oursin | Entries tagged with historians

A concatenation of things Relevant To My Research Interests (I guess), or, well, I feel I ought to keep up with this sort of thing....

Exiles of love?: uncovering lesbian voices in interwar Czechoslovakia, by someone I know, or at least, whose partner I know and whom I know by association.

Confining yet Convenient: Using Gender Norms to Defend Oneself in Cases of Rural Spousal Violence in Post-Independence Ireland: because that sort of thing could happen, using the system (see that book on 'economic divorce from deserting husbands' in late C19th England).

Review of Pious and Promiscuous: Life, Love and Family in Presbyterian Ulster, which is again, about how the system allows of certain flexibilities.

***

How to piss off historians: Drought, Conflict and the Use of Historical Data and Methodologies in Interdisciplinary Palaeoclimatic Research:

Norman et al. argue that historical sources support their conclusions that drought contributed causally to the ‘barbarian conspiracy’ of 367CE and to other late Roman conflicts. Although historians have developed rigorous methodologies for effective analysis and interpretation of surviving texts, the authors outline no methodologies for dealing with the textual evidence. Further, there are issues with the historical ‘conflict’ and numismatic datasets and with their interpretation.... the textual evidence discussed by Norman et al. does not, and cannot, support the authors’ assertions.

Swing that codfish!

***

Is this not lovely news? posthumous work by Vonda McIntyre forthcoming from Aqueduct Press in May

People on bluesky have been sending up the claim that GPT-5 boosts ChatGPT can provide PhD-level expertise.

After all, if you ask me for Mi Xpertise, you are likely to get 'it's complic8ed' and your ear bent with perhaps TMI on the subject, and what the areas of uncertainty are.

Do we not think that it would be more like having an overconfident mansplainer in one's pocket?

This led me to the teasing memory of a quotation, which I have tracked down and found has been researched in considerable depth here: Quote Origin: I Wish I Was As Sure of Any One Thing As He is of Everything.

It's fairly reliably attrib. to Lord Melbourne about the historian Thomas Macaulay (not, we fear, a member of the discipline given to declaring IAMC, sigh). Though it's been ascribed to various about various (funnily enough, all blokes) over the years.

But this promised to be a short video, by one of my academic crushes.

(Indeed, should I ever meet Professor Hutton I fear I shall melt down and revert into A Teenager in Love to the embarrassment of all.)

Ronald Hutton on Matthew Hopkins, the English Civil War's 'Witchfinder General': 'What really happened when a breakdown of the legal system in the English Civil War fuelled a series of witch-hunts? In this 10-Minute Talk, Professor Ronald Hutton FBA delves into England's witch trials and Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General.'

It was really local, it was really atypical -

- and I never realised how very young Hopkins was, as well as being in a socially marginal position. (Do we think that these days he'd be an incel mass shooter?) In the 1968 movie he was played by Vincent Price who was well on in his career by that date.

‘Fandom has toxified the world’: Watchmen author Alan Moore on superheroes, Comicsgate and Trump: er, Mr Moore, isn't there something missing in your analysis, hmmmmm? You mention age and economic privilege in your analysis of fan entitlement, the 'gentrifi[cation of] a previously bustling and lively cultural slum neighbourhood', but apart from noting the misogyny of Gamergate and Comicsgate, where is gender? Apart from your condescending account of the 'woman devoted to the late Jim Reeves' (the OED contradicts his claim for the date of the origin of the term, which is far older).

***

Something which seemed connected to the above, and people getting boringly overseriously invested in things, but annoyingly, the 'Big Idea' piece in the Saturday supplement on the value of playfulness doesn't seem to be yet online, chiz. And made me wonder what actually is play vs work or effort and striving. Because it resonated for me with a) a conversation on bluesky earlier in the week about the guilty secret of historians - loving research, research is fun, and b) an article somebody linked somewhere and I failed to save about the horrible abusive exploitation that is cheerleading, not that that makes it different from a lot of sports, which are not about fun or play. Also - is it in The Dispossessed? I think it's Le Guin, anyway, about doing the work you love in a society which is not about exploitation but cooperation, the concept of 'work/play'.

(Okay, my lovely dearios, you already know I am a matrimonial law geek, and this is REVELATION)

Introduction, free online to Deserted Wives and Economic Divorce in 19th-Century England and Wales:‘For Wives Alone'

And this is cool revelation of an underexamined and underappreciated clause of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, which enabled deserted wives to go to a magistrate's court, where for a modest sum, they could be given the right to control their own property and do business in their own name.

