Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Beiner
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Living History ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
The Past ◽  
Shared History ◽  
Folk History ◽  
Subaltern History

Questioning the inevitability of an inherent opposition between myth and history opens possibilities for rethinking our engagement with the past through the lens of ‘mythistory’. In the same vein, the concept of ‘vernacular historiography’ is introduced in relation to a number of related historiographical developments, namely: living history, history from below, people’s history, subaltern history, democratic history, ethnohistory, popular history, public history, applied history, everyday history, shared history, folk history, grass-roots history, as well as local and provincial history. In turn, the study of forgetting and of lieu d’oubli is identified as a new direction for advancing the field of Memory Studies and moving beyond our current understanding of lieux de mémoire. In particular, ‘social forgetting’, whereby communities try to supress recollections of inconvenient episodes in their past, is conceptualized as thriving on tensions between public reticence and muted remembrance in private. Finally, charting the forgetful remembrance of the 1798 rebellion in Ulster—known locally as ‘the Turn-Out’—is presented as an illuminating case study for coming to terms with social forgetting and vernacular historiography.

Theatre: A Neglected Site of Public History?

2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 21-39
Author(s):  
David Dean
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
Living History ◽  
The Public ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
Theatrical Representations ◽  
And Performance

Abstract Although theatrical representations of the past have been examined by theatre and performance studies scholars, public historians have preferred to focus on historical re-enactments in living history sites, museums, or on film and television. This article argues that theatre is a compelling site for representing and understanding the past through a case study of one of the most performed plays in recent Canadian repertoire, Vern Theissen's Vimy. Drawing on a survey of audience members and the author's experiences as an academic historian working with a national theatre company, it proposes ways in which further study and practice can illuminate our understanding of the public and its pasts.

The role of the officers’ mess in inclusive military leader social identity construction

Leadership ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 174271502110636
Author(s):  
Edward Gosling
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Military Leader ◽  
Leadership Identity ◽  
Leader Identity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Shared History ◽  
Integral Feature

Leadership is fundamentally a social phenomenon, and a leader’s legitimacy in personal and social terms is determined partly by how effectively they incorporate the prototypical leader identity. Using the historical British officers’ mess as a case study, this article presents a conceptual examination of the function place can perform in the construction of collective leader identities and the interconnected influence shared history, materiality and social interaction can have in encouraging inclusivity in leadership. Leadership identity is an integral feature of military life which has historically drawn on complex cultural and legal traditions to underwrite the individual’s right to command. This article will argue that social places such as the officers’ mess have been utilised as a means of cultivating cohesion in the past and that they may have an application in furthering inclusive collective leader identities in the future.

scholarly journals Republican Relicts: Gender, Memory, and Mourning in Irish Nationalist Culture, ca. 1798–1848

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-637
Author(s):  
Catriona Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn the past two decades, remembrance has emerged as one of the dominant preoccupations in Irish historical scholarship. There has, however, been little sustained analysis of the relationship between gender and memory in Irish studies, and gender remains under-theorized in memory studies more broadly. Yet one of the striking aspects of nineteenth-century commemorations of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions is the relatively prominent role accorded to women and, in particular, Sarah Curran, Pamela Fitzgerald, and Matilda Tone, the widows of three of the most celebrated United Irish “martyrs.” By analyzing the mnemonic functions these female figures performed in nineteenth-century Irish nationalist discourse, this article offers a case study of the circumstances in which women may be incorporated into, rather than excluded, from national memory cultures. This incorporation, it is argued, had much to do with the fraught political context in which the 1798 rebellion and its leaders were memorialized. As the remembrance of the rebellion in the first half of the nineteenth century assumed a covert character, conventionally gendered distinctions between private grief and public remembrance, intimate histories and heroic reputations, and family genealogy and public biography became blurred so as to foreground women and the female mourner.

scholarly journals Manchester and Salford Politics and the Early Development of the Independent Labour Party

1981 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Hill
Keyword(s):  
Labour Party ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
The Past ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
Local Strategy ◽  
The Subject ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One

The grass-roots activities of the Independent Labour Party have been the subject of increased scrutiny from historians over the past few years, especially in the pages of this journal. Consequently we can now be a little surer about the contribution of the party to the development of an independent labour movement in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, though with every fresh case-study a different local strategy seems to come to light. The one outstanding profile in this field is the closely observed account of the ILP in Bradford by J. Reynolds and K. Laybourn, who identify several key features in the party's growth in that city, notably the reformist nature of ILP socialism and the close associations with local trade unionism. “From the outset”, they tell us, “Bradford trade unionism and the Bradford ILP were seen as two aspects of a single homogeneous labour movement aimed at the emancipation of the working class from poverty and exploitation.”

