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Sweet harmony or rough music? Singing in the seventeenth century
By Carys Brown | @HistoryCarys If you’ve ever been in a roaring rugby crowd, a church full of carol singers, or even just broken into song in the shower, you’ve probably noticed that singing can have a powerful effect. The physical, psychological, and social benefits of singing are now widely recognised, although the underlying reasons behind…
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Changing rooms in eighteenth-century London
By Carys Brown | @HistoryCarys On 8 February 1750, some time between the hours of 12 and 1 o’clock in the afternoon, Baptist Minister Benjamin Wallin was ‘musing’ at his desk in the upstairs study of his Southwark home when he suddenly ‘felt the Desk move the floor shake and the Front of the house seemed to…
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A Captive Audience?: Prisons as Public History
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…
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A cracked voice…
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…
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Children’s strikes, school walk-outs, and youth political activism
By Helen Sunderland (@hl_sunderland) In the last two weeks, university students across the UK have been coming out in solidarity with lecturers and staff in the University and College Union’s USS strike. On the other side of the Atlantic, the news has been dominated by the aftermath of the latest US mass school shooting. Survivors from…
doinghistoryinpublic.org 