Which also has further implications for the study of women as small business people and economic operators.

But what is absolutely ADORABLE and PRAISEWORTHY, particularly when we see so much lack of credit-giving to precursors and forebears, is that the author tracked down the unpublished work of Olive Anderson, and credits her as joint author, because a lot of it was fairly far advanced, and her own work is actually coming at the subject from a different angle, and together they are even greater.

Thinking back through our foremothers.

But really, BLUD THIKT WITH COLD at reading this:
'A provocative journey through human sexual history, packed with fun factoids and forgotten stories'
by somebody who is still in the process of doing their PhD (on what looks like a fairly staid niche topic) and does a TikTok series on This Sort of Thing.

Contrary to popular belief, our predecessors had all sorts of obscene hobbies long before Christian Grey hit the scene. In this enlightening romp, learn about the first instances of homosexuality on record from the ancient world and the diverse history of nonbinary gender; encounter a thousand years’ worth of hilarious and horrifying contraceptive methods.

Ugh ugh ugh to the max.

I suppose this sort of thing may serve a purpose but I suspect that it is a lot less about 'educating ourselves about the weird, wonderful, and varied spectrum of human sexuality and experience' and normalising and destigmatising and so on, and more about feeding people the same old myths and factoids and snippety bits. And that that is what they will take away.

Do not consider myself particularly po-faced and have a suspicion that there are even those who consider that there Dr oursin rather lightminded, citing for example some of the 'before the colon' quotations that adorn her papers and that she had not always eschewed the odd snarky line.

But I do rather bar 'fun' 'romp' and 'hilarious' as USP and using the phrase 'dirty little secrets' applied to historical personages as a come-on.

There was lately A Thing on bluesky about Who Is The Most Famous Person You Have Met?

And because we are All More Complicated around here, I was:

a) Famous in the eyes of who?

b) What exactly constitutes 'met'?

I have passed fleetingly before the eyes of 2 members of the Royal Family in the course of graduation ceremonies but I think that is no more 'meeting' than a shag behind the lifeboats on the P&O going out to India c.1930 constituted a social introduction.

I know and have met in person a number of writers who are fairly well-known in the sff field. I did more or less meet Ursula K Le Guin at one of my early Wiscons when I was on green-room duty, but I was probably doing my celebrated goldfish imitation at the time. I also encountered a fairly well-known male author at a do connected with the Clarke Award: mansplained at. I daresay there are people with whom I can gain cred by flashing about the names of my acquaintance but that's within particular circles.

In the course of my professional activities as an archivist I occasionally met individuals who were famous/notorious or at least renowned enough to turn up in Guardian obituaries, but again, a bit niche. E.g. a person who was the member of a certain team who did not get the Nobel, shame, shame.

Then, in my occasional sporting my Hystorikal Xpertise for the meedja I have met various people who are somewhat household names - Jenni Murray, Lucy Worsley - met Marianne Faithfull in the green room at Woman's Hour - and was interviewed by Sir Bob Geldof about a less poetic episode in Yeats' life.

And, as a historian, I know (or, alas, ravages of time and mortality, knew) people who are of some renown in the field - and in the case of e.g. Late Rockstar Historian, who did a fair amount of media appearances, somewhat outside it as well.

Not sure where Noted Litfic Author would fit in.

Or meeting the late great Katharine Whitehorn in the ladies at what was then (I think) still London Guildhall University after a talk she gave.

A little while ago I was expatiating upon the assumption that In Ye Past Tymez most people stayed positively rooted to Their Native Soil and waxing somewhat sceptical, and behold, I find someone has Done The Research, or at least, Some Research, and finds that early modern people were moving about a lot more than one might suppose, okay, to and fro from where they lived rather than engaging in long distance roaming or peripatetic lives, but even so, seeing something of life elsewhere:

Using legal records: Everyday Travel in Early Modern England:

Going ‘abroad’ – meaning to leave the place you called home – was commonplace in early modern England. Some people were migratory, making more permanent moves to pastures new. Court records capture the migrant in droves: almost two thirds of church court witnesses in the south and west of England had moved at least once in their lives, mirroring patterns found elsewhere by Peter Laslett[4]. Others were semi-migratory or even itinerant, like Thomas Hanwood (more on him later). But many more still were mobile like Joanna King’s servants, travelling back and forth (to market, to work, to visit family) between their homes and sometimes quite distant places. It’s these quotidian movements that took people outside their parish of residence that have caught my attention.

