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Aug 13

How to abuse and misuse history: a guide from twentieth-century politics

By Spike Lister

The utilisation of history in political discourse has itself a long history. For as long as there has been a public space and a shared experience, communities have looked to the past as a lens through which to understand their issues. History offers us a guiding light by which to move forwards or a source from which to draw blood-curdling parallels to our present circumstances. Consequently, it should not surprise us in such complex and disruptive times that historical parallels abound as a means of garnering political support. In periods of political intricacy and seemingly tectonic historic change, it is inevitable that politicians draw from the past to assert the continuity of their policies within a nation’s historical experience, or to draw ominous parallels between history and the present day.

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Aug 6

The Politics of the Archive: reflections, observations and challenges

By Tamara Fernando (@TamaraFernando3)

One rainy winter day in 2016, I was navigating the cavernous halls and corridors of the British Museum, looking for the Department of Prints and Drawings. I had arrived to examine two seventeenth-century engraved frontispieces depicting Saint Augustine, the early Church Father, for an MPhil project on the reception of Augustine’s works. When I finally located the correct floor, I was hailed down by a museum guard at the entrance: ‘Madam, this is not the tourist section’ they volunteered. I mumbled an explanation about an appointment with the Curator of Prints—which presumably got muffled, because the staff repeated (this time louder and slower): ‘Maadamm, NO touurissts here’, making a wide crossing-arm gestures to clarify. Something about my age, gender or the colour of my skin and hair, signalled tourist, not researcher.

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Jul 30

Unconventional History: El Paso, Texas according to an early-twentieth-century postcard

By Savannah Pine (@savannah_pine)

El Paso, Texas (my hometown) features in the news frequently nowadays because of the migrant crisis and the administration’s desire to build a wall on the border between the United States and Mexico. The border, which lies along the Rio Grande, separates a large urban area into two cities: El Paso in the US and Juárez, in Mexico. But people have long travelled across the border, as this early-twentieth-century postcard demonstrates: a streetcar rides the El Paso & Juárez Streetcar Line from downtown Juárez, over the international bridge, and down El Paso Street to downtown El Paso. My professor sent me this postcard last year as a graduation gift and I decided to find the modern version. However, it was more difficult than I thought without institutional access to research resources. This is the story of how I did unconventional historical research.

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Jul 23

Ghettoes to Gentrification: How Hollywood Shaped America’s Urban Imagination

By Sam Collings-Wells (@Sam_cw_)

‘And they hide their faces / And they hide their eyes / Cause the city is dyin’/ And they don’t know why’.

These lyrics from Randy Newman’s 1977 ‘Baltimore’—later made famous by Nina Simone’s justly celebrated cover—perfectly captured the spirit urban life during the mid-1970s. Historians would later pinpoint the variety of forces that were killing America’s cities: the flight of industry to the suburbs; increased manufacturing competition from emerging economies in the Global South; a deeply racist housing market which served to entrap people of colour within these decaying urban cores.

Yet as Newman’s lyric suggests, for many Americans the causes of urban decay were far more nebulous.

In seeking out explanations, some might have turned to the intense contemporary debate amongst sociologists, urbanists, and politicians. For others, a rather more seductive interpretation of the urban crisis was emerging, one which they could absorb from the comfort of a suburban movie theatre.  Read more

Jul 16

Revisiting the Visitor’s Book

By Clemency Hinton (@clemencyhinton)

Have you ever left an online review after dining at a café or staying in a hotel? What about after a visiting a museum or a local heritage site? You probably left your comment for the benefit of future visitors or to get the attention of management, but that review may have had unintended consequences. Although you not have known it, your opinions could  be creating valuable digital sources for the historians of tomorrow.[i]

It might feel like websites such as Google Reviews, TripAdvisor and HotelWorld are a pretty new phenomenon. Certainly, online reviews are a product of the twenty-first century. But as consumers, we humans have been recording our opinions on recreational experiences for a long time. The best historic example of this is the visitor’s (or guest) book. Typically identified by its leather cover, heavy pages, or dusty appearance, this thick tome sitting in the corner of a museum room or end of the gallery corridor should not be overlooked. Though some visitor’s books may only elicit a signature, akin to ‘X was here,’ most are filled with colourful and reflective feedback. Even the briefest of autographs can open intriguing avenues of research, whether exploring the nature of the ink to the style of the handwriting.[ii]

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Jul 9

Serving ex-servicemen? Demobilisation schemes in India after the Second World War

By Mobeen Hussain (@amhuss27)

The demobilisation of soldiers has always been fraught with questions regarding jobs, re-skilling, pensions, rehabilitation and transition into peace time society. Such challenges were particularly pronounced at the apexes of the First and Second World Wars due to the sheer scale of demobilisation. Read more

Jul 2

‘No Stamp Act’: Pots & Politics in Early America

By Evelyn Strope (@develyn_16)