Occupied Philadelphia

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 31-48
Author(s):  
Tyler Rudd Putman
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Public History ◽  
Living History ◽  
Pilot Program ◽  
Historical Empathy ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Walking Tour

This article explores the aims and delivery of a living history event conducted in a contemporary urban environment. It reports on a pilot program, “Occupied Philadelphia,” delivered in October 2017 by the Museum of the American Revolution in downtown Philadelphia. This program re-created events and incidents from the fall of 1777 and included a walking tour with three main stops highlighting the lives of everyday Philadelphians and British soldiers. Occupied Philadelphia provided a framework for volunteer interpreters to engage in a form of “guerilla interpretation,” taking public history into unexpected places as a means of inspiring historical empathy and encouraging the public to make connections between the past and present.

The Queerest House in Cambridge

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-69
Author(s):  
Hilary Iris Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
Historic Sites ◽  
Historic Site ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
House Museums ◽  
The Past ◽  
House Museum ◽  
Historic House ◽  
History Of

One of the great challenges for public historians in LGBTQ history is finding and developing interpretation of the history of sexuality for public audiences at current historic sites. This article answers this challenge by repositioning historic house museums as sites of some of the most important LGBTQ public history we have, by using the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a case study. At this house museum, we can re-see historical interpretation through a queer lens and take on histories that have been until recently “slandered, ignored, and erased” from our public narratives of the past.1

Before 1979

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-35
Author(s):  
Ywone Edwards-Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Black History ◽  
Living History ◽  
History Museum ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Living History Museum

Before the living history museum of Colonial Williamsburg started its concerted interpretation of slavery in 1979, the African American coachmen were already representing the past and implicating black history and slavery in this restored eighteenth-century capital of Virginia. Various records of photographs, postcards, letters, newspaper clippings, oral history accounts, visitor observations, and corporate papers provide a window to understand the social climates of the museum’s period in the 1930s to the 1970s. This body of evidence supports the contention that the coachmen were visible and influenced public history within and outside the museum.

scholarly journals A Call for Hospitality

Exchange ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 335-349
Author(s):  
Gabrielle Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Small Scale ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
The Past ◽  
Catholic Women

Abstract During the past decade, global conferences on Receptive Ecumenism have directed ecumenists’ attention to the importance of hospitality for the flourishing of Receptive Ecumenism; this has been discussed conceptually, but not yet with respect to practice. In order to explore a practical example of hospitality within Receptive Ecumenism, I draw on a case study concerning a particular group of Catholic women in the Midlands, U.K. who organize small-scale, women-only Receptive Ecumenism conferences at grass roots. Through reflecting theologically upon their practices, important learning arises, which shapes the nature of hospitality required for Receptive Ecumenism. Further to this, against the backdrop of Christ’s radical hospitality, a prophetic call unfolds, which challenges the churches’ own hospitality to women and their reception of women’s gifts.

Hippies Living History

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 36-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malgorzata J. Rymsza-Pawlowska
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
Professional Organization ◽  
Living History ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Public Practice ◽  
Plimoth Plantation ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Commune Movement ◽  
Old Sturbridge Village

In the late 1960s and 1970s, living history flowered, with new developments in research and interpretation at sites like Plimoth Plantation and Old Sturbridge Village, and the establishment of many new living history farms and museums, alongside a new professional organization: the Association for Living History Farms and Museums. This article examines this shift and puts it into conversation with the concurrent countercultural and commune movement, which often resembled—both aesthetically and ideologically—new living history. Using this case study as a model, I argue that in order to fully understand and account for developments in public practice, we must not only look at public history in a wider lens, but also account for form alongside context.

scholarly journals Visiting history, witnessing memory: A study of a Holocaust Exhibition in Paris in 2012

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 630-645
Author(s):  
Sarah Gensburger
Keyword(s):  
Museum Studies ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Memory Mechanism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memorial Museums ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Empirical Material

Over the past 20 years, the number of memorial museums and memory exhibitions has increased exponentially and the commemoration of the Holocaust paved the way for this increase. This evolution has given rise to a significant amount of research. However, two questions remain largely unanswered: how are the protocols of memorial exhibitions planned and constructed in concrete terms? And then how do the visitors to these exhibitions use and appropriate this material? The search for the ‘visitor’s gaze’ which is at the heart of contemporary museum studies has only rarely been extended to memorial museums and exhibitions, even those dealing with Holocaust-related topics. This article aims to address this goal. It is thus situated at the crossroads of memory studies and museum studies. Based on extensive empirical material but within the limits of a case study, it focuses on the exhibition C’étaient des enfants. Déportation et sauvetage des enfants juifs à Paris, which was held at the Hotel de Ville in Paris, in 2012. In so doing, it aims to consider some of the underlying assumptions that often go unexamined in the scholarly work on Holocaust memory exhibitions and highlights the centrality of the witnessing memory mechanism as the main way of appropriating the exhibition.

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