The paper trail left by all sorts of litigation and offences – adultery cases, litigation over wills, defamation disputes, and indictments for theft – documents these ordinary journeys. The journey made by Joanna King’s servants appears because Joanna’s household economy was placed under scrutiny in a tithe dispute that year. But some movement turns up more incidentally: journeys to work are detailed as an explanation for why a witness was in a particular place at a particular time, for example. In using legal records, we have to be sensitive to the possibility that witnesses might distort the historical record. But handled with care, evidence of this kind allows us to write a history of mobile lives that encompasses men, women, and children across the age spectrum and from the poorest to richest strata of society.
....
[E]arly modern people were routinely making journeys: people were on the move all the time. Court records showcase roads and waterways bustling with life, travellers piled into beds in inns and taverns on stop-overs, and well-trodden routes established by both custom and tracks in the landscape.

***

More on what can be found in early modern legal records (and the frustration of what can't): highly unusual case of an apparent intersex person, 1522, in a case suing for nullity of marriage in the Consistory (ecclesiastical) court.

[T]he Consistory court judge ordered examinations by five different midwives – the gynecological experts of early sixteenth-century England.... All five midwives testified, in some anatomical detail, that Margaret had both a vagina and a penis, though four said that the vagina was too small to allow a man’s penis to penetrate. All described the penis as small, about the length of a thumb. The testimony has much fascinating detail about the practice, knowledge, and acknowledged experience of the midwives themselves: they were expert witnesses in the Consistory court appointed by the judge, a rare instance in medieval English legal culture both of women acting in an official capacity in a court and of the recognition of women’s learned expertise.
....
Margaret herself denied the first four midwives’ judgment that she was unable to have sexual intercourse: in her own response to Christopher’s claims on 6 Sept. (predating the first set of midwives’ examinations), she said that they had frequently had sexual intercourse, though she acknowledged that she had a certain “deformity in the secret parts of her body.” Even after the midwives gave their opinions that it was not possible for her to have had vaginal intercourse, she brought forth another expert opinion from midwife Joan Karter that countered what the previous midwives had said.

***

Further on issues of matrimony, this is a generally very chewy piece by Barbara Taylor on E. P. Thompson and the ‘Woman Problem’ in relation to his famous study on the making of the working class.

What particularly intrigued me was the account of the ding-dong between Thompson and Raphael Samuel over wife-sale and what it implied about the relations of the sexes among the poor in afore times:

Samuel published a piece in History Workshop Journal in which he criticised Thompson’s famous essay ‘The Sale of Wives’. A ‘form of unofficial divorce’ when it was unobtainable by all but the very wealthy, wife selling occurred in England from the seventeenth century and continued into the early twentieth century, although by then incidences were very rare. Thompson represented this public auction of a wife to the highest bidder as ‘usually by mutual consent, leavened by a rough plebeian humour’. Samuel was sharp: ‘He might as plausibly have situated it in relation to wife-beating, or (taking a cue from classical anthropology) the traffic in women, or – returning to the sombre figure of Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge from whom he took his original cue – as a fit of blind and drunken stupor.’

Two issues later the journal published a letter from Thompson objecting strongly to this criticism, saying that all the evidence supported his interpretation of wife sales. In his reply, Samuel stoked the fires further by suggesting that Thompson’s viewpoint reflected the sexual libertarianism of the time when it was written: ‘the article belongs surely that liberal hour of the 1960s when multiple or plural relationships were being widely canvassed as a release from the coils of matrimony’. ‘Had Thompson’s interest been in the subjection of women’, Samuel went on, ‘he might have chosen to put a less favourable glow on the proceedings’. Why, Samuel asked, ‘if marital breakdown was the point of interest’, did Thompson not look at cases of wife-beating, or rape, or ‘the records of the overseers of the poor…with their often poignant documentation of the plight of the abandoned and the deserted?’ Thompson did not respond to this.

There is an interesting later intervention from a woman whose g-g-grandfather, according to family tradition, had sold his wife.

But I would have thought that some slight acquaintance with the operation of the divorce laws might have suggested All More Complicated scenarios: while up until 1970 in England and Wales divorce was constructed as an adversarial guilty vs innocent party action, and indeed it could be adversarial and hostile (I invoke the saga of Russell v Russell in the 1890s) there was also the convention of the put-up job of fake adultery for the purposes of dissolving the marriage neither party wanted any longer.

