'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 ( Read more... )

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

An Oral History of the Lesbian Avengers - fascinating. Though with this: I also think the internal fucking fucked the Lesbian Avengers. When you start getting into relationships and you’re happier, you protest less because you’re less outraged.
I was rolling my eyes somewhat and thinking, sounds more like a whole lot of intra-organisation ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished The Black Book, a really solid and important work.
Though after that (and everything else) felt like something a bit lighter, so went for Margery Sharp, The Stone of Chastity (1940), which had been intriguing me for many years during which I had been unable to get hold of it. It's actually not, I think, among the top Sharps for ( Read more... )

I'm currently reading Sybil Oldfield's The Black Book: The Britons on the Nazi Hitlist (2020) and imagine my astonishment when I came across the name of George Orwell and it was not emboldened (all the names of individuals and organisations which appeared in the Book are emboldened in the text).
Yes, apparently George was not considered anything ( Read more... )

This weekend is Diwali, and I find that there is an amazing installation at the Tate Britain: Chila Kumari Singh Burman transforms the front of Tate Britain into a celebration of neon light and swirling colour: Inspired by the artist’s childhood visits to the Blackpool illuminations and her family’s ice-cream van, Burman covers the façade of Tate ( Read more... )

To an academic colleague's inaugural lecture this evening, on the very conflicting emotions that can be read in the historical record around AIDS in the mid 1980s.
It was a dark time.
But although there was a general toxicity coming from the media and from central government, a lot of popular hostility, and responses of fear, grief, mourning, anger ( Read more... )

Was musing lately over that apothegm of Bob Dylan's 'To live outside the law you must be honest'.

Which actually, I had to look up because I wasn't entirely sure how it ran, and my recollection was in fact 'To live outside the law you must respect the law'.

Anyway, my thought there was that if you have some objection to a particular law, perhaps ( Read more... )

Things that I, on the whole, agree with:

David Mitchell, There's too much harping on about respect and banning. What about the huge gulf of toleration in the middle?:
There's altogether too much harping on respect and banning these days. If you can't respect something, you should ban it. If it's not banned, you should respect it. Bullshit. There is ( Read more... )

My Monday post of the Guardian article about group psychology, with particular reference to the recent BBC reality show reprising, sort-of, the famous Zimbardo Guards and Prisoners experiment at Stanford, generated a productive discussion. Some of the issues have been picked up by shadowkat67 in a typically deeply thought out and well-argued post.

I've been ( Read more... )