Author: Doing History in Public

  • The Politics of the Archive: reflections, observations and challenges

    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…

  • 1. Oriel College Postcard

    1. Oriel College Postcard

    by Lucy Inskip (@lucyskippin) Rather than finding the most outlandish historical object from a heritage site or online collection, I looked to my own bookshelf for an interesting piece of history. I bought this vintage Oxford coloured postcard print from Antiques on High whilst reading History at Oriel College, University of Oxford (2016-2019). It is from…

  • Nazi doublethink: Race and nation in Germany’s borderlands

    Nazi doublethink: Race and nation in Germany’s borderlands

    By Luisa Hulsrøj “The national state . . . must set race in the center of all life,” Hitler declared in Mein Kampf, exemplifying his movement’s exaltation not only of the nation but also of its ostensible basis in race. This pernicious ideology encountered challenges, recent scholarship has found, when it met with populations in…

  • Playing the Blame Game: Divorce Then and Now

    Playing the Blame Game: Divorce Then and Now

    By Georgia Oman (@Georgia_Oman) When Parliament was suspended this September, several bills making their way through the Commons and Lords were dropped. Although three pieces of legislation were carried over to the next session, the remainder fell into a legal limbo, with their only hope of resurrection being that the government would choose to re-introduce them…

  • The Dreyfus Affair: metaphor and reality in public history

    The Dreyfus Affair: metaphor and reality in public history

    By Daniel Adamson (@DEAdamson9) The Pyrrhic Wars; the crossing of the Rubicon; the witch hunts; the sinking of the Titanic. Modern parlance is littered with examples of historical events that have accrued a metaphorical value superior to the weight of their historical realities. In public spheres, there is more interest in deploying historical events for…