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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.
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7. Schoolchildren’s Jubilee Address to Queen Victoria
By Helen Sunderland (@hl_sunderland) Queen Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees in 1887 and 1897 prompted an outpouring of national celebration. The queen received thousands of jubilee addresses from local authorities, philanthropic organisations and societies across the country. These large, colourfully decorated documents were full of patriotic language praising Victoria’s long reign. Trawling through these addresses in the…
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8. Hidden histories
By Harriet Lyon | @HarrietLyon My favourite archival source is the one I almost missed: a note, less than a page long, pasted into the back of a notebook belonging to the antiquary William Dugdale (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Hist. c 485, fol. 100). Dated July 1652, it recounts a shameful secret told in a private conversation…
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