May 12
If you walk into any charity shop, you are more than likely to find, somewhere, a box or folder full of old knitting patterns. The majority of people would overlook these – to those that cannot knit, the sheets look like indecipherable code, but even to those that can, the patterns are considered dated. But these publications are an archive of everyday material culture of their own, which merit engagement.
By Zara Kesterton (@ZaraKesterton)
15 March 2020: we were beginning to realise just how much of an impact the coronavirus pandemic would have on all our lives. One of my friends messaged a group chat, ‘Now that we aren’t allowed to touch anything ever again does it spell the end of material culture? Is the new textual turn approaching?’ Read more
By Stephanie Brown (@StephEmmaBrown), Laura Flannigan (@LFlannigan17), Aoife O’Leary McNeice (@aolmcn), Mobeen Hussain (@amhuss27) and Helen Sunderland (@hl_sunderland).
On Saturday 19 October 2019, five members of the Doing History in Public editorial team spoke at the Festival of Ideas. We sought to uncover echoes of today’s headlines in unexpected places and explore the historical roots of current issues. Stephanie examined the links between medieval and modern knife crime; Laura discussed the ‘the will of the people’ today and in Tudor England; Aoife explained how lessons from the Irish famine can help us respond to the migrant crisis; Mobeen showed how today’s beauty industry is shaped by legacies of racism and colourism; finally, Helen asked does today’s youthquake have a longer history? This blog will summarise the key points of each speaker. Read more
By Joe Rachman
What sparked the craze for martial arts, particularly kung fu, in 1970s America? Why did some Serbs commit acts of genocide in the late twentieth century despite Serbs themselves having been victims of genocide during World War Two? What started the Opium Wars? Did Zarathustra, the supposed founder of Zoroastrianism, actually exist? Why are contemporary African states so poor when compared to the legendary wealth of some pre-colonial African empires? All these questions, and more, posed by curious members of the public have recently been answered for free by historians willing to dedicate a little bit of their time to help sate public curiosity about history. Welcome to /r/AskHistorians.
By Spike Lister
The utilisation of history in political discourse has itself a long history. For as long as there has been a public space and a shared experience, communities have looked to the past as a lens through which to understand their issues. History offers us a guiding light by which to move forwards or a source from which to draw blood-curdling parallels to our present circumstances. Consequently, it should not surprise us in such complex and disruptive times that historical parallels abound as a means of garnering political support. In periods of political intricacy and seemingly tectonic historic change, it is inevitable that politicians draw from the past to assert the continuity of their policies within a nation’s historical experience, or to draw ominous parallels between history and the present day.
By Savannah Pine (@savannah_pine)
El Paso, Texas (my hometown) features in the news frequently nowadays because of the migrant crisis and the administration’s desire to build a wall on the border between the United States and Mexico. The border, which lies along the Rio Grande, separates a large urban area into two cities: El Paso in the US and Juárez, in Mexico. But people have long travelled across the border, as this early-twentieth-century postcard demonstrates: a streetcar rides the El Paso & Juárez Streetcar Line from downtown Juárez, over the international bridge, and down El Paso Street to downtown El Paso. My professor sent me this postcard last year as a graduation gift and I decided to find the modern version. However, it was more difficult than I thought without institutional access to research resources. This is the story of how I did unconventional historical research.
By Helen Sunderland (@hl_sunderland)
Last week, the world’s media was fixed on the arrival of another royal baby. At less than a week old, pictures of Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, the first child of Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, and the Queen’s eighth great-grandchild, have been shared around the globe. Although the birth took place in the relative privacy of the Windsor estate – avoiding a repeat of the now-familiar press camp outside St Mary’s Lindo Wing – the royal couple were still expected to present their new baby to the world within days. Royal Instagram followers were even treated to a photo of Archie’s feet on Sunday to mark Mother’s Day in the US. This level of exposure might seem unique to the internet and social media age, but royal childhood was followed just as eagerly at the turn of the twentieth century.
