-
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 &…
-
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.…
-
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…
-
‘Go with your gut’? Reason and passion from the eighteenth century to the present day
By Madeleine Armstrong If you’ve ever had to make a difficult choice, you’ll be familiar with the nauseating conflict between the head and the heart. You may have drawn a dozen pros-and-cons lists, only to go with the option that simply felt right. We are accustomed to seeing reason and passion in conflict, and always…
-
The Great British Summer? A Historical Heatwave
By Helen Sunderland (@hl_sunderland) ‘The Weather for some Days past is said by the Curious in such Observations, to have been several Degrees hotter than for these four Years past.’[1] As I write this piece under another cloudless Cambridge sky with temperatures soaring well into the high twenties, this July 1757 report from the London…
doinghistoryinpublic.org 