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On Florentines and Fieldwork
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…
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“Separate but equal”? The challenges of life as an African American under Jim Crow
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…
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Shipwrecks and Sand dunes: A Brief History of Sable Island
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…
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The Politics of the Archive: reflections, observations and challenges
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…
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Review: The Museum of the American Revolution
By Evelyn Strope (@emstrope) 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…
doinghistoryinpublic.org 