-
Mentalités and Body Politics: Aspects of Our Pandemic Global Microhistory
By Weiao Xing (@WeiaoX) In early January 2020, a newsletter disclosed an unknown pneumonia spreading through Wuhan, China.[i] This understated report failed to lade me with extreme anxiety on an otherwise ordinary day in Cambridge. Many of my peers did not anticipate any interruption to our annual schedule of international trips, but lockdowns and travel…
-
Contestations of the Past: A Historical Analysis of the Christopher Columbus Monuments in Trinidad
By Aileen Alexis The history of Trinidad from 1498 is representative of a colonial and imperial system of Spanish and British rule. The impact of European colonization in Trinidad has meant that how we construct and remember history often follows Western historiography. The public arena is filled with signs, symbols, street names, buildings, artifacts, and…
-
2. Pearls in the Armada Portraits
By Ellie Doran (@Elena_Doran) Only three Armada Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I survive.[1] All were painted to commemorate the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Whilst it is fun to play ‘spot the difference’ between the details in each portrait, these paintings also provide beautiful sources for examining the global in the early modern period.
-
11. A Fifteenth-Century Illustrated Shahnama of Firdawsi
By Jacinta Chen (@jchen852) The Shahnama (Book of Kings) (977–1010) of Firdawsi (c. 940–1019/1025) was one of the most celebrated epics of the early modern Persianate world. Courts and individual patrons collected older manuscripts and commissioned copies of their own, giving artists plenty of creative license to experiment with the surrounding landscape, architecture, clothing, and…
-
Archives of the air: tracing the lives of East African radio broadcasters in Moscow and Beijing
By Alex White (@alex_j_white) In December 1959, the Zanzibari Rajab Saleh Salim arrived in the Soviet Union in search of work. For the 25-year-old Salim, this journey into the heart of the Cold War was only the latest example in a long line of radical and anti-colonial placemaking. Born to an African family in Zanzibar,…
doinghistoryinpublic.org 