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BUNAC Archives: Anyone find a home?

April 4, 2013 By admin Leave a Comment

imagesBUNAC – I nearly looked to go with them for my first overseas experiences…

“Ultimately, if we cannot find a home for this material, it will finish up going through the shredder and being recycled. I think that would be a tragedy, but I cannot see an alternative,” David Heathcote, former Bunac national committee member, told Times Higher Education.

“The material traces the changes in attitude among young people to the US from the time of the Vietnam War to the present day. There must surely be a PhD thesis in the material, at least.

Read full article.

Filed Under History Tagged With Archive, BUNAC, History

History too employability focused?

March 21, 2013 By admin 1 Comment

mhYddLiWhen I last taught history in HE, which must be about 3 years ago now – we had to do this … in many ways I think it’s useful to determine ‘transferable skills’, but also important to note that it’s taking away from other potential teaching time:

First-year history students at my university take a course titled Making History that teaches them about historical research and writing.

It comprises 20 twice-weekly lectures, given by various colleagues, on broad topics such as historiography, periodisation, causation, primary sources and reading critically, and 10 weekly seminars applying those topics to particular historical subjects – the American Revolution in my case.

This year, though, one seminar required students to “prepare three things: a CV; a paragraph identifying its weaknesses; an action plan for how you are going to address these weaknesses”.

Seeing these instructions, it struck me how far the “employability agenda” has progressed – to the point that it is now claiming time on syllabi at the expense of academic subjects and inculcating market values at the expense of free and critical thinking.

Read full piece.

Filed Under History Tagged With History, Transferable Skills

History of Value? @timeshighered

March 14, 2013 By admin Leave a Comment
http://www.rgbstock.com/photo/mhARSNe/history+lesson+3

http://www.rgbstock.com/photo/mhARSNe/history+lesson+3

A number of US arts and humanities departments are fighting back against calls that the liberal arts aren’t worth funding as they don’t lead directly to jobs…

In response, several associations of universities with four-year courses are fighting back. The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) is aggressively advocating the importance of imparting “broad knowledge and transferable skills”. And the Council of Independent Colleges has established a Campaign for the Liberal Arts that will provide research and data to dispel stereotypes about the discipline.

“There is a new and heightened perception driving this trend that associations and organisations need to help the public better understand the value of the liberal arts,” said Laura Wilcox, the council’s spokeswoman.

The organisations contend that what employers really want from universities is not job training but graduates who can think critically, write and speak well, and solve problems.

Read full story.

Filed Under History Tagged With History, Purpose, Value

Spitting Blood: A History of Tuberculosis

December 15, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=422086&c=1

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=422086&c=1

Looks really interesting:

Tuberculosis has claimed many famous victims over the centuries, in fiction and in real life, from John Keats to George Orwell, from the Bronte sisters to Robert Louis Stevenson, from the heroines of Verdi’s La Traviata and Puccini’s La Bohème to the consumptives who whiled away the hours in conversation on Thomas Mann’s magic mountain. It became quite fashionable in the 19th century, seeming to lend its victims an air of noble suffering and heightened sexual allure. “I look pale,” Lord Byron is said to have remarked, gazing into the mirror during a visit by the diarist Tom Moore: “I should like to die of a consumption.” “Why?” his guest asked. “Because the ladies would all say: ‘Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying!’”

In fact, tuberculosis was a disease of the poor, encouraged by inadequate nutrition and spread by cramped and overcrowded living conditions. As industrialisation spread across the world, packing the new working classes into damp mills, unhygienic factories and fetid slums, so TB casualties soared. In Hamburg between 1885 and 1894, death rates from the disease in the richest city precincts averaged 1.3 per 1,000 population, in the new working-class areas 2.6, in the waterfront tenements where the casual dock labourers lived, 3.4. The unlovely realities of the disease’s incidence were conveyed in a terrifying scene in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, when the consumptive, poverty-stricken widow Katerina Ivanova, thrown into destitution by the alcoholism of her irresponsible husband and even more so by his eventual death, becomes delirious and takes her small children out on to the streets to sing and dance for a few kopeks; arrested by a policeman, she runs breathlessly away, stumbles and falls dead in the street, blood gushing out of her throat. “I’ve seen it before,” says the policeman. “That’s consumption.” Her death is undignified and grotesque, the product of extreme poverty that has driven her not into an exalted, otherworldly state of mind but into madness and degradation.

Read full review.

Filed Under Book Review Tagged With History, Medicine, Times Higher Education

Perspectives on History

May 24, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

An interesting story demonstrating differing perspectives on history:

Over the course of three nights in late April 1922 in the west of County Cork, 18 people – all but one of them Protestant – were killed.

This bloody episode, known as the Bandon Valley Massacre, is notable in recent British and Irish history for the sheer number of individuals slaughtered from a particular religious minority.

It is now the focus of controversy in an academic dispute that raises questions about the differing roles of the research historian and the public historian driven by wider, political, aims.

