Category: Methodologies
Analysing Jacobite Prisoner Lists with JDB45
Analogous Analysis Paralysis: The Stultifying Weltschmerz of Jacobite Prisoner Lists DR DARREN SCOTT LAYNE Now nearly three centuries on from Jacobitism’s imminent threat to the British post-revolution state, the movement’s historical record is still a living entity with plenty of room for growth. To… Continue Reading “Analysing Jacobite Prisoner Lists with JDB45”
Stitches of Resistance: Reclaiming the Narratives of the Enslaved Seamstresses in Martha Washington’s Purple Silk Gown
DR CYNTHIA E. CHIN A single object was the subject of my doctoral dissertation: a heavily faded purple silk gown owned and worn by Martha Dandridge Custis Washington (1731-1802), the wife of ‘His Excellency’, President George Washington. One of three surviving intact dresses belonging… Continue Reading “Stitches of Resistance: Reclaiming the Narratives of the Enslaved Seamstresses in Martha Washington’s Purple Silk Gown”
Trouillot in the Digital Age: A Fifth Crucial Moment for Public Historians?
AARON SHUMAN Last semester, one of my professors assigned a chapter of anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past as a jumping off point for considering how silences can work their way into the historical narrative. During our weekly Zoom-based class, conversation homed in on the ‘four… Continue Reading “Trouillot in the Digital Age: A Fifth Crucial Moment for Public Historians?”
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… Continue Reading “Collecting Contexts – Why Do We Collect?”
Material Culture and Identities: The Case of Eighteenth Century Toby Jugs
KERRY LOVE A main principle of material culture theory (the study of objects and their relationships to people) is that they can reflect or shape the people who lived alongside them in any given time. I have always enjoyed studying objects more than any… Continue Reading “Material Culture and Identities: The Case of Eighteenth Century Toby Jugs”
Role Theory and Protestant Spirituality in Early Modern Scotland
CIARAN JONES I recently submitted my PhD thesis on Protestant spirituality in early modern Scotland. Focussing on witchcraft trials, my thesis was mainly concerned with how your average seventeenth-century peasant articulated certain spiritual ideas. Using mostly manuscript records of witchcraft trial confessions as my source base,… Continue Reading “Role Theory and Protestant Spirituality in Early Modern Scotland”
Reading Russian Sources
George Gilbert Reading Russian Sources: creating a new edited collection When I was tasked with editing the collection Reading Russian Sources for Routledge, one of the first questions that came to mind – and the spirit I will be approaching this blog post with – is,… Continue Reading “Reading Russian Sources”
Using Scrapbooks as Historical Sources
Cherish Watton. Think of any topic, and someone, somewhere, has probably made a scrapbook on it. People scrapbooked on things which were important to them; family, friendships, professional activity, popular culture, political, and associational activity. Scrapbooks didn’t just document family life. Politicians and diplomats… Continue Reading “Using Scrapbooks as Historical Sources”
Historiography in Action: Teaching and Learning Historiographical Approaches through Active Primary Source Analysis
Liz Goodwin. This semester, my students discussed their memories of the London 2012 Olympic Games. For the majority of them, this took place when they were around 11/12 years old, in the summer between primary and secondary school. They wrote a paragraph down in… Continue Reading “Historiography in Action: Teaching and Learning Historiographical Approaches through Active Primary Source Analysis”