Meet generation stay-at-home: ‘You don’t need to pay to go clubbing: you can sit at home and watch it on your phone’ This is so many generations down the line from when I was a young thing - it wasn't even so much about clubbing when I was a student, because (and this may be down to having been at an on-the fringes of the conurbations campus uni) there were various events involving live bands or the precursors of disco actually on the premises.

Sort of resonated with something I spotted on social media where somebody had screenshotted somebody going 'how did people get together before mobile phones?' and I was very tempted to go 'Eeeeee, we'd go down to the monkey-walk':

[I]t consisted of a parade of unattached young men and women walking along from the clock on the Co-op buildings on Belvoir Road to the clock on Lashmore’s shop on High Street*. Young men would be on one side of the street and young women on the other. They would parade back and forth ‘eyeing up the talent’ as one participent put it. ‘Liaisons’ would occur and often couples would be ejected from shop doorways by the local bobby on his beat.

*Varying from place to place. A whole load of oral history interviews about.

***

From my very first downward dog, I was hooked. But training as a yoga teacher led me to a miserable world of false promises, exploitation and near-total burnout. Could I find my way back to the mat? Some of this rather reminded me of my brief period of fairly peripheral involvement with the 'growth' or 'human potential' movement around the late 70s, where people did seem to get sucked into the cult, or rather, different manifestations thereof that were around at the time, presumably according to individual personality:

It was wildly chaotic but there was a strange kind of method to it. Something like breaking us down to build us up. We’d spend a weekend each month in her studio, then return to our lives wide-eyed and changed.

While I don't think this went down the commercialisation route that yoga has gone, there was a lot of potential for exploitation and dodginess.

And, talking of cults, Italian researchers say that joining the mafia is like entering a cult in which members must leave behind their own identity:

Everything changes, Lo Verso said, when something disrupts the mobsters’ lives. “As long as they are integrated into the mafia family, the bosses do not show any kind of psychological suffering,” he said. “Their own ‘self’ is suppressed because they identify totally with the mafia and their thoughts conform to those of the clan. However, things change when there is a break, a detachment from the mafia, for example, when an arrested mafioso decides to collaborate with the authorities.

***

This is just me being irked, niggled and narky: maybe that is just having been part of a niche community of historians which has been WELL AWARE of these figures since the 1970s or so, has this guy ever heard of Jeff Weeks or Sheila Rowbotham(or is he just Failing to Cite)? Beyond Oscar Wilde: the unsung literary heroes of the early gay rights movement. Grump. Unsung by whom? Mutter fume.

Queer Fascism and the End of Gay History, Interesting, though it doesn't seem to name-check the macho-macho strand within the German homophile movement, very much opposed to Hirschfeld, post WW1, trying to dredge up details from memory: anyway, already looking proto-fascist in the 20s.

***

Old face from the early 90s floating crap-game of sex historians who always all turned up at the same conferences and now we hardly ever see one another (even before More Recent Events): Harry Oosterhuis, 'Sodomy, Possessive Individualism, and Godless Nature: Eighteenth-Century Traces of Homosexual Assertiveness' (wonder if he cited van der Meer on the situation in the C18th Netherlands, where persecution actually created sense of identity? - and has Theo's work yet been translated into English?)

***

Medicine, morals, and masturbating women: John Marten and the changing face of female self-pleasure – Elizabeth Schlappa - interesting on the changing moral/medical perception - how far did the wider context of the increasing pathologisation of male masturbation inflect it?

***

What Made a 17th-Century Midwife Good at Her Job? Swingeing smack at male 'historians' - i.e. male professionals dabbling in the history of their field and erasing/dissing on women precursors. Though on the licensing system for midwives I remember looking out some ecclesiastical licences for midwives for a talk/demonstration I was giving and boy, they sounded terrifying 'a God-fearing woman and she bringeth up her children in the fear of the Lord' - yes, that is totally the person I want when I'm having babby....

***

This sounds terrible and I am so glad nobody came near me with invites to be involved: Sex: A Bonkers History review – the relief when it ends is indescribable.

