History at The Open University

Lotte Hughes, Annie E Coombes and Karega-Munene have just published Managing Heritage, Making Peace: History, Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kenya (I.B. Tauris 2013).  Kenya stands at a crossroads in its history and heritage, as the nation celebrates its fiftieth anniversary of independence from Britain in 2013.

At this important juncture, what parts of its history, including the Mau Mau uprising, do citizens and state wish to remember and commemorate and what is best forgotten or occluded? What does heritage mean to ordinary Kenyans, and what role does it play in building nationhood and forging peace and reconciliation?  Find out more about this book.

 

Deborah Brunton’s book Health and Wellness in the 19th Century (Greenwood, 2013) has just been published.

The book explores medical ideas and practice in the 19th century around the world, this book showcases the wide range of medical ideas, practices, institutions, and patient experiences, revealing how the exchanges of ideas and therapies between different systems of medicine resulted in patients enjoying a surprising degree of choice. The work provides an introduction to 19th-century medicine and sets the advancement of medicine within the context of wider historical changes. Chapters examine areas of dramatic change, such as the development of surgery, as well as the fundamental continuities in the use of traditional forms of supernatural healing, covering western, Chinese, unani, ayurvedic, and folk medicine-based understandings of the body and disease. Additionally, the book describes how the culture of medicine reflected and responded to the challenges posed by urbanization, industrialization, and global movement. Find out more.

 

Yoshi Kikuchi, a former research student of the Department of History of Science, Technology and Medicine, has published a new book partly based on his PhD thesis on Anglo-Japanese relations in chemistry submitted to the OU in 2006.

Anglo-American Connections in Japanese Chemistry: The Lab as Contact Zone (Palgrave Macmillan) also draws on his postdoctoral research on American-Japanese relations at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (Philadelphia), MIT and Harvard University.

The book analyses the dynamic cross-cultural interplay between British and American chemists and their Japanese students in a variety of “contact zones” in three continents and its consequences for the institutionalization of scientific and technological higher education in Japan in the late nineteenth and twentieth century.  Find out more about this book.

 

Christian Bailey’s new book Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926-1950 seeks to understand how Germans became such ‘good Europeans’ after 1945. Whereas many histories of European integration tend to largely focus on the diplomatic goings-on between elites, this book focuses on how support for a united Europe was cultivated in civil society. It asks if, and how, incorporating West Germany into an integrated Europe helped to democratize German political culture and to establish the new state as a reliable member of the Western bloc during the Cold War era. Find out more about this book.

 

Dr Gemma Allen’s new book, The Cooke Sisters: Education, Piety and Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press), has just been published. Part of the select group of Tudor women allowed access to a formal education, the Cooke sisters were also well-connected through their marriages to influential Elizabethan politicians.

Drawing particularly on their own writings, this book reconstructs for the first time the sisters’ humanist education and reveals the extent of their religious and political agency.