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3. A Mother to her Son: Isabella of Angoulême and King Henry III
By Emily Ward | @1066unicorn How did Isabella of Angoulême, queen of England, greet her son, King Henry III, when she wrote to him in the years following the nine-year-old boy’s succession to the throne in 1217? A desire to answer this question, and to resolve two conflicting modern transcriptions of a letter sent from Isabella to Henry…
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4. Journal of William Dixon, 1811
By Nicholas Dixon One of the most memorable sets of items I have found in an archive is the journals and notebooks of William Dixon (1756-1824), a farmer from the village of Holton le Moor in Lincolnshire. Deposited in the Lincolnshire Archives, 54 of these roughly bound volumes survive, some of them with pages recycled…
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A Captive Audience?: Prisons as Public History
By Tom Smith (@TomEtesonSmith) Wandering the corridors of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, it’s difficult not to feel a chill down your spine. The paint peeling from the walls, the crumbling brickwork, and the abandoned operating theatre, complete with a giant broken surgical light, all contribute to a disconcerting sense that you are on the…
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A cracked voice…
Writer Graham Palmer (@GP_writer) explains how he’s using music to explore the past in his exciting collaborative project, Cracked Voices. Warning: my history is suspect. It is fake news. I am not a historian. But I am fascinated in the way we are all complicit in fashioning stories, in interpreting our own lives and those of others…
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Distinguishing Fact from Fiction in British Prison Museums
By Dan Johnson, University of York (@Dan_Johnson19) Prison museums are becoming a popular form of dark tourism around the world. In the last few decades, infamous prisons that have been in use since the beginning of incarceration as a form of punishment in the nineteenth century have begun to close their doors to make room…
doinghistoryinpublic.org 