'I prefer to see historians as the guardians of the skeletons in the cupboard of the social memory...' (citing Peter Burke, 'History as Social Memory', 1989): Matthew Gabriele riffs off this to suggest that:

[W]hat Burke was trying to get at was that studying the past - and then, importantly, talking about it with an audience - is about revealing the mess behind the myth, the story behind what we think we know. A #twitterstorians Twitter thread, an opinion piece in a magazine, an appearance on TV, all in their own way asks questions in order to break down that myth into is base parts, to see how it works and why it was put together in the way it originally was. And that can be uncomfortable.

I am made quite unconscionably happy by the concept of 'the mess behind the myth'.

This - it's quite long and rather dense - seemed to me to have some resonance with this, as I went 'ah' and 'oh', when it mentioned 'tidying of social movement histories', which is certainly not unique to 1970s lesbian feminism: Rox Samer: 'Introduction' to Lesbian potentiality and feminist media in the 1970s: Living in the Lesbian’s Former Future. A Media Historiography of Imagination for When the Present Is Past.

Also, I loved the paean to archives, well I would, wouldn't I?

this more theoretical queer conception of the archive could only be strengthened by periodical tethering to material collections and institutions. In the mid-1990s and early 2000s, dozens of feminist collections from the 1970s were taken in by institutions such those listed earlier. This archival turn in feminism, as Eichhorn names it, has moved scholars beyond clichéd generational debates. Earlier generations’ feminisms have not been hurled into a scrap heap, as straight cisgender feminists such as Susan Faludi would have us believe, but have been preserved at no small cost in dollars or labor. Far from serving as the dutiful daughters straight cis feminists envision, researchers of younger generations, such as Eichhorn, Corbman, and I, have become active agents in such archives. How we thumb through a collection’s files and receive what we find can, in fact, be quite divergent and queer. In short, the millennial archival turn has finally facilitated the meeting of feminism’s concern with its own history and the queer desire for history.

There's a story about the origins of the song in the 1964 Mary Poppins movie, 'A Spoonful of Sugar' by the son of one of the Sherman brothers, that they were trying to come up with the song, and he came in from having his polio vaccine on a lump of sugar, and, BINGO! there was their song.

Okay, they changed it to spoonful....

The concept of 'sugaring the pill', to conceal the taste of bitter medicine, used in a metaphorical sense, can be dated back at least to the seventeenth century (according to the Oxford English Dictionary online).

I do not know whether, throughout the Mary Poppins books, she ever administers medicines thus concealed, but it would have been a strategy surely passed on through generations of less supernatural nannies on how to medicate their charges.

While Sabin's sugarlump may have been the immediate stimulus, I depose that the song itself was at least riffing on subconscious memories of this time-honoured practice/saying.

(It is a relentless historian's habit to be sceptical of neat stories.)

History and the state: supporting institutional memory or challenging national myths?. Several historians' essays addressing this issue of particular present relevance.

***

And on something that is not perhaps quite perpetuating national myth, but is still, perhaps, trying to fudge a dreadful record: ‘A Dark, Difficult, and Shameful Chapter’: Dr Ciara Breathnach on the Final Report of Ireland’s Mother & Baby Homes Commission of Investigation. Or at the very least, troubling methological issues.

***

Interrogating an apparently bland, if unique, object:

At first glance, the beautiful, hand-written ‘Programme of the Evenings Musical Performances at Warrawang’ may not seem particularly radical. A unique item, it was clearly created by an enthusiastic amateur musician rather than a professional. It is undated, so it is unclear if multiple performances took place, or if it was a one-off event. There is also an eclectic mix of pieces that reference different European countries and musical styles including ‘A Spanish Air’, ‘The German Waltz’, ‘A French March, ‘The King of Prussia’s March’, and several Scots tunes including ‘The Birks of Invermay’. There is no indication the creator of the programme intended it as a radical object, and yet it illustrates the harsh realities of emigration and colonisation in the nineteenth century.

***

I wish somebody would ask me to review this (perhaps I should solicit?): Charles Upchurch, "Beyond the Law": The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain (introduction downloadable there).

***

William Dorsey Swann is a name relatively unknown, forgotten entirely for nearly a century. However, his legacy was, and is, still preserved under his other name, “The Queen of Drag.” Largely recovered from court records or newspaper reports of court cases.

This is interesting, particularly in the context of the recent flurry of studies of Virago Press, Lucy Delap, Feminist Business Praxis and Spare Rib Magazine, in what I see is a themed journal issue on feminist publishing, which appears to be Open Access, right-on, sisters! and also to included work on some of the UK feminist publishers that weren't Virago. Have a slight niggle about the Spare Rib article in that it doesn't mention that it was an early adopter in providing mail-order sources of vibrators, but I am not sure how long that went on for - I am not sure the early suppliers were entirely right-on and okay...

