Annual Public History Lecture – King Charles I, Parliamentary Sovereignty and Brexit: The Relevance of History

Speaker: Professor Glenn Burgess, Professor of History at the University of Hull

Our world is awash with historical claims and comparisons. You can hardly read a newspaper or check your Twitter feed without coming across comparisons between today’s politics and the 1930s. Neo-liberal capitalism, it is said, is returning us to the gross inequalities of America’s Gilded Age of the late 19th century. Climate activism draws comparison, not always admiring, with the student politics of the 1960s. And – as this lecture will suggest – comparison can be drawn between the parliamentary troubles of a seventeenth-century monarch and a twenty-first- century prime minister. And yet, at the same time, in our education system and our culture, History and the Humanities are threatened, their relevance, usefulness and value questioned. This lecture will explore the essential role played by History in helping us to make sense of the human world that we inhabit, and the importance of historical literacy for a healthy democratic society.