Hall of Science, Manchester, then (1846) and now (2011)




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Commemoration of the execution of 17 Luddites, York, 19 January 2013

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On Saturday 19 January, York's Alternative History held an afternoon of talks and commemoration for the Luddites tried and executed at York. placards outside York Castle In the huge space of the Guild Hall, Adam Gutteridge , one of the organisers, introduced the themes of the day. His speech echoed the two interesting articles publicising the event in the Guardian (by local historian Paul Furness, here , and by another organiser Helen Graham, here ). They argue that now that York's industrial economy is no more (chocolate and railways), York has remade itself round the past: an economy of tourism. Yet the past as presented to tourists and indeed to residents, is a sanitised and normalised history, centring round Vikings, medieval religion, and Georgian middle-class pleasures. The recent York 800 celebrations had no place for the popular protest and resistance that had a distinguished history in the city. I began the talks by explaining the context and meaning of the
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My colleagues and I have, over the past couple of years, been replacing the traditional 1 hour lecture- 1 hour seminar format with a 'workshop' of 2 or 3 hours. Of course, many of us have been teaching practical skills and 'interactively' for years, if not our entire careers, but we have come to the conclusion that we have to spell it out for our students more explicitly, both through the timing of the sessions and the activities in them. Why? We're shifting from seminars to workshops because, among other reasons: demand for increased student contact time with staff is a feature of questions at open days, the NSS, and the media; due to budget constraints and other factors, seminar group sizes are getting larger students unfortunately do not always prepare enough reading before the seminars to make discussion among them useful or continuous. No3 results from several reasons, including: a) the structure of their degree (at UH, students study 4 modules per
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