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Protestant Echoes and the Spirit of Calvinism
By Rory Bannerman (@BannermanRory) If there is a work of sociology that has held more attention, generated more discussion, and created more controversy than any other, it is Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Released in 1905, its premise is based on Weber’s observation that Protestants, in particular Calvinists, appear to…
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Replicating past mistakes? The Irish government, survivors, and the mother and baby homes report
Aoife O’Leary McNeice (@aolmcn) On January 13 2021 the Irish Taoiseach Michéal Martin made a public apology to the survivors of mother and baby homes. ‘It is the duty of a republic’ he said, ‘to accept parts of our history which are deeply uncomfortable’. Martin’s predecessors made similar apologies. In May 1999, then Taoiseach Bertie…
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The Challenges of Writing ‘Vernacular’ Histories
By Rebecca Goldsmith (@rebeccagold123) The desire to recover ‘lost voices’ in the archives is by no means a new impulse. It has underpinned entire fields and ‘turns’ in the historical discipline. Nevertheless, there is something new in the recent attempts made by scholars in modern British history to recover the ‘vernacular’. Historians spanning Jon Lawrence,…
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Helen Sunderland – Historian Highlight
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Women of the Manhattan Project
By Evangeline Leggatt (@evie_leggatt) Traditional narratives of the Manhattan Project emphasise a group of heroic white male physicists in the United States who succeeded in creating, testing, and using the world’s first atomic weapons. Perhaps the most recognisable figure in atomic history was the project’s scientific leader, Dr J. R. Oppenheimer. Other prominent male figures…
doinghistoryinpublic.org 