***

While that is open access, yay, yay, while this is a meritorious project, Introducing Queer Pasts: A New Digital History Platform, it does seem to be something you have to have membership of a relevant library or a subscription to actually to access. SIGH.

***

Lo, I am a figure from a bygone day, unhonoured and unsung... Wot, me, miffed? (yes) The joy (and frustration) of sex research. Talk to me! Talk to meeee! I have been doing this for nearly 40 years!

***

[T]wo statements, made 100 years apart, relay the words of women apprehended for their supposedly immoral and criminal sexual behavior. More there for this kind of thing than Yet Another History of Prostitution Since The Dawn of History...

***

And talking of The Dawn of History, this is a grim reminder that the mindset of Schleimann (burrow down until you find what you're looking for, or something you can claim reasonably resembles it!) still stalks archaeology: When Biblically Inspired Pseudoscience and Clickbait Cause Looting.

Well, yay for the British Academy, what: Historian David Olusoga awarded President’s Medal: The writer and broadcaster has brought diverse stories from Britain’s past to a wider audience:

Olusoga, a writer, broadcaster and film-maker, best known as the author of Black and British: A Forgotten History, is the 39th person to be given the President’s Medal, which is awarded annually in recognition of services to the humanities and the social sciences....
....
Olusoga, 51, is a professor of public history at the University of Manchester and received an OBE in the 2019 new year honours list for services to history and to community integration. He is also the presenter of acclaimed documentaries, such as the Bafta-winning Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, Black and British: A Forgotten History, and the current A House Through Time. Olusoga received the award for his approaches to British and international history by unearthing and telling stories from Britain’s past to a wide audience. He has previously spoken about the rapid growth of hostility to his work and why black history is British history.

And, relevant to this in the wider European context, came across this review: Olivette Otele, African Europeans: An Untold History:

Olivette Otele unveils the entangled history of Africa and Europe by narrating the diverse stories of African Europeans. In doing so, she vividly demonstrates how Europe’s violence toward Africa influenced and continues to influence the lives and identities of African Europeans. Despite this violence, the narratives she presents reveal resistance to racialization and marginalization in the homes they made for themselves in Africa, Europe, and the rest of the African diaspora. Otele’s work complicates African and European history, details the complexity of African European identities, experiences, and biographies, and shows how this group has contradicted stereotypes promoted by white Europeans. It is particularly impressive that Otele’s perspective on African European history does not default to the standard Eurocentric view of Africa. Rather, she emphasizes the reciprocal relationships between Africa and Europe. Here a Eurocentric view is subverted in favor of a more nuanced recounting of African European history. This is a transnational story of movement—a complex fluidity that is reflected in the identities of African Europeans. The term “African European” itself is complex and challenges a phantasma of a homogeneously white European society and history.

I also recently came across this post trying to reclaim the novels of best-selling African-American novelist Frank Yerby for 'deconstructing the myths of the Old South and tearing down the social constructions of race that have dug their roots deep into our cultural psyche'.

Hmmmm. I observe that the author of that piece first encountered Yerby in one of the later works in which he was trying to rebrand himself as a serious novelist writing on serious issues rather than an author of pulp romances. Having, in my omnivorously reading youth, read most of Yerby's oeuvre, I'm not entirely persuaded that he 'used the historical romance genre and moonlight and magnolias setting to challenge and educate his readers'. Quite aside from egregious attitudes around gender and sexuality which, well, okay, of the period, but still...

I sighed when I came across this, because it is is yet another iteration of a previously-observed phenomenon: Donors Worry About Fate of Artifacts as Museum on Irish Famine Closes: Quinnipiac University, which had opened Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum in 2012, said that it could no longer afford to operate it. Enthusiastic person sets up a collection - archives or artefacts or whatnot - that does not have long-term institutional support going forward once enthusiastic person is out of the picture.

I have seen this with archives. Collections which have ended up in the oddest places because of some academic or manuscript librarian who had a devotion to or personal connection with person or organisation, and a) they are not necessarily the place researchers are going to look and b) there is no local particular interest. Research groups which start collecting archives/ephemera/stuff within their area of interest without ever talking to, you know, people whose job that is and who might alert them to issues like, getting the terms on which they acquire them sorted, storage secure and to standard (hollo larfter), facilities for access (hysterical sobbing).