Read full story.

Filed Under History Tagged With History, Perspectives

The Institute for Dark Tourism Research

May 6, 2012 By admin 1 Comment

Auschwitz (photo taken by Dr Bex Lewis)

Having visited Body Worlds, a number of concentration camps, the ‘Killing Fields’, and having taught about memory in history, this story in Times Higher Education caught my interest: the field of new research ‘Dark Tourism’.

The preserved fetuses and chess-playing cadavers in Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds have made it the world’s most popular touring exhibition. Although the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers were a significant New York City tourist attraction, the numbers have been dwarfed by the vast tide of visitors – 9 million in 2010 – who have come to look at Ground Zero since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.

The phenomenon of “dark tourism” is now the subject of serious academic analysis. Last week saw the official opening of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire. This is largely the brainchild of its executive director, Philip Stone, a senior lecturer in tourism who worked as a management consultant and general manager, largely within the tourist industry, before joining the academy in 2001.

He developed a particular interest in dark tourism – which he now defines as “the act of travel to sites of death, disaster or the seemingly macabre” – when he came across a student doing a dissertation on the topic.

Read full story, or the Institute for Dark Tourism Research.

Filed Under History Tagged With History

Learning Lessons from History: Titanic

March 29, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/24364

As we hit a century since the Titanic sank, and James Cameron’s film makes it back into the cinema in 3D, there’s a great article in Times Higher Education re the lessons that can be learnt from across a range of subjects:

On his office wall, James Reason displays a reproduction of a poster that was used to advertise tickets on the RMS Titanic.

The choice was a deliberate one for Reason, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Manchester whose research has focused on human error.

“It’s an excellent example of a classic organisational accident,” he says of the liner that sank 100 years ago next month. “They sail happily into disaster, not seeing or thinking about it.”

A century later, the same “unwarranted insouciance”, as Reason calls it, that characterised this famous disaster is still perceived in events such as the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and the foundering of the MS Costa Concordia earlier this year.

For a small number of academics around the world, the tragic story of the Titanic is surprisingly replete with modern-day lessons in psychology, organisational management, marine engineering and even media and film studies.

Read full article. Note that the photo that accompanies this post was one of the few freely available on sec.hu, and even provides its own little piece of history – one of the people in the photo didn’t get their passport on time, so missed the ship!

Filed Under History Tagged With History, Learning and Teaching, Titanic

Another History of Keep Calm and Carry On

March 19, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

Another nice video – I guess what this teaches you is that I need to get my own video made!

Filed Under keep calm and carry on Tagged With History, keep calm and carry on

‘Internationalisation’ in Universities

March 8, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1377962

The importance of history in affecting modern day policy should always be considered:

‘Internationalisation’ is the trend du jour for universities, but they would do well to consider its earlier manifestation during the British Empire’s long 19th century. As Tamson Pietsch explains, history has much to tell us about the possibilities – and pitfalls – of the phenomenon today

Across the world, higher education is increasingly characterised by talk of “internationalisation”. Taking a number of forms – from charging foreign students full-cost fees to establishing overseas campuses and offering offshore degrees – internationalisation is big business. These activities offer cash-strapped universities a way to increase their income while also advertising themselves as institutions that equip students to work in the global knowledge economy.

But to a historian of the British Empire, much of the current talk about internationalisation sounds strangely familiar. At least four of its contemporary variants can be traced back to the 19th century, when the expanding routes of British trade and empire were creating new kinds of global connections and different forms of educational entanglement. These earlier versions of university internationalisation deserve attention, for they have much to tell us about the possibilities – and the perils – of the phenomenon in the 21st century.

Read full story.

Filed Under History Tagged With History, Lessons, University

Bad History!

February 11, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

Is there such a thing as ‘really bad books’ – e.g. the author picks upon The Da Vinci Code as an example of bad history which is so powerful that many people think that this is ‘how it is’:

The world is full of “bad books”; not just uninteresting, or ill-informed, or morally repugnant books, but books that set out to present or defend positions that are insupportable in logic. I speak here not of books such as Hitler’s Mein Kampf but of books that include Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods? (1968), which presents “proof” of visits to Earth by extraterrestrials, or of Barry Fell’s America B.C. (1976), which “proves” that ancient Celts reached North America before the time of Christ, or The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982), in which Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln purport to prove that lineal descendants of Jesus (and his wife, Mary Magdalene) walk among us. The Holy Blood has the additional distinction of having been the inspiration for Dan Brown’s best-seller The Da Vinci Code(2003). Often these bad books become quite popular, and frequently gain a wider audience than good books on the same subjects. In discouraging my students from relying on such bad books, I began to wonder why they are popular. Few are models of prose style, although most provide a brisk enough narrative. Most of them are long, between 300 and 500 pages. Are we seeing here just the literary equivalent of Gresham’s law, or is there something else going on?

Read full article.

Filed Under History Tagged With History, Popular History, Times Higher Education
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