Michael Reeve

Exhibition: working-class community and mutual aid during the First World War Remembering to Help, Helping to Remember, an exhibition funded by an SSLH grant, has opened at the Heugh Battery Museum in Hartlepool. Michael Reeve reports. Stories of the struggles, heroism and s…

New on the website
Remembering to Help, Helping to Remember, an exhibition funded by an SSLH grant, has opened at the Heugh Battery Museum in Hartlepool
sslh.org.uk/2025/10/04/e...

blog About | Events | Meet us | Contact | Join BLOG: Teaching in a Time of Crisis conference, 29 May 2025 – reasons to be cheerful? Alex Riggs Regional Ambassador, Midlands and Michael Reeve Co-Ch…

HL+ committee members Dr Alex Rigg & Dr Michael Reeve have written a blogpost about the Teaching in a Time of Crisis Conference 2025 at University of Warwick. Have a read! historylab.plus/blog/

@historyuk.bsky.social @ihrhistorylab.bsky.social @alexriggsby.bsky.social @drmichaelreeve.bsky.social

This is both an incredibly niche thing but I think it should be more of a thing. Caffè Nero subscribes to the British Newspaper Archive so it’s all free on their wifi. There. I said it.

Where now for Britain’s Universities? UK higher education now faces a very bleak future, retreating in the face of little public sympathy and limited political interest.

ICYMI on Tuesday, here's my *new* and *free* short-form summary of what's gone wrong in our universities. This is something of a last word really, because unless the Budget and White Paper do something really radical, the fate of much HE is already sealed.
politicalquarterly.org.uk/blog/where-n...

No Right to Return or Remain: French Colonial Soldiers and Discriminatory Demobilization This post explores experiences of veterancy for those who had served in France’s colonial Forces.

I wrote this short blog on the discriminatory demobilisation of French colonial troops for the Returning Soldier network: returningsoldier.co.uk/2025/09/18/n...

Join me on Nov 13 for my talk:

A Recipe for Resistance? Vegetarianism and Ethics in the anti-Nazi Underground.

My alternative title was: First add oats, then kill Hitler.

Well-being Past and Present In this exciting interdisciplinary volume, researchers, archivists, curators and social scientists offer a fresh exploration of the concept of well-being in Bri…

Available here: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/wellbeing...

Chuffed to have received my copy of this book edited by @siobhanhyland.bsky.social & colleagues at @uninorthampton.bsky.social. I have a chapter in it about the health discourses surrounding smoking & alcohol during the First World War. A great variety of other interdisciplinary work in there too.

A photo realistic illustration of a woman in overalls, hoovering and deep cleaning the fabric seats of a railway carriage

The modern world in old Ladybird books.

"Carriages get very dirty inside from all the tobacco ash"

(On the Railways, 1972)
Artist: John Berry

OldRailwayAccidents (@rwldproject.bsky.social) 200 for #Railway200 - a new thread! We're 200 days out from the 200th anniversary of the 1st passenger journey on the Stockton & Darlington Railway, on 27 September 1825. To mark it, we'll post a…

As the cinders cool from yesterday's 200th anniversary Stockton & Darlington celebrations, find out more about railway work, the people who did it, & the risks they faced in our HUGE thread.

👇

#Railway200

Our next FREE #HL+DocsCom event is TODAY! Join Co-Chairs @drmichaelreeve.bsky.social & @northumbriauni.bsky.social's Kathy Davies in the McMordie Room @qubelfastofficial.bsky.social from 11:30 for tea & inspiration: the amazing @sophcocooper.bsky.social will be talking 'From ECR to Senior Lecturer'!

The exhibition is open now at the Heugh Battery Museum in Hartlepool - a hidden gem if you've never been! The museum is open Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. More info here: www.heughbattery.co.uk

The historical interpretation is based on my research, but it was definitely a team effort - museum manager Diane Stephens made it happen and the whole thing looks so good thanks to designer Phil Eldridge. Thanks again to the @sslh.bsky.social for their generous grant.

...fixture in Hartlepool from 1915 until well into the interwar years. So, out of destruction came solidarity and mutual aid which, over time, dovetailed into memorialisation. It's an interesting story that has not been told before in the museum. There is a fuller story in a tie-in booklet...

...the bravery of ordinary passers by and health workers. After the initial response, there were local efforts to commemorate the events, which folded into processes of charitable fundraising for the hospitals that helped those injured in the bombardment.
'Thank-offering Days' became a regular...

A view of the gallery space at the Heugh Battery Museum

Historian Michael Reeve stood in the gallery space at the Heugh Battery Museum

The tie-in booklet that accompanies the exhibition

Finally launched 'Remembering to Help, Helping to Remember' at the weekend - a new exhibition about #FWW civilian experience in Hartlepool following the Dec 1914 naval bombardment of the town (with a generous grant from @sslh.bsky.social). It covers the emergency response to the attack, including...