By Laura Flannigan (@LFlannigan17)
Within the first month of 2019, historians were treated to not one but two blockbuster movies: The Favourite (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos) and Mary Queen of Scots (dir. Josie Rourke). Both grossed millions of dollars in the short time since their worldwide release, reminding us that film is by far the most accessible form of historical representation for expert and non-expert audiences alike. In their immediate afterlives, their success and significance are open for debate. As Natalie Zemon Davis has reflected of her own role in bringing sixteenth-century France to the big screen, ‘it’s up to historians, those who have participated in the film and those who have seen it, to bring to the debate both an understanding of the possibilities of film and a knowledge of the past’.[1] In this spirit, last month The Cambridge Public and Popular History seminar invited the historical consultants of these new films, Professor John Guy (Fellow in History at Clare College, whose 2004 book My Heart is My Own was adapted for Mary Queen of Scots) and Dr Hannah Greig (Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York, and consultant for The Duchess, Poldark, and The Favourite, amongst others) to discuss their experiences.
Cambridge PhD students Bethan Johnson and George Severs (@GeorgeSevers10) talk to Doing History in Public about their recent Festival of Ideas panel Forms of Extreme Protest in the Post-War West.
Can you tell us a bit about your research?
George: My PhD researches the history of HIV/AIDS activism in England from 1982, the year of the first AIDS-related death in the UK, to 1997, the year after the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy which transformed a diagnosis with the virus from a terminal to a chronic one. 1997 also saw the end of 18 years of Conservative government with the election of Tony Blair’s Labour government.
Bethan: My research analyses a particular form of nationalism in North America and Europe between 1965 and 1975. I call this type of nationalism ‘militant separatism’ as it is characterised by a commitment to separation from the governing state through extremely violent methods. I study the role of ‘organic intellectuals’ – influential but not formally trained thinkers – in the activism of ten separatist groups, across five countries.
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 & International Studies (CIRIS) is a multi-disciplinary research centre at Clare College, Cambridge. We aim to provide students, practitioners, and the general public with credible and engaging insights that will shape new scholarship, sound policy, and constructive debate on the role of faith in international affairs. Read more
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 more ancient the history, the more time we need to spend in transit – interpreting, translating, contextualising – to get there.
By Mobeen Hussain | @amhuss27
In the last few years, there has been a resurgence of period adaptations based on the British in India. This spat of television and film productions depicts particular historical narratives that romanticise the British Empire and hark back to the good-old-days of British imperialism. Indian Summers (2015), Victoria and Abdul (2017) and Viceroy’s House (2017) reveal a lot about the kinds of narratives that producers and the British public are interested in telling, championing and watching. With the exception of Indian Summers, these productions were post-Brexit and released in the year of the seventieth anniversary of India’s partition. Read more
By Helen Sunderland (@hl_sunderland)
The recent success of The Vietnam War, a television documentary co-directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, shows the enduring legacy of the conflict in popular memory. Broadcast as a ten-hour series in the UK on BBC Four and originally aired with an even longer running time on PBS, the series is ambitious in its detail and scope. That such an in-depth history can still prove gripping, accessible and popular shows how the Vietnam War continues to loom large in the psyche. Read more
By Dan Johnson, University of York (@Dan_Johnson19)
Prison museums are becoming a popular form of dark tourism around the world. In the last few decades, infamous prisons that have been in use since the beginning of incarceration as a form of punishment in the nineteenth century have begun to close their doors to make room for more modern prisons. In the UK, many former prison buildings have been saved and repurposed, rather than torn down. Some former prison buildings have even been transformed into boutique hotels and student accommodation. Although there has been a recent rise in the closures of Victorian prison buildings, there was a first wave of closures of some of the first British penitentiaries following the nationalisation of the prison system in 1878. In the nineteenth century, many prisons were destroyed, however, some became tourist attractions. One of these prison buildings-turned-tourist sites is the Victorian Prison at Lincoln Castle. Read more
Writer Graham Palmer (@GP_writer) explains how he’s using music to explore the past in his exciting collaborative project, Cracked Voices.
