Category: Public History
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Collecting Contexts – Why Do We Collect?
WILL BURGESS During the summer of 2019, I volunteered at the V&A’s Lansbury Micro Museum in Poplar, East London, to help run an exhibition called For the Love of Things. The exhibition put the personal collections of the museum’s visitors on display, its shelves changing throughout the summer as people contributed different groups of objects: antique…
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Everyday Decolonisation: the local museum in 2020
PIPPA LE GRAND A few Monday mornings ago, I stood outside Weston Park Museum, Sheffield, enjoying my job and welcoming visitors. There were few enough around that I was able to gaze at the frieze over the door and even discuss it at length with a colleague. The frieze, according to Sheffield Hallam’s Public Art Research…
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Remembering English Saints in 2020: A Pilgrimage in Print
DR PAUL WEBSTER 2020 will be a year that lives long in the memory. For historians of the medieval saints, and at cathedrals and great churches across England, and for historians of the medieval saints, it began as a major anniversary year. The Association of English Cathedrals had declared 2020 to be a national ‘Year of…
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Heritage or Highway: York’s city walls as tourist and civil infrastructure
Louisa Hood This blog explores two very particular histories of York’s city walls. Although known generally as Roman or medieval defences, the social, material, economic, and other histories of the walls are layered, obscured, or unknown. York’s extant walls are a key aspect of its historic environment and identity as a tourist destination, but they…
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Britain First: The official history of the United Kingdom according to the Home Office – a critical review
Frank Trentmann BRITAIN FIRST: The official history of the United Kingdom according to the Home Office – a critical review Following this summer’s open letter to the Home Office, this article by Frank Trentmann offers an analysis of the official history chapter in the ‘Life in the UK’ handbook that is required reading for migrants…
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Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890-1915
…or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the book… James Michael Yeoman This is the second of a two-part discussion, which explores the creation and contents of my book, Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890-1915, which was published last autumn. In part I, discussed my relationship with…
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Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890-1915
…or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the book… James Michael Yeoman This is the first of a two-part discussion which explores the creation and contents of my book, Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, which was published last autumn. While the second part of the discussion will…
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Lucy Jane Santos’ ‘Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium’
Lucy Jane Santos In the late 19th century that Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a previously unknown form of powerful radiation that was invisible to the human eye. This type of ray, which no one (including Röntgen) fully understood at the time, was so mysterious that he simply named it ‘X’. In 1896, working from Röntgen’s findings,…
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Historians Call for a Review of Home Office Citizenship and Settlement Test
21 July 2020 Historians Call for a Review of Home Office Citizenship and Settlement Test We are historians of Britain and the British Empire and writing in protest at the on-going misrepresentation of slavery and Empire in the “Life in the UK Test”, which is a requirement for applicants for citizenship or settlement (“indefinite leave…
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Realising Socialism Abroad? What Communist History Has To Offer In International History Education
Ilana Hartikainen Even in an age of increasing globalization and close connections between different countries and regions, most history in schools is still taught from a national perspective. American students, for example, learn of the American Revolutionary War with a clear set of good guys and bad guys, never giving a thought to the soldiers…
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