History and Today

Thanks to Simon Webster and the twittersphere for alerting me to this blog on brainpickings.org on science and technology advertisements from the 1950s and 60s. Such beautiful modernist art for products that were either industrial or military, reminding us that even in this simple abstraction, the threat of the cold war was always at hand.  The advertisement for copper, has small children watching television with a weird freak-out going on around them. So cool.

Thanks to Tim Hitchcock for alerting me to sketchmap.co.uk . It has a handy feature of a listed buildings and scheduled monuments layer. So here's St. Albans compared with Croydon: Having read the conservation area reports for stalbans I presume that many of the blue blobs are for 'locally listed' rather than nationally?

'Protest, Memory and Public History', an Economic history society funded workshop, took place at UWE on 11 February 2012. It formed the second part of my 'new approaches to the history of protest' series. James Baker's report on his blog tells you all you need to know about the papers and discussion. I will add my thoughts on the day, but focused more on the theoretical implications. The theme that emerged from the morning's session was locality, region, place, and memory. Echoes of Pierre Nora's lieux de memoire and Maurice Halbwach's 'every society must have its landmarks' ran through the papers. Yet those places, in England at least, were local and defined by local rather than national commemorations. Protests, demonstrations, oppositional incidents occur in specific places. Even if at the time such events had greater repercussions or wider support nationally or internationally, often their occurrence is only commemorated and remember

We held the second leg of my 'new approaches to the history of protest' series at UWE, Bristol, on the bright frosty cold day of 11 February 2012. The theme this time was 'protest, memory and public history'. About 40 participants came, and included a healthy mix of trade union activists, local historians, museum professionals, postgrad- and undergraduate students, and academic historians. I will post some reflections relating to theories of memory and material culture soon, but in the meantime, I must highly recommend James Baker (University of Kent)'s detailed write-up of the main discussion points of the day: http://cradledincaricature.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/prohist-2/