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Reorienting the Home Front: Spatial History and Collective Memory
By Clemency Hinton (@clemencyhinton) Does the past sometimes feel ‘far away’? Can we ever ‘go back’? And ‘where’ did we come from? These questions demonstrate that we often conceptualise and speak about history in spatial terms. That is, we describe the past as a place. History has famously been called a ‘foreign country’. Perhaps the…
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History, policy, and religion: a conversation
Tom Smith and Helen Sunderland (Doing History in Public) talk to Judd Birdsall, Managing Director of the Cambridge Institute on Religion & International Studies based at Clare College, Cambridge Doing History in Public: Hi Judd. Could you tell us a bit more about CIRIS and its work? Judd Birdsall (CIRIS): The Cambridge Institute on Religion &…
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Constructing an archive: a reflection on British Library collections
By Mobeen Hussain (@amhuss27) As historians, we are often used to thinking about an archive as a fixed set of documents kept in a static physical location. An appropriate historical source is often considered as such only if it can be verified by ‘real’ material from a ‘real’ archive.[1] Yet, archives mean different things to different researchers.…
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Staging History: Mary Stuart
Harriet Lyon (@HarrietLyon) reviews Friedrich Schiller’s play Mary Stuart, adapted and directed by Robert Icke. What is history if not a series of contingencies? For every thing that happens, an infinite number of other possibilities are extinguished. But what if things had been different? Although writing history certainly involves a good dose of imagination, academic historians have…
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Theatre History: Out of the Archives and Onto the Stage
by Holly Dayton | hollyedayton@gmail.com Few people know that Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston’s American mother, was a playwright. If they happen to know of her, they only know her as the mother of Winston Churchill. Yet she wrote three plays over the course of her life: His Borrowed Plumes (1909), The Bill (1913), and Between the…
doinghistoryinpublic.org 