History School of Humanities

Inaugural Lecture by Prof Peter Jackson. September 2014 - Muscular internationalism: French Civil society activism and the quest for peace and security, 1890-1919.

Inaugural Lecture by Prof Lynn Abrams. May 2014.

Inaugural Lecture by Prof Callum Brown. Historians have long spoken about “civilisation” as something rooted in a religious morality. Many of them have feared its decline with the growth of atheism. In this lecture, Callum Brown explores the nature of this argument, and places it in the context of a western society in which, in many places already, atheism and no religionism are major or even dominant life stances. What does being without religion mean for “civilisation”? Humanists claim that people are “good without god”. Can the historian test this argument? Can it be that secularisation may be shown to be a beneficial development for humankind?

Inaugural Lecture by Prof Dauvit Broun. Scotland's beginnings are normally explained in terms of how the kingdom emerged in the early middle ages. A different approach is taken to Scottish origins in this lecture. Instead of asking how the kingdom expanded to its current borders, the first question is when did the kingdom's inhabitants first thing of 'Scotland' and 'Scots' in the basic way that we do today? When did they first think that the regions ruled by the king of Scots formed a single country and people? The answer is: the thirteenth century. From this starting point, Prof. Broun goes on to consider what 'Scotland' and 'Scots' meant before the thirteenth century, and why it changed. Is there any way of tracing what people at large thought about 'Scotland' and 'Scots', when the written sources are few in number and produced by and for the elite? The lecture dips into other disciplines before returning to discuss what history can offer not only for our understanding of Scottish origins, but our present-day society generally.

Professor Wendy Lower is the John K. Roth Chair of History and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College and is a research associate of the Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich. In this guest lecture Professor Lower discusses the role women played in the Nazi regime.

Professor Dauvit Broun speaking about the 1297 Wallace uprising