Although it may come as a shock to a twenty-first-century consumer, tea was once a political brew. The strong, steeped leaves and the teapots, teacups, and silverware that accompanied them were representative of clashes between imperialism and commercialism in the Atlantic world. As tea shifted from luxury to necessity in early modern Europe, Britons wanted tea-time utensils as fashionable as the drink itself.[1] Sensing a profitable opportunity  in this spike in tea consumption, British manufacturers raced to meet demand for teaware and challenge the Chinese stronghold on the porcelain market through the invention of ‘creamware’ or ‘pearlware.’ Both attractive and cost-effective, creamware opened up new markets for fine tableware beyond the middling classes, allowing ordinary men and women whose pocketbooks had once restricted them to rough earthenwares to dabble in the finer things in life. New-and-improved British ceramics were marketed throughout the Empire, including in the North American colonies, where tea and teaware would set the stage for now-infamous taxation protests. Long before disaffected colonists threw around 340 chests of tea into Boston Harbor, Americans had already begun to associate pots and politics. Take, for example, the ‘No Stamp Act’ teapot.

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Jun 25

Re-educating the enemy: German Prisoners of War in Britain

By Emily Redican-Bradford

As the Second World War in Europe entered its final stages, Allied governments began to focus on how to deal with a defeated Germany. The leaders of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union were determined to eradicate Nazism, in the hope of preventing the eruption of another global conflict. In an effort to achieve this, each of the Allied powers embarked on a policy of re-education, with the aim of weakening loyalty to National Socialism amongst the Germans already in their custody: prisoners of war.

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Jun 18

Shipwrecks and Sand dunes: A Brief History of Sable Island

By Aoife O’Leary McNeice (@aolmcn)

‘Unless I’m clean lost, we must now be somewhere near Sable Island. I’m expecting to hear the roar of its breakers any minute, and once the Francis gets amongst them, God help us all!’ These are the words of Captain Reefwell in James Macdonald Oxley’s 1897 adventure story The Wreckers of Sable Island. The Island already had a reputation as a dangerous site of multiple shipwrecks. A search on The Times digital archive for “Sable Island” produces 127 results from 1812 to 1899, most referring to shipwrecks. In 1812, with ‘the wind blowing hard… a heavy sea, and hazy weather’ HMS Barbados struck on the North West bar of Sable Island, and ‘notwithstanding every exertion, was lost’. Much of the ship’s cargo – sugar and rum, was not recovered.[1] Thirty-five years later, the Anglo Saxon was lost off Sable Island, carrying an extensive cargo that included 500 barrels of pork, 5000 barrels of bread, and 25 barrels and boxes of relief for the Great Irish Famine.[2] Read more

Jun 11

Gallipoli and national memory

By Stephanie Brown (@StephEmmaBrown)

On 22 May 1915, ‘a gay-hearted youth’, William Fielding Sames, sat outside his dug-out in Gallipoli (modern-day Turkey) drinking a cup of tea.[1] Even though he was just 22-years-old, William had been in the Army for five years, been promoted to Lieutenant and served in Egypt.[2] Yet, the decision to sit and drink this cup of tea was to prove fatal. While he sat with his tea a bullet penetrated his lung.[3] William died nine days later while on the way to a military hospital in Greece. He was buried at sea on 31 May 1915.[4]

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Jun 4

Researching with English Legal Records: some tips on getting started

By Laura Flannigan (@LFlannigan17)

The vast archives produced by the English legal system are some of our most valuable materials for legal, political, social, and family histories.  Issuing from national and local courts, from common, ecclesiastical, and equitable jurisdictions, and covering civil and criminal law, they offer a window into the lives of ordinary people and the principles that governed their societies.  Yet to the first-time researcher – and even to more experienced scholars – they can seem idiosyncratic, impenetrable, and daunting.  As someone who is still on the steep learning curve that comes with reading these records, I have put together some basic advice for those new to working with them.

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May 28

Book Review – Samia Khatun, Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia

Mobeen Hussain (@amhuss27) reviews Samia Khatun’s Australianama (Hurst Publishers, December 2018, ISBN 9781849049696 £25.00)

In Australianama, author and academic Samia Khatun skilfully weaves an intricate patchwork of hitherto unexplored connections between South Asia and Australia. I first heard about Australianama at an Islam and Print in South Asia Workshop at the British Library where Khatun was presenting on her work on South Asian peoples in Australia. She shared her research journey, relating how she came across a photograph of a book labelled as the Quran located in the desert lands of Australia in Broken Hill, noting how the words looked like Bengali script. At the workshop, as well as in the book, she shared her experience of visiting the mosque to find that the book was not the Quran but a book of Bengali Sufi poetry called Kasasol Ambia (Stories of the Prophets), all the while wondering how a book published in Bengal found its way to an inland Australian mining town. (Khatun, 3) This question is where Khatun’s Australianama begins.

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May 21

History for Schools

PhD students Eleanor Barnett (@eleanorrbarnett), Trina Moseley (@trina_moseley) and Lewis Defrates (@lewisdefrates) talk to Doing History in Public about their experiences running sessions with primary school children for the Faculty of History’s History for Schools programme.

What was your History for Schools session about and how does it link with your research?

