Hardy perennials
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.
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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
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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?
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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.
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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.
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