Being Human festival 2019: Discoveries & Secrets From trawling for treasures in archives to discovering secret lives and overlooked histories, the annual Being Human festival is back. And it’s on a mission to bring the latest humanities research to life in fun, inspiring and socially relevant ways.  It is the UK’s only national celebration of the humanities, and takes place from 14 to 23 November.

Many British people were shocked by media reports of the D-Day landings as they happened 75 years ago, according to original research material unearthed by academics at the Institute of English Studies ( IES ). They scoured thousands of government documents and photographs to learn how the Ministry of Information (MoI) assessed the British public’s reaction to the allied invasion. And here is what they learned in the ‘ Home Intelligence Reports’ and ‘Wartime Social Surveys’ .

Booth Poverty Map showing the Strand. The dark blue sections south west of Lincoln's Inn Fields were areas of severe poverty   Layers of London, an interactive map-based project at the Institute of Historical Research ( IHR ), has collaborated with the London School of Economics and Political Science ( LSE ) to include The Booth Poverty Map, which records a survey of the socio-economic conditions of the residents of London between 1886 and 1903, as a map layer to be explored online.  

History is just a story? Well it depends who is writing it. Your readers could be drawn or maybe they’ll just yawn. So to help develop your communication skills we have invited 2018 Costa book award winner Bart Van Es and the feminist and historian, Sarah Knott, to talk about new approaches to writing history in a lecture and panel discussion.