This has now also become 'let's make a digital archive!' and that has its own problems (metadata wot metadata...)

Groans in archivist.

***

Paging George Bernard Shaw and the Camden Vestry, 1900: The urinary leash: how the death of public toilets traps and trammels us all (the illo is not, however the Ladies at Parkway opposite Camden Town Tube, that last time I went out into the big wide world was still being a not very access-friendly public loo):

Britain has lost an estimated 50% of its public toilets in the past 10 years. This is a problem for everyone, and for some it is so acute that they are either dehydrating before going out or not leaving home at all

****

A Scholarly Analysis of Shakespeare’s Life That Reads Like a Detective Story: but Y O Y:

The transgressive image of Shakespeare circulating in recent years — cosmopolitan, perhaps secretly Catholic, most likely gay or bisexual, eager to flee Stratford — is replaced here by a Shakespeare who is “a family man” in a close economic partnership with his wife.

Might one not embrace a certain power of 'and' and 'all more complicated' and 'people are of a mixed yarn' etc?

***

However, this is bringing a new, well, a less-often articulated, angle to the story (I may possibly have mentioned it myself ahem): Vibrators had a long history as medical quackery before feminists rebranded them as sex toys:

Vibrators made housework easier by soothing the pains of tired housewives, calming the cries of sick children and invigorating the bodies of modern working men. They were applied to tired backs and sore feet, but also the throat, to cure laryngitis; the nose, to relieve sinus pressure; and everything in between. Vibration promised to calm the stomachs of colicky babies, and to stimulate hair growth in balding men. It was even thought to help heal broken bones. A 1910 advertisement in the New York Tribune declared that “Vibration Banishes Disease As the Sun Banishes Mist.” In 1912, the Hamilton Beach “New-Life” vibrator came with a 300-page instructional guide titled “Health and How to Get It,” offering a cure for everything from obesity and appendicitis to tuberculosis and vertigo. As such advertisements suggest, vibrators were not standard medical treatments, but medical quackery, alternative medicine that didn’t deliver on their promises. Yet the electrical cure-alls sold by the millions.

Yup.

***

Historians rewrite history all the time: it’s our job. Our success and prestige depend on our discovering new facts and advancing new interpretations. Richard J. Evans on 'Rewritten History' and who is really attacking history.

Never mentioned, in my agitato post on Monday, that the day had begun with turning on my phone to discover a text telling me I had a voicemail as of first thing from my sister -

- this in fact turned out to be a blip by her phone and there was no family crisis.

Phew.

***

The solution I thought I had attained to logging in to old workplace email turned out to involve Weirdnesses when I tried the next time to log in (siiiggghhh): but before I got embroiled in lengthy negotiation with IT support, I thought I'd just try that thing of trying the reset in a different browser, a trick I have found to work for other similar difficulties, and believe it or not, This One Simple Trick actually did the trick, and I have managed to log in on consecutive days without undue bother.

***

I have had two invitations to non-virtual events - while I appreciate The Thought, I am not so close to either of the people involved that I feel enormous obligation to Try And Make An Effort, Summon Up The Blood, and get on public transport to go out and meet people.

***

Had an email from somebody wanting A Chat with me about topic within one of my areas of expertise - I am a bit peeved that having said yes in principle, these are times that would suit, they have not yet got back.

***

There was a massive if somewhat niche hoohah on Twitter during the week when the American Historical Association sent a letter to the National Archives demonstrating a significant insensitivity in reading the room of this present historical moment and understanding the kind of pressure people in libraries and archives have been under. You can only push archivists so far, and it was magnificent. Who keeps the records: WE keep the records! Also provided some very useful links for my website that I hadn't previously encountered.

A bit miffed to have had something come back to me with editorial comments querying why I have not cited more recent historiography of subject?

That would be, pretty much, because all the standard historiography of the subject is there, I can't actually help it that a pioneering work of primary research was published over 40 years ago* and anything replacing it would be either plagiarising it or reinventing the wheel.

Okay, there are debates to be had and questions to be asked (and one of the authors of A Classic-ish Work has been walking back on Big Theory Therein, Hah), and I will concede that there is one recent work which I probably should put in there even if I haven't had a chance to have sight of it (am profoundly irked that no-one has asked me to review it what is this thing that this thing is, am I not a Nexpert in this rather niche field WOT? Is expensive academic press book not among volumes marked down during their latest sale). I do have a fair amount of confidence in the author's capacities and have read articles by them.

