History Compass 2007 Graduate Essay Prize - Results

Many thanks to all of you who entered the 2007 Graduate Essay Prize.

The final results are listed below (and are also available as a PDF). Winners and runners-up will be published in History Compass, with winners also receiving $200 / £100 of free Blackwell books.

Winners

Falsified by History: Menzies, Asia and Post-Imperial Australia
Mads Clausen, University of Copenhagen (Australasia & Pacific Prize)

NICE Paintings – the National Inventory of Continental European Paintings

Image details: ‘La Falaise à Fécamp’ by Claude Monet, 1881 © Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum

Guest Post: Andrew Greg, Project Director, National Inventory Research Project, Department of History of Art, Univeristy of Glasgow

‘NICE Paintings’ is a pioneering database aiming to bring together in one searchable catalogue all 22,000 old master paintings in UK museums. The first phase of the project is now on line at http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/NIRP/index.php. It contains detailed records of nearly 8,000 pre-1900 Continental European oil paintings from 200 public collections across the United Kingdom. Over 2,500 are illustrated with digital colour images, and more images are being added regularly.

Although a growing number of, mainly large, museums are producing on line catalogues of their collections, most museums do not have on-line catalogues and there is no union catalogue of any aspect of UK museums’ collections that brings together all their holdings into one searchable database. In addition, it has long been recognised that smaller museums do not have access to the expertise to enable them to research their specialist collections and that this is a barrier to publicising and making full use of these collections. The project’s methodology therefore was to bring together the research skills of academic art historians and the under-researched collections of often hard-pressed museum curators.

History Compass Collaboration with H-Diplo

History Compass is very pleased to announce a collaboration with H-Diplo and H-France! We have made History Compass author Peter Jackson’s article Post-War Politics and the Historiography of French Strategy and Diplomacy Before the Second World War temporarily free on the History Compass site, and linked to the H-Diplo listserv where Prof. Robert Young has written up a commentary. H-Diplo are hosting a discussion around this piece, so add your feedback on the commentary to the Discussion List; alternatively, you can Post Your Feedback on the History Compass website.