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The Public House – the struggle to find privacy in the eighteenth century home
By Alex Wakelam – @A_Wakelam Around two o’clock in the morning of February 15th 1732, Robert Atkinson, a sadler, returned home drunk from the alehouse. His mother Ann Atkinson, having sent the maid to bed at midnight, had sat up to wait for him so that she could lock the door behind him (the symbolic ending of the…
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Unconventional History: El Paso, Texas according to an early-twentieth-century postcard
By Savannah Pine (@savannah_pine) El Paso, Texas (my hometown) features in the news frequently nowadays because of the migrant crisis and the administration’s desire to build a wall on the border between the United States and Mexico. The border, which lies along the Rio Grande, separates a large urban area into two cities: El Paso…
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Ghettoes to Gentrification: How Hollywood Shaped America’s Urban Imagination
By Sam Collings-Wells (@Sam_cw_) ‘And they hide their faces / And they hide their eyes / Cause the city is dyin’/ And they don’t know why’. These lyrics from Randy Newman’s 1977 ‘Baltimore’—later made famous by Nina Simone’s justly celebrated cover—perfectly captured the spirit urban life during the mid-1970s. Historians would later pinpoint the variety…
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12. Ford Box Bungalow
By Aoife O’Leary McNeice (@aolmcn) The coast surrounding Cork Harbour is dappled with little holiday cottages. Ivy and gorse break through the flimsy plywood walls of these boxy bungalows, and paint flakes off to reveal the curious industrial origins of these summer homes. These bungalows started life in the Ford Motors Factory, which opened in…
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Stamford’s Urban Renewal Projects: Local Archives and Narratives of Progress
In the 1960s and 70s, Stamford, Connecticut, demolished 130 acres of its downtown in an attempt at revitalization. The record of these Urban Renewal Projects lend insight into how power imbalances are created and perpetuated in local historical archives.
doinghistoryinpublic.org 