Doing History in Public

Tag: Public History

  • ‘St Patrick’s Well Lane’ and the Origins of St Patrick’s Day

    ‘St Patrick’s Well Lane’ and the Origins of St Patrick’s Day

    By Kate Collins (kec66@cam.ac.uk) If you find yourself walking around Dublin this St Patrick’s Day, take a look up at the street signs and you might just see a reminder of how the annual celebrations on the 17th of March are said to have begun. All streets in Dublin have two names, in Irish and…

  • Pearly Queens: Eleonora di Toledo vs. Elizabeth I 

    Pearly Queens: Eleonora di Toledo vs. Elizabeth I 

    By Ellie Doran (@Elena_Doran) Figure 1 (left): Agnolo Bronzino, Ritratto di Eleonora di Toledo con il figlio Giovanni, (c.1544-45), oil on panel, 115 x 96cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, 1890 n.748. Available here: https://www.uffizi.it/opere/%2Feleonora-di-toledo Figure 2 (right): Unknown English artist, The Armada Portrait, (c. 1588), oil on panel, 97.8 x 72.4 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 541. Available here: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw02077/Queen-Elizabeth-I Elizabeth I,…

  • Two Maps of the Mediterranean

    Two Maps of the Mediterranean

    Two maps of the Mediterranean, one included in the medieval cosmological treatise Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes (Kitāb Gharā’ib al-funūn wa-mulaḥ al-ʿuyūn) and the other frequently reproduced in modern scholarship, first appear very distinct, but perhaps share a similarity: they reflect a mariner’s view of the Mediterranean.

  • ‘Out of the Shadows’: A DHP Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon

    ‘Out of the Shadows’: A DHP Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon

    By Zara Kesterton On 24 May, Doing History in Public hosted our first ever Wikipedia edit-a-thon. Edit-a-thons are events where new and established editors get together to learn new skills, and work towards improving information on Wikipedia around a theme. Our theme for this event was ‘Out of the Shadows’. We aimed to improve knowledge…

  • Alex White – Historian Highlight

    Alex White – Historian Highlight

    Alex White (@alex_j_white), interviewed by Zara Kesterton Historian Highlight is an ongoing 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…