Before services were centralised to London, many regions looked after their own affairs – and thrived.
Articles on 19th century
Displaying 1 - 20 of 55 articles
Ads from the 19th and 20th centuries shows how the industry has long tried to promote coal as clean and even healthy, despite evidence to the contrary.
The devastating 1839 hurricane that hit the island of Ireland had unexpected benefits for some decades later.
The memoir of Nathaniel Isaacs, a Jewish merchant who found himself shipwrecked in what is now South Africa, influenced Shaka’s long-lasting fame abroad.
In many of Austen’s novels, going out in the rain meant risking illness or death. Was this really the case?
Two hundred years ago, the Erie Canal was often derided as a ‘folly.’ Yet the waterway went on to transform the American frontier.
The Trump administration’s current use of 19th-century tools to solve 20th-century problems threatens to take America back to the 19th century.
The theatre offered queer Victorian men a space to express their identities, at a time when homosexuality was criminalised.
Between 40% and 50% of children didn’t live past 5 in the US during the 19th century. Popular authors like Charles Dickens documented the common but no less gutting grief of losing a child.
The most politically divided time in US democracy coincided with a boom in new communications technologies, confrontational political influencers and widespread disinformation. It wasn’t 2024.
May 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the Immigration Act of 1924, which sharply cut the number of people allowed into the US.
Mothers are smudged out and poorly cloaked beneath drapes in these 19th century portraits. But these photos are not so much relics of shoddy photography than an ode to childhood.
Hybrid flowers became a metaphor for sterility at the end of the 19th century.
The idea of Manifest Destiny inspired Americans to push west, leading to the creation of the first national parks. But those beliefs spelled removal for many Native American groups.
With its iconic designs and its showcasing of women writers, the Yellow Book gave its name to the decade.
Curators have concentrated on the small and everyday to communicate a sense of life in 19th century China.
Despite the association of ‘Luddite’ with a naïve rejection of technology, the term and its origins are far richer and more complex than you might think.
Davy’s famous lectures on the animating power of electricity may have inspired a young Mary Shelley as she came up with the idea for Frankenstein.
The 1859 book ‘Self-Help’ by Scottish journalist and physician Samuel Smiles was written in bite-sized pieces reminiscent of today’s wellness and lifestyle New Year tips.
Edwina Preston tells why her favourite literary heroine is Seven Little Australians’ Judy Woolcot and her ‘bone-true authenticity of self’ – beating fellow tomboys Jo March and Anne Shirley.
Top contributors
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Professor of English, Macalester College
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Visiting Assistant Professor of History, Miami University
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Maitre de conferences en histoire de l'Europe moderne, Université de York, Fellow 2018 - IEA de Paris, Institut d'études avancées de Paris (IEA) – RFIEA
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Associate Professor of History, Michigan State University
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Doctoral Researcher in Politics, University of Surrey
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Associate Professor of Communication, Texas A&M University
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Professor of History and Chair of the Program in History of Science and Medicine, Yale University
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Professor of Political History, University of Nottingham
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Professor of American History, Università di Torino
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Research Associate on the Davy Notebooks Project, Lancaster University
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Associate professor, Indiana University
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Research Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of London
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Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Centennial Professor in Drama, The University of Texas at Austin
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Professor of English and former Academic Director of the Public Humanities Hub, University of British Columbia
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Chancellor and Professor of English, Indiana University Kokomo