Tag: Public History

  • Distinguishing Fact from Fiction in British Prison Museums

    Distinguishing Fact from Fiction in British Prison Museums

    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…

  • Capturing the Raj: visual narratives of British India

    Capturing the Raj: visual narratives of British India

    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…

  • Reorienting the Home Front: Spatial History and Collective Memory

    Reorienting the Home Front: Spatial History and Collective Memory

    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…

  • Public History at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas

    Public History at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas

    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…