last update: 7 February 2006
A quick, up-to-date guide to research tools available from the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College London and via the internet is available from this website. War Studies dissertation training - February 2006 provides a guide to resources for both university students and anyone interested in military conflict in modern times.
Richard Holmes, Professor of Military and Security Studies at the Cranfield Institute and well-known television presenter of Military history, will deliver the next Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives annual lecture. The lecture will be Wednesday, 10 May 2006 at 17.30. The venue now will be in the Raked Lecture Theatre in the basement of King’s College on the Strand, room 2B16. As usual, admission is free of charge and the public are invited to attend.
Invaluable papers relating to World War Two have been secured for King’s College Archives thanks to generous grants led by one from the National Heritage Memorial Fund for £182,000. Papers of Field Marshall Alan Francis Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke of Brookeborough, (1883-1963) provide direct evidence of decisions including those of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, taken at the top level of British command. For more details, see the King’s College Press release National treasure secured at King’s.
The text is now available online here for the most recent Annual Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives Lecture, 'How the cold war froze the history of World War Two' given by Professor David Reynolds, FBA on Tuesday, 15 November 2005. It joins the texts of 11 previous LHCMA annual lectures available online providing readers a wide-ranging review of topics related to modern military history.
Our most recent online exhibition, From Empire to Nationhood available on this site, explores the legacy of the Second World War. The story of the Cold War is set in the context of the decline of empire and rise of the nation state. The exhibition contains a wealth of images from collections held in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives.
(June 2005) With the assistance of web team at King's College London we have developed a new searching facility which for the first time enables our users to search across both our Summary Guides and Detailed catalogues in a single search. As before, from the new search page it is possible to search the mass of Summary Guides or Detailed catalogues separately or to search individual Detailed catalogues.
The new search page facility is easy to reach by means of a direct link from most pages of the LHCMA website, improving overall navigation. Another benefit of this upgrading is a new search page for the Location Register of Twentieth Century Defence Personnel.
We are grateful to the King's College London web team for the work they are putting into this project.
(23 July 2003) We are delighted to announce the deposit of a large collection of Waterloo medals in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives thanks to the generosity of Mr Stuart Gager. The Waterloo Medal was the first campaign medal issued to all ranks and to the next of kin of all those killed in action. It was also the first campaign medal on which both the recipient's name, rank and unit was imprinted around the edge. This detail together with related medals and a quantity of associated research material opens up a variety of extremely interesting possibilities for socio-demographic research. See Gager Collection of Waterloo Medals (1815-2003).
Why display them at King's College London? Because the Duke of Wellington (who is named on the medal along with a winged figure of Victory) was also a founding father of King's College London. In 1828 in the Freemasons' Tavern he chaired the first meeting of the provisional committee of King's College London at which the formal decision to found the College was taken and public support for the establishment sought. He subsequently served as a member of the College Council.
The Archives and Corporate Records Services, of which the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives forms a part, would like to invite any readers interested in scientific discovery to inspect our online exhibition prepared for the 50th anniversary of the announcement in 1953 of the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule. The online exhibition entitled DNA: the King's story celebrates the work of the King's men and women who helped to crack the code of DNA beginning from 1947 until the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Maurice Wilkins, Frances Crick and James Watson in 1962.
Included in the exhibition are a timeline of the discovery, a list of frequently asked questions and a collection of images including the key individuals, the cameras and equipment used and the x-ray photographs produced at King's which led to the deduction of the double-helical structure of the DNA molecule.
'DNA: the King's Story' was prepared by the staff of the Archives and Corporate Records Department of King's College London with the encouragement and support of Professor Raymond Gosling and the late Professor Maurice Wilkins, to whom the staff are grateful.