IWM Blog

  • Blog: Holocaust

    Guest Post: Holocaust Exhibitions Compared

    Our guest blogger, Angelika Schoder, conducted her recent PhD research into the representation of National Socialist crimes at IWM London, and the German Historical Museum, Berlin. Here she outlines the findings of her thesis, which will be published in Germany in spring 2014.
  • Blog: British Empire

    Who will make the UK’s Indigènes?

    The website Caribbean aircrew in the RAF during WW2 draws attention to the 1953 feature film Appointment in London, a story about Bomber Command starring Dirk Bogarde, and in particular to a scene showing Bogarde mixing with his peers: among the officers is one of Caribbean origin.
  • Blog

    Guest Post: West Indian soldiers in the First World War

    Arthur Torrington is one of three external specialist researchers on the Whose remembrance? project. Arthur's research looked at the contribution of West Indian soldiers to the First World War which he writes about here.
  • Blog: Colonial Troops

    Guest Post: South Asian seamen in the two world wars

    Ansar Ahmed Ullah, a member of the Swadhinata Trust, is one of three external specialist researchers on the Whose remembrance? project. Ansar writes here about his research into the experiences of South Asian seamen in the two world wars.
  • Blog: British Empire

    Whose Remembrance? project workshops

    As Project Manager of the AHRC sponsored Whose remembrance? project, I was responsible for drawing up the programme for the two workshops we held in the summer of 2012 - to enable both historians and museum professionals who have been researching aspects of this history to share their work.
  • Blog: British Empire

    Introducing the Whose Remembrance? Project

    For a large part of 2012 the Research Department has been working on an AHRC-sponsored scoping study called Whose Remembrance?. The study asked the IWM to identify whose stories were being included in the history of the First and Second World Wars and how this was affecting patterns of remembrance.
  • Blog: Second World War

    Bolts from the blue

    Barely 150 metres from Imperial War Museum Londonis the site of the most destructive explosion in Lambeth during the Second World War, which killed 43 people. Just before 8.30pm on the night of Thursday 4 January 1945 a huge explosion destroyed an apartment building, Surrey Lodge, on the corner of Kennington Road and Lambeth Road.
  • Blog: Film

    Restoring the First World War film The Battle of the Ancre and Advance of the Tanks (1917)

    The Battle of the Ancre and Advance of the Tanks (1917) is a little known masterpiece of British non-fiction cinema that documents the winter stages of the Somme campaign on the Western Front.
  • Blog: First World War

    Saving Lives

    As part of a major project supported by the Wellcome Trust, I catalogued some of the IWM’s medical collections which had hitherto been largely unavailable to researchers.
  • Blog: Collaborative Doctoral Awards (PhD)

    Prisoners of War on the Sumatra Railway

    February this year saw the seventieth anniversary of the Fall of Singapore on 15th of that month 1942. Between June of that year and October 1943, over 60,000 Allied troops would be forced to labour as prisoners of war (POWs) on the Burma-Thailand railway.
  • Blog: Medicine

    Cataloguing IWM medical collections

    One of the most rewarding aspects of my work since I joined the Research Department has been cataloguing IWM’s medical collections.
  • Blog: Conference

    Film Archivists in China: the 2012 FIAF congress

    The collective noun for a gathering of film archivists? A vault? A screening? The more cynical might say a confusion. Certainly, at the annual congress of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) held in Beijing in May.