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The It-Narrative as Material Culture Methodology: Practical Applications for Historians
By Kerry Love (@kerrymlove) A popular novel format in the eighteenth century was the ‘it-narrative,’ or ‘novel of circulation,’ whereby the story was told by an inanimate object, such as a coin, quill or a coach, or an animal such as a pet dog, in first person. Their treatment in literary studies has been covered…
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Harry Parker – Historian Highlight
By Harry Parker, interviewed by Cherish Watton Historian Highlight is a new series sharing the research experiences of historians in the History Faculty in Cambridge. We ask students how they came to research their topic, their favourite archival find, as well as the best (and worst) advice they’ve received as academics in training. History is…
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Historian Highlight – Eric Williams
By Molly Groarke (@mollygroarke) On 19th April 1944, Eric Williams (1911-1981) delivered a lecture at Trinidad Public Library on ‘The British West Indies in World History’. Williams later recalled in his memoir how the audience overflowed the space of the library. He created typed copies of the lecture to sell cheaply so his paper could reach…
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10. Erich Mielke’s Breakfast Order
By Caroline West (@Caroline_N_West) The archives of the East German Ministry for State Security (known as the Stasi) are vast. The holdings contain 111 kilometers of documents on the ministry’s operations – and perhaps most significant, its comprehensive and detailed recordings of the private lives of East German citizens. In 1989, aware that public support…
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Reconstructing and Performing Texts Digitally
By Samuel Rowe Traduttore, traditore, goes the Italian saying. [1] Modern scholarship often seeks accuracy, the original of something: historical ‘truth’. Performing a text in an ancient language to bring us closer to the past falls within this desire – but the realities of reconstucting historical texts are often more complicated. The idea of reconstructing…
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