Author: Doing History in Public

  • 24. A Celebrity Chef’s Recipe for Famine Soup

    24. A Celebrity Chef’s Recipe for Famine Soup

    By Aoife O’Leary McNeice (@aolmcn) Alexis Soyer was a nineteenth-century celebrity chief. Born in Mieux-en-Brie in France in 1810, Soyer fled to England during the French Revolution of 1830. He quickly became a public figure, publishing books like The Gastronomic Regenerator: A Simplified and Entirely New System of Cookery and The Modern Housewife or, Ménagère.

  • Doing History in Public Year in Review: 2019

    Doing History in Public Year in Review: 2019

    Editor of DHP Stephanie Brown (@StephEmmaBrown) looks back at 2019. As it is New Year’s Eve, let’s take one final look at 2019, before the resolutions of 2020 begin. In fact, it was a resolution that kicked off 2019 for DHP. Veganuary saw Greggs launch their vegan sausage roll and they quickly struggled to keep up…

  • Apocalypse Then: what would past ages have made of COVID-19?

    Apocalypse Then: what would past ages have made of COVID-19?

    By Sam Harrison (@seph1812) As the implications of COVID-19 became clear last month, many of us began to ask why we had not done more to prepare for it: we had known for some time that the virus had the potential to become a pandemic, and for years experts had been warning successive British governments…

  • History in the Present: Saving the Thomas Cook Archives

    History in the Present: Saving the Thomas Cook Archives

    By Zoë Jackson On September 23, 2019, the British travel company Thomas Cook suddenly went out of business. The company had been dealing with financial issues for years. But its end was abrupt enough as to catch hundreds of thousands of travellers in the middle of trips or looking forward to trips planned with the…

  • The Climate of History: Protest and Performance at the British Museum

    The Climate of History: Protest and Performance at the British Museum

    By Alex White (@alex_j_white) On the 8 February 2020, the British Museum became the site of a mass protest for climate justice. The target was the multinational oil and gas provider BP, a long-term partner of the British Museum and the sponsor of a new flagship exhibition entitled ‘Troy: Myth and Reality’.[1] According to the…