Recently global headlines celebrated the news that the World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended the RTS,S vaccine for use against malaria. While the headlines claimed this was “groundbreaking,” a “major milestone,” and a “historic day,” it didn’t take long for a note of caution to creep in.[1] The vaccine is less effective than many had… Read more →
Tag: british history
Black Before Florence: Black Nurses, Enslaved Labor, and the British Royal Navy, 1790–1820
Throughout the eighteenth century, the British Royal Navy embarked on a scheme of hospital construction in the Atlantic World. The largest hospitals were in the British Isles, but those that dealt with the highest mortality were in the Greater Caribbean. Most naval medical history focuses on male medical officers, while most nursing history examines the… Read more →
Love in the Ton: Georgette Heyer’s Legacy in Regency Romance World-Building
Georgette Heyer is widely considered to be the pioneer of the Regency romance. From 1921 to 1972, Heyer published thirty-seven romances set in the Georgian or Regency eras.1 But Heyer’s fiction never reflected the realities of life in Regency England. Although she was an avid researcher, particularly when a subject interested her, she nevertheless invented… Read more →
Worcestershire Sauce and the Geographies of Empire
Had a Bloody Mary to drink at brunch? Ate a Caesar salad last week? Munched on deviled eggs at that party? All of these dishes, and many more, commonly are made with Worcestershire sauce. But behind this seemingly innocuous condiment is a much larger colonial history that touches on issues of authenticity, domestication, and Anglicization…. Read more →
Colorizing and Fictionalizing the Past: A Review of Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old
Five years ago, the Imperial War Museum in London contacted Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) and tasked him with presenting some 100+ hours of archival footage from the First World War in a “fresh and original” way, without any new or modern footage. For over half a decade, Jackson and his team… Read more →
“Everything Seems Wrong:” The Postwar Struggles of One Female Veteran of the First World War
Around the world, ceremonies, public art installations, concerts, lectures, and educational events are commemorating the fallen of the First World War, to make beauty, peace, and sense out of a century of global grief. These ceremonies provide a critical sense of closure to a world still reeling from the political, economic, and personal ramifications of… Read more →
Proper Nurses: Regulating Nursing Care in the Royal Navy and the British Army in the 18th Century
The American Association for the History of Nursing is so pleased to partner with Nursing Clio for this special series, which showcases some of the innovative and diverse work being done by historians of nursing across the world. The AAHN holds its annual meeting this week in Rochester, New York, and these essays are windows into the… Read more →
Whose Body Is it Anyway? Decolonizing Narratives of Aboriginal Prisoners’ Health
When the British colonized Western Australia in 1829, they did so under the legal doctrine of “terra nullius,” or empty land. Of course, the area was inhabited – owned by the Indigenous Nyoongar people who were dispossessed from their land through frontier conflict, disease, physical dependency on European goods, and punishment under British law. By… Read more →
“We lost our appetite for food”: Why Eighteenth-Century Hangriness Might Not Be a Thing
In August 2015, Oxford Dictionaries declared that the word “hangry” had entered our common vocabulary. Surely most people living in the twenty-first century have experienced the sense of being simultaneously hungry and angry. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hunger was also everywhere. A recent NPR essay examines how slaveholders withheld food from enslaved people,… Read more →