Author: Doing History in Public

  • Elmina Castle and the Year of Return

    Elmina Castle and the Year of Return

    By Evan Binkley (@evanbinkley_) In 2019, Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo inaugurated the Year of Return, a national tourism strategy that invited members of the African Diaspora to visit Ghana.[1] The Year of Return marked four hundred years since the first enslaved Africans arrived in the English Colony of Virginia. To commemorate this anniversary, President Akufo-Addo…

  • Emilie Cunning – Historian Highlight

    Emilie Cunning – Historian Highlight

    Emilie Cunning, @emiliegcunning, interviewed by Cherish Watton Historian Highlight is an ongoing series sharing the research experiences of historians in the History Faculty in Cambridge. We ask students how they came to research their topic, their favourite archival find, as well as the best (and worst) advice they’ve received as academics in training. History is…

  • Contestations of the Past: A Historical Analysis of the Christopher Columbus Monuments in Trinidad

    Contestations of the Past: A Historical Analysis of the Christopher Columbus Monuments in Trinidad

    By Aileen Alexis The history of Trinidad from 1498 is representative of a colonial and imperial system of Spanish and British rule. The impact of European colonization in Trinidad has meant that how we construct and remember history often follows Western historiography. The public arena is filled with signs, symbols, street names, buildings, artifacts, and…

  • ‘A Most Ignominious Thing’: Face-Paint and Cosmetics in Seventeenth-Century England

    ‘A Most Ignominious Thing’: Face-Paint and Cosmetics in Seventeenth-Century England

    By Marlo Avidon, @MarloAvidon Today, when people hear the term ‘face-paint’, they typically envision children at street-fairs, or birthday party guests decorated as princesses, cats, or fairies. Yet, in seventeenth-century England,  ‘painting the face’ was akin to modern make-up, with various pigments used to colour the face artificially and achieve the contemporary beauty standard of a…

  • The Unbearable Failure of Looking

    The Unbearable Failure of Looking

    By Ivana Dizdar (@ivana_dizdar) An Arctic seascape. A shipwreck. Polar bears devouring human flesh. This is the scene British artist Edwin Landseer depicts in his 1864 painting Man Proposes, God Disposes. The action takes place within a landscape of glaciers and ice: cold, hard, and jagged. The environment is inhospitable and threatening, just like the feast…