Warning: my history is suspect. It is fake news. I am not a historian.
But I am fascinated in the way we are all complicit in fashioning stories, in interpreting our own lives and those of others (however distant). The narrative thread is well and truly woven into our being now that Time Team and Who do you think you are? have taught us that anyone can uncover truth with a trowel, a census or a curious mind. In an online world where the loudest, most outrageous opinion echoes and re-echoes over social media and blogs, everyone has become an expert (including me). History has never been so contemporary, nor so contentious (or so goes another myth that strokes our fragile 21st century egos). Read more
By Tom Smith (@TomEtesonSmith)
Wandering the corridors of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, it’s difficult not to feel a chill down your spine. The paint peeling from the walls, the crumbling brickwork, and the abandoned operating theatre, complete with a giant broken surgical light, all contribute to a disconcerting sense that you are on the set of a horror film. It seems, also, that this emotive environment is deliberate. Having ceased to be operational in 1971, ESP was gradually opened to the public from the mid-1980s under the philosophy that it would be ‘stabilized’, not restored, and it now attracts around 220,000 visitors each year. It takes full advantage of the setting around this time of year, with its annual, after-dark ‘Terror Behind the Walls’ interactive Halloween event, as part of which costumed actors lurk in the shadows, waiting to terrify their patrons. Indeed, the prison has even acted as a mental asylum in Hollywood films. Read more
By Megan Suster
The unofficial mantra of Riverside, California by the beginning of the twentieth century was ‘Citrus is king!’ Starting with Valencia oranges in the California missions in the southern half of the state, and further catalyzed by the Bahia Navel orange that came to town in 1873, the citrus industry became central to how Riverside, and surrounding cities like nearby Redlands and faraway Pasadena, identified themselves. As a result, there is an unwavering nostalgia in Southern California for its citrus heritage, and California Citrus State Historic Park aims to preserve some of this in the form of nearly 300 acres of groves, as well as a small museum. Read more
by Tom Smith – @TomEtesonSmith
What connects the obscure lives of neurophysiologist Geoffrey Sonnabend and opera singer Madelena Delani? Are these people even real? Is there really an elaborate miniature engraving of the Crucifixion on that seemingly ordinary fruit stone? Are we supposed to take these heroic portraits of the dogs of the Soviet space programme seriously? Are bees really seen to be so integral to the life cycle within certain cultures that they must be told if a member of the family has married or died, and are invited (in writing) to funerals? And what on earth does that have to do with Alexander Fleming? Read more
I learned more about the nature of the discipline of history during my PGCE and year as a Newly Qualified Teacher than I have in all of the rest of my academic study combined. It might be that I’m a poor academic historian, but rather I think it says something about the immense value of the PGCE course I undertook, and the incredible work that many history teachers across the country do every day in striving to keep our discipline alive.
Unfortunately, however, the reflective approach which characterises PGCE training is under threat. Cuts to allocations of places for university-led teacher training in favour of more “on the job”-based training programmes has resulted in even Ofsted-rated “Outstanding” university-led courses having to drastically cut their provision. It might sound sensible to base teacher training at schools – after all, that’s where they’ll have to work. But, for historians at least, the idea is not as good as it sounds. Read more
by James Lloyd – @jtlloyd3
James is a PhD student at the University of Reading/Exeter in Classics. His thesis is entitled: ”Music and Ritual in Ancient Sparta: the lead votive figurines of the Sanctuary of Artemis Orthia”
In recent years, there has been a flurry of new technologies emerging at a price which makes them (just about) affordable, notably 3D scanners and printers, and such technologies have attracted attention in the news of late for their employment in the digital recreation of artefacts and archaeological sites destroyed by IS. Indeed, 3D printing is a wonderful tool for bringing the past to life: Museum3D, for example, uses its 3D prints to engage museum visitors with low-vision and Alzheimer’s. However, as this post will show, 3D scans are just as important to public history. Read more
