OpenLearn Profile
History & The Arts
History of reading tutorial 1: Finding evidence of reading in the past
...History of reading tutorial 1: Finding evidence of reading in the past, is the first in a series of tutorials designed to help users of the UK Reading Experience Database (UK RED) search, browse and use the resource, and explores the types of evidence historians have uncovered about the history of reading. Tutorial 2 (Red_2) and Tutorial 3 (Red_3) look at how this...
Level 2: Intermediate
2 hrs
Society, Politics & Law
History offers Britain an important lesson on shutting down immigration
...history repeating itself argues Dr Tendayi Bloom and Dr Katherine Tonkiss...[Immigration on map ] Immigration was at the centre of the EU referendum debate The rate of hate crimes reported in the UK has rocketed since the country voted to leave the European Union in June, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council. In 2013 we published research on the parallels...
History & The Arts
Ta, cheers, much obliged: A brief history of 'thanks' in English
...history of the phrase we find that it derives originally from the word ‘think’. In Old English (c.450 – c.1100) the primary sense of the noun ‘thank’ was ‘a thought’. From there, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the meaning moved to ‘favourable thought or feeling, good will’, and by the Middle Ages it had come to refer to ‘kindly thought or...
History & The Arts
Reading Between the Lines: uncovering racism and homophobia in British history
...history of ‘othering’ and lesbianism in Britain [Hermaphrodite engraving circa 1690] Engraving representing contemporary ideas on hermaphroditism, circa 1690. In her book Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801, the Irish novelist Emma Donoghue has written a lively account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British lesbian culture.
History & The Arts
Banning the bomb: a global history of activism against nuclear weapons
...histories of anti-nuclear activism’, with nine partner institutions in seven countries across five continents. This course was produced collaboratively by The Open University and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize....Introduction and guidance: Introduction - Nuclear weapons have been used in war twice, when...
Level 1: Introductory
6 hrs
Nature & Environment
The Hunt: a natural history series that challenges us to side with the predators
The Hunt's academic consultants and OU lecturers Miranda Dyson and Vicky Taylor look at the remarkable strategies predators and prey deploy...We’re here to reveal another side to “nature, red in tooth and claw”. Predators are commonly perceived as being ferocious successful hunters and their prey as having little or no chance of survival once the hunt is on. The truth...
Society, Politics & Law
Download your free 'The Secret History of Our Streets: Scotland' newspaper
...of the The Street newspaper...[The front page of The Street newspaper created for The Secret History of Our Streets: Scotland series] Download your newspaper by selecting this link This edition of the The Street covers stories on class, poverty, housing and migration. [What role does an agreement made in Montevideo in the 1930s have in the Scottish independence debate?]...