But apart from that, honestly, there is only so much to be discovered about this subject, and it was all thoroughly covered in the standard works. That more recent overview textbook commenter suggested doubtless cites to them rather than bringing up anything new.

In my archivist days had a fair amount of hopefuls wanting to research this and you know, was given to telling them that they were not going to uncover Exciting New Things. (While pushing them towards the area where there was in fact Lots To Uncover, and still is, in in related area.)

*In fact there is classic work in general field published in 1930s which remains standard because, like, no-one is going to get that nerdy again.

In the light of attacks on historian explor[ing] links between its properties and colonialism, I think some consideration might be given to the way in which that institution has drifted, or, indeed, been hijacked, from the intentions of its original founders. who were worthy late-Victorian reformers Octavia Hill 'social reformer....worked tirelessly to improve urban housing and to protect green spaces, Sir Robert Hunter, who was all about preserving the commons from the landowners, and Canon Hardwick Rawnsley, another passionate social reformer.

It was not until 1937 that it became a scheme of out-relief for the upper classes unable to maintain their stately homes, and enabling them to avoid death duties: the architect of which was the Marquis of Lothian, member of the Cliveden set....

However, in 1939 they did acquire Quarry Bank, one of Britain's greatest industrial heritage sites, home to a complete industrial community.

I note that the National Trust site is perhaps curiously silent about the role of James Lees Milne, who seems to have froliced in some very sus social circles of the 30s (did he really shag both Tom and Diana Mitford???):

In 1936 Lees-Milne was appointed secretary of the Country Houses Committee of the National Trust. He held the position until 1950, apart from a period of military service from 1939 to 1941.... He was instrumental in the first large-scale transfer of country houses from private ownership to the Trust.

See above re out-relief for the aristos, and preventing them being ground under Clem's iron heel.

Do we have a feeling that the original founders might have been rather more sympathetic to historicising the sites for which the Trust is responsible rather than focusing on aesthetics? They were, I am like to suppose, rather on the side of building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant.

Sir Richard Evans, worth reading as ever: The history wars: 'The statues erected at the height of imperial power and prejudice do not belong in 21st-century Britain. But toppling monuments will not help us properly understand our past or resolve our present troubles'

Also always worth reading: Vivian Gornick, on the “Forgotten” Wife of Victorian Novelist, George Meredith (though I'm not sure why it says 'Mrs. Meredith Finally Gets Her Due', when Gornick mentions in the actual article that she first read the book sometime in the 70s, as did I (must re-read).

The history of attempts at an ungendered/non-binary pronoun is a lot longer than one might suppose: Amia Srinivasan, He, She, One, They, Ho, Hus, Hum, Ita:

Of the nearly two hundred gender-neutral and non-binary English pronouns listed in the appendix of What’s Your Pronoun?, half were coined (or in the case of those drawn from English dialects, like the Gloucestershire ou, already in use) before 1930.

William John Bankes, forced into exile after gay liaison, celebrated by National Trust (in 2017):

A two-month project examining the life and exile of a man forced out of Britain because of his gay relationship with a soldier has gone on display at the stately home he inherited in 1834 but from which he later had to flee.

There was a certain amount of Disgusted-Tunbridge-Wellsery about it.

The Not-So-Stimulating History of Using Erectile Drugs on Women: 'The little blue pill really is just for those with penises. The pink pill is trying to solve the wrong problem. Why is it so hard to find a female Viagra that actually works? .

Profile

oursin

My Website

May 2026

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Style: Green for Basic Boxes by branchandroot

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated May. 30th, 2026 05:33 pm

It's Always More Complicated

The wandering thoughts of a wandering hedgehog

Entries tagged with historians

Assorted things

I really, really would lay odds it does not say 'it's all more complicated'

I am usually very much a text person....

Noted in passing, pretty much

Actually feeling a bit weepy, in a good way, over this

Okay, call me a miserable ol' academic historian

It all depends what you mean by -

Clio has noted a thing or two in passing

A certain temps perdu vibe, perhaps

A certain amount of thematic connection, sort of

Recovering lilacs from the dead land, the life in dried tubers

I suspect it reminded them of the ancient saying, really

These seem to have some resonance

Mostly connected

I think these sort of mesh together...

Hardy perennials

Something of a week

Sometimes work isn't outdated

If we're talking about erasure and the National Trust

Offered for your perusal