Looking forward to heading over to Belfast for this @historylabplus.bsky.social event! Great opportunity to meet other early-career historians, chat about research and do some fun stuff too (like a museum tour and our 'History Open Mic'). There's still time to sign up, if you can make it.

Belfast! Come join me as we collaboratively imagine the concept of a History Open Mic night.

I'll be sharing some of my "Too-Spicy for Social Media" Historical Hot Takes and outlining the MCCU (the Maurice Casey Cinematic Universe - which is not just a conceited term for early C20th Europe!)

A good summary of how it’s going. Finished my PhD 9 years ago and am still stringing things together. As the first Anon says, what does ECR (or Mid-career) even mean anymore? That kind of career linearity depends on first vaulting over the fault line of secure/insecure - now a nearly impossible task

As part of our Network Northern Ireland 2025 event @mauricejcasey.com will be hosting our latest History Open Mic Night w/ special guests at The Pavillion pub in Belfast. Open to all.

Did I get all of Britain's main architectural styles in one photo here? Exchange Square, Manchester.

In most places, the majority of research is done by PhD students. Much of that unfunded or internally funded. Research culture dies without them.

'"You can’t have hobbyist research that’s unfunded going on in institutions. We can’t afford it.”'

Such a badly formulated phrasing of the issues, so open to so many misinterpretations. If this is the level of thinking about research among sector leaders and policy-makers, be very afraid.

Poetry under fire: what poems did during the First World War 5.30pm, Tuesday 11 November 2025 Craiglockhart Campus, Edinburgh Napier University What did the First World War do to poetry? What did poetry do during the First World War? In this lecture, Dr Julia Ribeiro Thomaz will explore a brand new corpus of war poets to interrogate not what is a good or bad war poem nor what war poems say about the war, but rather the social and cultural functions accomplished by poetry in 1914-1918: inventing itself, creating social links, anchoring the war in relation to a poetic past and multiple imagined futures, mediating the experience of war, and producing knowledge about the conflict. She will explore how the expansion of our definition of war poetry allows us to ask new questions about the First World War, as well as future possibilities to continue broadening our understanding of what war poetry was and, above all, what it did and continues doing for those writing and reading it. Dr Julia Ribeiro Thomaz is a postdoctoral researcher at Université de Lille. She completed her doctorate, on French poetry of the First World War, at Université Paris Nanterre. Julia has already published widely in academic journals, and is a Fellow of the International Society for First World War Studies. This lecture continues the annual series of Remembrance lectures at Edinburgh Napier University, marking the historical significance of Craiglockhart as a War Hospital during the First World War, famously the meeting place of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. We also remember our late colleague Catherine Walker, who was for many years curator of the War Poets Collection. Funding comes from the Centre for Arts, Media and Culture and the Centre for Military Research, Education & Public Engagement.

This year the event is also the Dennis Showalter Memorial Lecture, selected by the International Society for First World War Studies. Named after Dennis Showalter, the leading historian of Germany during the war and a longtime friend and supporter of the Society it is delivered each year by a leading early career researcher in First World War Studies. The event is held in the Rivers Suite at Edinburgh Napier University’s Craiglockhart Campus (Google map | travel info). There will be a wine reception from 5.30pm; the lecture will start around 6pm. The event will also be streamed online via Zoom. If you have any queries about the event, please contact Dr Andrew Frayn (a.frayn@napier.ac.uk). This event is both in person and online. If you wish to attend online, please buy an 'online Ticket'. Zoom information will be found in the email confirmations.

We are delighted to share the details for this year's Dennis Showalter Memorial Lecture 'Poetry under fire: what poems did during the First World War' to be delivered by @juliarsct.bsky.social on 11th Nov 2025

You can book to attend in person or online:

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/remembranc... 🗃️

New bibliography entry: Otto Dix and the Great War: Reality, Memory, and the Construction of Identity in The Trench (1923) and the Portfolio The War (1924) ift.tt/891wvDU #FWWstudies

The next event in our @wellcometrust.bsky.social @sshmedicine.bsky.social -funded conference series will be ‘War, Trauma and Emotional Injury’, which takes place at @unibirmingham.bsky.social on 6-7 November #milwelfhist

deliberately avoiding the latest Alien Earth episode to keep alive the dream that this might finally be the episode that the xenomorph enjoys a soothing visitor experience to The Museum of English Rural Life

OUT NOW: 'City of Capital and Labour: The Making and Transformation of Industrial Manchester' by Tom Saunders, a bold reinterpretation of Manchester’s industrial past through architecture, archaeology, and class struggle. buff.ly/RVAo2gd

We are enormously thankful for the equally enormous response our call has generated: we have recieved 𝟭𝟮𝟬 paper proposals and 𝟭𝟲 three-to-five person panel proposals!

A little over three weeks until this event. A great variety of stuff on the programme, both scholarly and social! Still time to sign up!