Happy Birthday, Horace

Author: colinharding
Date: Monday, February 27, 2017
Section: Research

A female coke heaver at the South Metropolitan Gas Works, Old Kent Road, London. Photograph by Horace Nicholls © IWM.

17 February, 2017 marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of an important and yet comparatively little-known British photographer. Perhaps more than any other photographer, Horace Nicholls has shaped our perception of Britain during the first decades of the twentieth century. Even though his name is probably unfamiliar, you will almost certainly recognise his iconic images of fashionable upper class ladies at Ascot or, in stark contrast, women munitions workers during the First World War.

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Five more go through the War Office Selection Boards (WOSBs)

Author: ktomasiewicz
Date: Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Section: Research

left to right: Paul Cornish, Jamie Carlin, Kasia Tomasiewicz, Vikki Hawkins and Anna Ravenscroft of the IWM Second World War Galleries team

‘The test has now begun.’ These five words, which have struck fear into the hearts of many, seem oddly out of place in the Wellcome Collection’s impressive Reading Room. It’s not just the location, rather that all participants including five from the IWM’s Second World War Galleries team, are wearing false moustaches.

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Dirty Wars: A Century of Counterinsurgency

Author: srobbins
Date: Monday, December 12, 2016
Section: Research

Dirty Wars: A Century of Counterinsurgency by Simon Innes-Robbins ©IWM

It was with great delight and pleasure that I received copies of my book, Dirty Wars: A Century of Counterinsurgency, which was published by The History Press on 6 October and will be published in North America in February 2017. This is the first book written for IWM by a member of staff to fully explore the origins and continuing importance and relevance of counterinsurgency.

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Clare Carolin visits Limerick to see Still (the) Barbarians: EVA International the Irish Biennale, curated by Koyo Kouoh

Author: ccarolin
Date: Monday, October 3, 2016
Section: Research

A History of Stone, Origin and Myth (2016), Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley, Photo courtesy of Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley

A History of Stone, Origin and Myth (2016), Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley, Photo courtesy of Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley ‘I grew up with that border and I wouldn’t want it back again...’ intones the septuagenarian taxi driver taking me from Shannon Airport to Limerick. He is speaking of the boundary separating British-governed Ulster in the north from the Republic of Ireland, which since 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, abolished border controls, symbolically softening an 800 year-long conflict. Now, in the aftermath of June’s referendum, the border’s return seems inevitable:  a clear indicator of the disruption to the Irish peace process resulting from Brexit.

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Resistance to the First World War Conference

Author: sgrimshaw
Date: Friday, April 15, 2016
Section: Research

Community day: Conscientious objection and resistance to the first world war

Over the weekend of 18-20 March an international conference took place in Leeds, focusing on resistance to the First World War. The conference, which I helped to organise, brought together academics, community groups, poets and storytellers from across the globe, including delegates who had travelled from Australia and the USA. The conference was envisaged following the suggestion that the prominent narratives during the First World War Centenary were limited to stories of those who had actively participated in the war effort.

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'The Day After' 1983: real and imagined nuclear attack in the Cold War

Author: jbulgin
Date: Thursday, February 11, 2016
Section: Research

A large mushroom cloud from a British nuclear test in the 1950s

On the evening of November 20 1983, 100 million Americans settled down to watch Nicholas Meyer's made-for-TV film The Day After. The film’s focus was a familiarly normal community in rural Eastern Kansas in the lead up to, and aftermath of, nuclear war. It is shocking and arrestingly bleak viewing; moreover it was, and remained for years afterwards, the most highly rated TV film in US broadcast history. Its importance however, lies less in its status as a landmark media event than in what it demonstrates about the cultural imagination in the 1980s.

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The Imperial War Museum Sound Collection

Author: arichards
Date: Wednesday, January 6, 2016
Section: Research

The Imperial War Museum Sound Archive contains well over 60,000 hours of professionally recorded, documented and preserved material.

As we look forward to the New Year and begin to plan the various projects which will keep us busy over 2016, it is always useful to take a step back and consider the progress already made.  For over forty years, IWM has preserved one of the most important sound archives of its kind in the world.  Established in 1972, the Department of Sound Records, as it was then called, was an offspring of the museum’s Library which at that point included a handful of gramophone records.  The following decades saw the collection grow in size until, following a major restructuring in 2010, it was merged wi

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When the Fireweed Flowers

Author: jmcarthur
Date: Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Section: Research

C Eliot Hodgkin, ‘The Haberdashers’ Hall, 8th May 1945’, tempera on panel

June is the month when rosebay willow herb comes into flower, growing from derelict buildings, on wasteland and railway embankments across the UK. During the Second World War and in the following years, its spires of magenta flowers were common to see amidst the ruins and cleared bomb sites, hence the name it was given at the time - fireweed.

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