One of the advantages of balancing a PhD with research at the Black Country Museum is that I get to compare and contrast over time. My PhD work is about the Black Country in the 1840s through to the 1870s; at the Museum, it's the 1940s through to the 1960s. This is great, but as … Continue reading No-go zones, racism and the press in British history
Category: Representation
Coming over here, taking our jobs…
Crowds of miserable Irish darken all our towns. The wild Milesian features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways... He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with. So wrote the great crusading reformer Thomas Carlyle in 1839. Heroes of the Left like Friedrich Engels were little better: True, the … Continue reading Coming over here, taking our jobs…
“Broke… alone… in love with a pigeon”
No Black Country history this week I'm afraid, more like a sideline that I've been exploring... #storypast I'm currently making notes for my first ever paper at an academic conference, in just under four weeks time. It's not a full, 20-minute affair, but a 5 minute conversation-starter for a somewhat unusual panel at the Social History … Continue reading “Broke… alone… in love with a pigeon”
The Other immigrants of Carribee Island: “men of colour” in the 1860s
One of the most fun elements of my research to date has been trawling the British Newspaper Archive for references to my study area - mostly because you just never know what you might find. There's likely to be plenty of property sales, perhaps reference to the grand annual event which was the municipal licensing … Continue reading The Other immigrants of Carribee Island: “men of colour” in the 1860s
First as tragedy, then as farce
History can be a depressing mistress sometimes. Most people will be familiar with an expression attributed to Marx, that history repeats itself "the first as tragedy, the second as farce." In fact, Marx was quoting Hegel and referring specifically to "great world-historic facts and personages, but it's still held to be true. Even Slavoj Zizek says so, … Continue reading First as tragedy, then as farce
History from below
The picture above is by the well-known late C19 landscape artists John Fullwood, of a scene off North Street that no longer exists. Fullwood was not all that common in that beside his landscape work, he took time to document some of the Black Country's poorest parts, most notably a series of etchings of Wolverhampton prior … Continue reading History from below