses as a coddler of dictators, a cynical practitioner of realpolitik, a war-monger, a suck-up to superiors, and a tyrant to subordinates—his genius and wit matched only by his underhandedness.'
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. By Peter Frankopan. Bloomsbury; 656 pages; £30. To be published in America in February by Knopf. THIS is, to put it...
Kent College History's insight:
'The Huns, destroyers of the Roman Empire, bandaged the heads of their children, applying pressure to flatten the frontal and occipital bones, so causing their heads to grow in a pointed fashion.' A review of Peter Frankopan's new book, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World.
Share your videos with friends, family and the world
Kent College History's insight:
How do you know what you think you know? Noam Chomsky on propaganda, free speech and the press. Includes Chomsky's take on Vietnam, Watergate, COINTELPRO and the Gulf War.
On the eve of World War II, a British stockbroker saved the lives of more than 650 children trapped in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.
Kent College History's insight:
Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker who saved the lives of more than 650 children trapped in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II, died in July 2015.
The folks over at Texas Eagle Forum, the state chapter of Phyllis Schlafly's far-right organization, are worried that "leftist" ideology is infiltrating the sta
Kent College History's insight:
'The folks over at Texas Eagle Forum, the state chapter of Phyllis Schlafly’s far-right organization, are worried that “leftist” ideology is infiltrating the state’s public schools through the widely respected International Baccalaureate (IB) program. Seriously.'
Himmler called porcelain ‘one of the few things that give me pleasure’ and Hitler gave it as gifts. This is the extraordinary story of Porzellan Manufaktur Allach
Kent College History's insight:
Edmund de Waal, author of The White Road: A Pilgrimage of Sorts, on the porcelain factory at Dachau concentration camp.
It never helps historians to say too much about their working methods. For just as the conjuror’s magic disappears if the audience knows how the trick is done, so the credibility of scholars can be sharply diminished if readers learn everything about how exactly their books came to be . . .
Kent College History's insight:
Keith Thomas, author of Religion and the Decline of Magic, on the historian's method (which is not always systematic): 'A few of my most valued envelopes have disappeared altogether. I strongly suspect that they fell into the large basket at the side of my desk full of the waste paper with which they are only too easily confused.'
Gestures – usually made with the hand, but in some notable cases with other parts of the body entirely – form a symbolic, non-vocal language; a shorthand way of sending a message without t
Kent College History's insight:
Dr. Robert Hume considers the history – both real and imagined – of six popular (and unpopular) gestures.
Michael Todd Landis, an Assistant Professor of History at Tarleton State University, writes that 'the old labels and terms handed down to us from the conservative scholars of the early to mid-twentieth century no longer reflect the best evidence and arguments. The tired terms served either to reassure worried Americans in a Cold War world, or uphold a white supremacist, sexist interpretation of the past. The Cold War is over, and we must reject faulty frameworks and phrases.'
‘Self-indulgent wife murderer and tyrant’ tops poll of historical writers, ahead of Edward VIII and Charles I
Kent College History's insight:
'King John I may forever be known as a Bad King ... but according to history authors, it is Henry VIII who should bear the title of the worst monarch in history.'
'The libraries of Timbuktu in Mali contain over 400,000 manuscripts, mostly from the city’s glory days from the 1300s to the 1500s. The manuscripts range from contracts and sales receipts to books of religion, law, poetry, astronomy and history. Thanks to Timbuktu’s hot, dry weather (it stands at the edge of the Sahara), its deep love of books and its history as a seat of high learning, it has preserved an amazing treasure from Africa’s past.'
'The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.' John Pilger writing in 2008.
Excavators working on the Liverpool Street site that will house London's new Crossrail station have discovered a mass grave thought to contain 30 victims of The Great Plague of 1665.
Kent College History's insight:
'Excavators working on the Liverpool Street site that will house London's new Crossrail station have discovered a mass grave thought to contain 30 victims of The Great Plague of 1665.'
Prejudice against the medieval runs deep. It is an adjective applied to atrocity, severe punishment, out-of-date technology (this “medieval” typewriter), and all illiberal attitudes. For many, the Middle Ages are ineradicably reprehensible, as well as comic: knights immobilized in their armor, fat monks panting after licentious nuns, ladies locked into chastity belts.
Kent College History's insight:
'Prejudice against the medieval runs deep.' Eric Christiansen writing in the New York Review of Books.
Make a newspaper clipping with your own headline and story. In example to surprise friends and coworkers, send a birthday greeting or to give your next blog entry a special look.
Kent College History's insight:
A neat little app for creating newspaper clippings, cigarette packets, talking squirrels and various other essentials of everyday life.
We welcome the useful contribution made by Historians for Britain in the current issue of History Today, which provides a timely reminder of the value of history in contemporary debate. More spe...
Kent College History's insight:
Edward Madigan and Graham Smith of Royal Holloway, University of London: 'We welcome the useful contribution made by Historians for Britain in the current issue ofHistory Today, which provides a timely reminder of the value of history in contemporary debate ... As historians, however, we take issue with the statement’s highly reductive distortion of the history of the United Kingdom.'
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