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Conflict, Memory and Reconciliation: ‘The Vietnam War’
By Helen Sunderland (@hl_sunderland) The recent success of The Vietnam War, a television documentary co-directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, shows the enduring legacy of the conflict in popular memory. Broadcast as a ten-hour series in the UK on BBC Four and originally aired with an even longer running time on PBS, the series…
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10. Woodstreet Compter Commitment Book, 1765-66
By Alex Wakelam | @A_Wakelam As a quantitative economic historian, a significant amount of my research is impersonal. Studying the functioning of eighteenth-century debtors’ prisons and their effectiveness as a mechanism of contract enforcement rarely brings one into contact with material that connects you to the thoughts, feelings, and lived experience of an individual human being. My principal…
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5. Empathy in the archives
By Fred Smith | @Fred_E_Smith ‘Like death, like the cemetery which is at the centre of the village, violence is at the heart of life in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries’. It is easy for the historian of early modern England to become desensitised to violence and suffering. Studying the religious changes of this period, changes which…
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Capturing the Raj: visual narratives of British India
By Mobeen Hussain | @amhuss27 In the last few years, there has been a resurgence of period adaptations based on the British in India. This spat of television and film productions depicts particular historical narratives that romanticise the British Empire and hark back to the good-old-days of British imperialism. Indian Summers (2015), Victoria and Abdul…
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12. Oral history in the British Library
By George Severs In 1972, Raphael Samuel wrote of the ‘perils of the transcript’, the potential for mutilation and distortion of the spoken word when it is transferred to the page. In the 45 years since then, oral historians and archivists have been keen to heed this warning, yet inevitably such difficulties persist.
doinghistoryinpublic.org 