Category: Archive

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…

By Dan Johnson, University of York (@Dan_Johnson19) While conducting research on public understandings of punishment in British prison museums, the public facing collections and exhibitions often act as the main primary sources that I engage with. One of the elements of the prison interpretation that I do rely on archival material for is the reconstruction…

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…

By Aprajita Sarcar, Queen’s University, Canada. Driving towards a district hospital in Kerala, I find the physical manifestation of what I seek in my research. This mouldy painted image of a husband, wife and a girl child is the family that represents the national population control programme. Since 1951, this family has been changing shape: with…

By Tom Smith  (@TomEtesonSmith) For me, the best archival gifts are documents which serve as reminders that you are dealing with real, complex people who are more than a public persona. Take Nathaniel Emerson (1839-1915), for example, born in Hawai‘i to American parents, and best remembered as a man of science, having published significant ethnological accounts…