Eleanor and Trina: Our History for Schools session was called ‘Hungry Historians: A Delicious and Disgusting Journey Through Time’. We used our combined research interests in early modern (Italian and English) and modern (British) food history to teach about how flavours and ingredients have changed over time. We tried to have as many hands-on activities as possible, including opportunities to taste historical sweets and cakes! You can find out more about our session on the Cambridge Body and Food Histories Group blog.

Lewis: My session was on the first visit of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to London in 1887. More broadly, my research concerns the movement of a variety of cultural actors and performers from the United States to Britain between 1880 and 1914 and differing conceptions of ‘Americanness’ that travel and performance enabled these figures to formulate, but this was a great chance to focus on one particular instance of travel and explore what it would have shown British audiences about ‘America’ in the late nineteenth century.

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May 14

Royal babies: a late-nineteenth-century perspective

By Helen Sunderland (@hl_sunderland)

Last week, the world’s media was fixed on the arrival of another royal baby. At less than a week old, pictures of Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, the first child of Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, and the Queen’s eighth great-grandchild, have been shared around the globe. Although the birth took place in the relative privacy of the Windsor estate – avoiding a repeat of the now-familiar press camp outside St Mary’s Lindo Wing – the royal couple were still expected to present their new baby to the world within days. Royal Instagram followers were even treated to a photo of Archie’s feet on Sunday to mark Mother’s Day in the US. This level of exposure might seem unique to the internet and social media age, but royal childhood was followed just as eagerly at the turn of the twentieth century.

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May 7

The History of Advertising Trust: preservation, management, and marketing in modern Britain

By Alistair Moir (Archive and Library Collections Manager, https://www.hatads.org.uk/.)

The History of Advertising Trust (HAT) is a nationally accredited archive service established in 1976 to preserve the heritage of the UK advertising industry and make it available for study and research. Today the HAT archive is the most comprehensive collection of British advertising and marketing communications in the world. Over the past forty years the Trust’s collections have developed into a truly unique resource for advertising industry and brand heritage records. Archives of several major advertising agencies and industry professional bodies form the core of HAT’s collections, alongside ephemeral press, poster and commercials collections.

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Apr 30

Angela Davis in conversation: legacies, lessons and reflections on resistance, justice and hope

By Mobeen Hussain (@amhuss27) and Aoife O’Leary McNeice (@aolmcn) 

We were both lucky enough to attend two events with the revered black communist scholar and activist Professor Angela Davis in March and April. The first was held at the Southbank Centre in London for International Women’s Day as part of the Women of the World festival with the centre’s former Artistic Director Jude Kelly CBE and the second in Cambridge in conversation with Scottish Poet Laureate Jackie Kay organised by Decolonise Sociology. Both conversations reflected on Davis’s life and work, her iconic status as a black activist, and the legacies and futures of social activism.

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Apr 23

Daydreaming in Linoleum: Postwar Advertisements and Domestic Fictions

By Kate Schneider

Every era has material nova that signal the newness of the present age. In the 1930s, it was the shine of early plastics such as Bakelite and celluloid that made them attractive modern surfaces. But in the 1950s and 1960s, domestic daydreams about ideal homes were played out in the medium of linoleum. First manufactured in 1863 — transforming linseed oil and other raw natural matter into mechanically flattened sheets — its inventor Frederick Walton acknowledged that linoleum might not rank in importance with Watt’s steam engine, but he hoped that ‘many housewives will […] bless my memory in the future, although my name will be forgotten.’ And it was as part of the postwar aesthetic of ‘damp-cloth’ consumerism that linoleum — ‘easy on the nerves and feet’ — came to be the ground on which an aspirational domesticity could be built.[1] We can read postwar linoleum adverts as a way into understanding the appeal of domestic fictions of the time, and as powerful proposals about the home.

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Apr 9

From the Jarrow Crusade to the Brexit Blues: historical protests and expressions of direct action

By Aoife O’Leary McNeice (@aolmcn)

Petitions, marches and referendums have been in the news a lot lately, manifestations of frustration from people who do not feel represented by those in power, and so undertake direct action in an attempt to gain leverage, produce change, or simply quell an increasing feeling of powerlessness. I am of course referencing the online petition to revoke article 50, which as I write has amassed 6,065,623 signatures and rising, comfortably securing the title of most popular online petition in the history of online petitions. The government responded to this petition on the 26th March, asserting ‘this Government will not revoke Article 50. We will honour the result of the 2016 referendum and work with Parliament to deliver a deal that ensures we leave the European Union’.

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Apr 2

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Constitutional history’s new public moment?

By Helen Sunderland (@hl_sunderland)

Over recent months I’ve watched more parliamentary debates than ever before. I imagine I’m not alone. This is perhaps a bold confession for a historian of political culture – admittedly, I’m more familiar with nineteenth-century Hansard than BBC Parliament. Numerous historical parallels have been drawn over Brexit, some more accurate than others. I won’t dwell here on what the EU referendum result says about the legacy of empire, whether Brexit will split the Tory party like the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, or politicians’ astonishing displays of historical illiteracy over Ireland. But with media attention fixed firmly on Westminster as the drama continues to unfold, I’ve been reflecting on the place of constitutional history in the public imagination.

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