ALIVE – AND STILL KICKING: THE RHS AT 150

Abstract

Marking and reflecting on the Royal Historical Society’s major anniversaries has not typically been a function of our Transactions. In his presidential address of February , C. W. C. Oman unsurprisingly made no mention of the Society’s fiftieth anniversary. Noting that he was employed at Whitehall in three different types of war work and had read only one book of history in the past year, Oman identified himself ‘as one of the much-cursed tribe of censors’ employed by the government to police dissemination of contemporary historical records, and proceeded to use this vantage point to reflect on what we now term ‘fake news’, that is ‘the genesis and development of Rumours, Reports, and Legends of a false or exaggerated sort, during times of military or political crisis’. Like Oman before him, R. A. (Robin) Humphreys, president of the Society at its centenary in , failed to note this milestone in the Transactions – indeed, no presidential address from  was published by the Society, with A Centenary Guide to the Publications of the Royal Historical Society – instead appearing to mark this anniversary. Ian Archer’s ‘ Years of Royal Historical Society Publishing’ in this volume thus represents an innovation – one that merits being read alongside both the articles here (drawn from our past year of public lectures and symposia), and also our new anniversary blog, Historical Transactions (https://blog.royalhistsoc.org/). Archer’s survey, informed not only by our archive and publications but also by his many years of sterling service for the Society as a literary director, provides several salutary reminders that the RHS is not now as pioneering as we may wish to think. He observes that women historians were prominent in the Society’s publications – winning two-thirds of the RHS Alexander Prizes between  and  and accounting for  per cent of published papers in the s, for example – long before the advent of second-wave feminism. Furthermore, earlier incarnations of the RHS (like the Society in )