It's Black History Month, and as I have a little spare time I wanted to share a story that came up during my PhD research. Black history is often (wrongly) regarded as separate to Black Country history, or as something recent, but I turned up loads of Black people living their lives in mid-Victorian Wolverhampton. … Continue reading “A somewhat novel case”: a Black life in the Black Country
Category: Wolverhampton
After Carribee Island: the Black Country’s long migration history
I've been looking for a way (and time) to wrap up my after-life of Carribee Island series (see 1880s, 1890s, WW1, 1939) for a while. I'm going to start this one with going right back to a time when this officially-designated Unhealthy Area was being torn down and its residents dispersed through Wolverhampton. Typically, those … Continue reading After Carribee Island: the Black Country’s long migration history
No-go zones, racism and the press in British history
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
After Carribee Island: the eve of destruction
This post follows some preceding ones on the continuing history of the area once known as Carribee Island in Wolverhampton. This area, designated a slum, was pulled down in the 1880s but as these posts have seen, the community life in and around the area remained shaped by its past. Until the 1921 census returns … Continue reading After Carribee Island: the eve of destruction
After Carribee Island: the Great War
This post follows on from these two about the afterlife of Carribee Island, for forty years the assumed - and stigmatised - home of Wolverhampton's Irish population in the nineteenth century. The Carribee Island area was part of a major clearance scheme in the late 1870s and 1880s which transformed the North-Eastern area of Wolverhampton … Continue reading After Carribee Island: the Great War
After Carribee Island: 1891
This post follows the period of my research into Carribee Island, and an earlier post looking at the space in 1881. By 1891, The Space Formerly Known As Carribee Island had been destroyed, its "congregation of ruinous cottages" razed to the the ground, its filth dispersed. So too its population. In the Inquiry for the … Continue reading After Carribee Island: 1891
After Carribee Island: the persistent Irish quarter?
My PhD research on the Stafford Street area of Wolverhampton finishes, pretty much, in 1877: the date that Parliament approved the Wolverhampton Improvement Scheme which led to the demolition of Carribee Island, the laying out of Princess Square and the new bit of Lichfield Street, and so on. I'm focusing at the moment on how … Continue reading After Carribee Island: the persistent Irish quarter?
Slavery and the Black Country: coming home
We've recently looked at how deeply the trade in human lives was embedded in the financial and industrial creation of the Black Country, with roots running through almost every facet of life in the eighteenth century. But of course, slavery was not solely a distant project, enacted on continents and islands thousands of miles away … Continue reading Slavery and the Black Country: coming home
Slavery and the Black Country: collars and chains
Last week I looked at money: finance that filtered from Africa to Jamaica to Britain through the holdings of wealthy landlords such as the Earls of Dudley. This week I want to look at things: the industrial links that the Black Country had with enslavement and unfree labour. These are not easy to trace, just as … Continue reading Slavery and the Black Country: collars and chains
Distance and Strangeness: the murder of Anne Spencer
I sometimes feel like I've spent the last three years trying to figure out my place within history. I still feel like there's probably a huge mountain of scholarship that I've completely missed, but in general I'm starting to work out what historiography is (I'm not a historian by background - everyone else just calls it 'the literature' … Continue reading Distance and Strangeness: the murder of Anne Spencer