Parties
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Early women MPs: Margaret Wintringham and Parliament
In September 1921, Margaret Wintringham (1879-1955) was elected to the House of Commons as the first ever Liberal woman MP. Dr Mari Takayanagi, Senior Archivist at the Parliamentary Archives, discusses Wintringham, her election, and the issues she supported in Parliament.…
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William Augustus, duke of Cumberland, ‘the real Prime Minister’ and ‘the strangest cabinet in British history’
2021 is the 300th anniversary of the birth of one of British history’s most controversial characters: William Augustus, duke of Cumberland, younger son of George II and the brutal victor of the battle of Culloden. Dr Robin Eagles, editor of…
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The Earl of Aberdeen and the Scottish Peerage By-election of 1721
With two by-elections to the Commons on the horizon, in the latest blog for the Georgian Lords, Dr Stuart Handley looks back on the by-election for a Scots representative peer to sit in the House of Lords that took place…
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Party in Eighteenth-Century Politics
Ahead of next Tuesday’s Virtual IHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar, we hear from Dr Max Skjönsberg, of the University of Liverpool. On 2 March 2021, between 5.15 p.m. and 6.30 p.m., Max will be responding to your questions about his…
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Powell’s Predecessors: The British Radical Right and Opposition to Commonwealth Immigration in Britain, 1952-1967
Ahead of Tuesday’s Virtual IHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar, we hear from Dr Liam Liburd, at King’s College London. On 1 December 2020, between 5:15 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., Liam will be responding to your questions about his pre-circulated paper…
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Post-war politics in the Welsh valleys: ‘socialists by birth and background’
Today, Emma Peplow, co-ordinator of the History of Parliament’s oral history project and co-editor of the new collection of extracts from the project, The Political Lives of Postwar British MPs: an Oral History of Parliament, contributes to our local history…
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A tribute to John M. H. Lee
In the fifth blog of this sombre series that pays tribute to interviewees from our Oral History Project, Emma Peplow looks back on the life and career of John Lee, Labour MP for Reading (1966-70) and Birmingham Handsworth (Feb 1974-79),…
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A tribute to Joe Ashton, MP for Bassetlaw 1968-2001
This is our third blogpost paying tribute to former MPs and interviewees of our Oral History Project who have sadly passed away during the current crisis. Here project lead Dr Emma Peplow remembers Joe Ashton, MP for Bassetlaw October 1968-2001.…
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The royal scandal that helped change British politics: the 1820 Queen Caroline affair
On 5 June 1820 Caroline of Brunswick returned to England to take her place as Queen Consort to George IV. But the breakdown in the couple’s relationship would become a matter of parliamentary and national importance. This blog from Dr…
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Friends reunited? The end of the Whig Schism
In the summer of 1720 a schism that had divided the Whig Party into competing factions was finally healed. Dr Charles Littleton, senior research fellow in the House of Lords 1715-90 section, considers how this came about and how those…
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‘Where the disease is desperate, the remedy must be so too’: debating the 1721 Quarantine Act
The latest blog for the Georgian Lords considers the topical issue of quarantine. In the 1720s the government was forced to update its quarantine legislation, but as Dr Charles Littleton of our Lords 1715-1790 project shows, it received spirited opposition…
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Voices from the Oral History Project – Chris Smith
Unusually for a profile of one of our Oral History Project interviewees, Chris Smith has not recently passed away! Yet as the first sitting MP who chose to publicly come out, his is a fascinating interview to focus on this…