Dec 31
Editor of DHP Stephanie Brown (@StephEmmaBrown) looks back at 2019.
As it is New Year’s Eve, let’s take one final look at 2019, before the resolutions of 2020 begin. In fact, it was a resolution that kicked off 2019 for DHP. Veganuary saw Greggs launch their vegan sausage roll and they quickly struggled to keep up with demand. Piers Morgan called the bakery ‘PC-ravaged clowns’, however, Zoe Farrell uncovered the long history behind veganism.
by Lucy Inskip (@lucyskippin)
Rather than finding the most outlandish historical object from a heritage site or online collection, I looked to my own bookshelf for an interesting piece of history. I bought this vintage Oxford coloured postcard print from Antiques on High whilst reading History at Oriel College, University of Oxford (2016-2019). It is from an original watercolour drawing of Oriel, by Alfred Robert Quinton (1853-1934).
By Evelyn Strope (@develyn_16)
Location: 3rd & Chestnut Streets, Philadelphia, PA, USA, Independence National Historical Park
Ticket Prices: $18 Student, $21 Adult
Opening Hours: Mon–Sun, 10am–5pm
www.amrevmuseum.org; @AmRevMuseum
While undertaking archival research in Philadelphia this summer, I finally had the chance to visit the Museum of the American Revolution (MAR), situated at the heart of the United States’ Independence National Historical Park. The Museum is still relatively new; it opened in 2017 on the anniversary of the Battle of Lexington & Concord – 19 April 1775. Both its modern architecture and its attention to visual experience and to cutting-edge digital history reflect its age. More importantly, those technologies, woven into eye-catching text panels and amongst many extant artefacts, help the MAR to tell a cohesive story within its main exhibit, divided chronologically into four sections: Becoming Revolutionaries (1760–1775), The Darkest Hour (1776–1778), A Revolutionary War (1778–1783), and A New Nation (1783–Present).
By Tamara Fernando (@TamaraFernando3)
One rainy winter day in 2016, I was navigating the cavernous halls and corridors of the British Museum, looking for the Department of Prints and Drawings. I had arrived to examine two seventeenth-century engraved frontispieces depicting Saint Augustine, the early Church Father, for an MPhil project on the reception of Augustine’s works. When I finally located the correct floor, I was hailed down by a museum guard at the entrance: ‘Madam, this is not the tourist section’ they volunteered. I mumbled an explanation about an appointment with the Curator of Prints—which presumably got muffled, because the staff repeated (this time louder and slower): ‘Maadamm, NO touurissts here’, making a wide crossing-arm gestures to clarify. Something about my age, gender or the colour of my skin and hair, signalled tourist, not researcher.
By Aoife O’Leary McNeice (@aolmcn)
‘Unless I’m clean lost, we must now be somewhere near Sable Island. I’m expecting to hear the roar of its breakers any minute, and once the Francis gets amongst them, God help us all!’ These are the words of Captain Reefwell in James Macdonald Oxley’s 1897 adventure story The Wreckers of Sable Island. The Island already had a reputation as a dangerous site of multiple shipwrecks. A search on The Times digital archive for “Sable Island” produces 127 results from 1812 to 1899, most referring to shipwrecks. In 1812, with ‘the wind blowing hard… a heavy sea, and hazy weather’ HMS Barbados struck on the North West bar of Sable Island, and ‘notwithstanding every exertion, was lost’. Much of the ship’s cargo – sugar and rum, was not recovered.[1] Thirty-five years later, the Anglo Saxon was lost off Sable Island, carrying an extensive cargo that included 500 barrels of pork, 5000 barrels of bread, and 25 barrels and boxes of relief for the Great Irish Famine.[2] Read more
By Zack Rose (zr239@cam.ac.uk)
Under the Jim Crow laws (1877-1950s), segregation based on race was legally justified in the United States.1 The key Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v Ferguson (1896) was that it was not unconstitutional to enforce racial segregation, so long as segregated facilities were “separate but equal”.2 However, it is well known that the services available to African Americans were extraordinarily inferior and underfunded. By examining three modes of travel, this post hopes to shed light on the realities that African Americans faced under the Jim Crow system.
By Eleanor Russell
Perhaps surprisingly to non-specialists, vast amounts of documentation survive from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, far more than from earlier periods. These surviving documents are not, however, necessarily coherent, and large bodies of sources remain rare. Even merchant correspondence, carefully preserved by traders for their records, has generally not remained intact. One important exception to this is the archive of the Spinelli, a Florentine family who were prominent in trade and silk manufacture in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. Their correspondence, tax records, wills, family trees, account books, and numerous other types of documents are kept in the Beinecke Library at the University of Yale, from where I was able to obtain a Visiting Fellowship to study this important collection. Read more
By Ana Núñez (@anac4_nunez)
The Byzantine princess Anna Komnene (1083-1153) appears to have been a most devoted daughter. The first-born of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (r.1081-1118), Anna took it upon herself to continue the work started by her late husband, Nikephoros Bryennios, and write a history (The Alexiad) of her father’s eventful imperial reign.[1] From the outset her goal is clear: to record the events of her father’s reign so that they are not ‘swept away on the flood of Time into an ocean of obscurity’.[2] Thus, she proceeds to compose a fifteen-book history of her father’s rule and his many great struggles and triumphs within the borders of the Byzantine Empire and beyond.
By Zoe Farrell (@zoeffarrell)
As part of my research fieldwork this year, I was lucky enough to be able to visit the city of Bolzano in Northern Italy. This South-Tyrolean city provides a perfect example of how small, provincial cities often have rich and diverse histories which make them prime points of study for enquiries into historical change throughout Europe.
By Zoe Farrell (@zoeffarrell)
One of the many advantages of being a historian who studies other countries is the ample opportunities for travel. My work focuses on artisans and material culture in sixteenth-century Verona, and I have therefore spent a lot of time in Veronese archives. However, I am also interested in how Renaissance culture travelled, especially through the Alps and into Germany. As part of a major fieldwork trip this year, I decided to follow the route of my research to Germany, visiting archives of interest along the way. In total, I visited thirteen archives in three different countries. During this time, I went from eating lunch outside in the piazzas of Italy, to walking through the snow in -14 degrees Celsius in Germany. No two archives were the same and I learnt a vast amount about research, travel, and independence. Here, I will share some of the most important things I learned. Read more
by Eleanor Russell
This famous sketch of a rhinoceros was created in 1515 by the influential German artist, Albrecht Dürer, reflecting the growing interest in foreign curiosities that had emerged in tangent with the overseas voyages of exploration, commerce and conquest by the Spanish and Portuguese. The rhinoceros had been given as a gift by the ruler of Cambaia to Afonso de Albuquerque, the Portuguese viceroy in India, who in turn gifted it to king Manuel I of Portugal.
While the drawing itself provides a great deal of information about art and Orientalism in the Renaissance, among other things, the backstory of the painting is equally as fascinating. How did Dürer, then living in Nuremberg, ever come to make such a sketch?
In the third of our series on research abroad, Zoe Farrell (@zoeffarrell) scopes out Verona.
One of the most exciting yet intimidating elements of PhD research is the archival visit. This is perhaps particularly daunting for those of us venturing to foreign pastures and putting into practice hard-earned language skills. However, the rewards of navigating the maze of the foreign archive are substantial and the experience can be enriching in more ways than one. Read more
