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Downton Abbey: House Popular?

January 16, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

A really interesting story in Times Higher Education recently as to the popularity of Downton Abbey - and how the house itself – the ultimate British status symbol – has contributed to its popularity.

The success of Downton Abbey is a tribute not just to Julian Fellowes’ ability as a dramatist, but to the enduring popularity of his subject: the country house. Highclere Castle, playing Downton Abbey, is the real star of the show. The British are in love with the “big house”, the centre of a landed estate, and for centuries the dynamic heart of whole societies and economies in rural Britain.

The wealth and status of British landowners over the centuries and the impact of primogeniture in keeping estates intact has meant that Britain has a wealth of these magnificent properties, from mellow mansions nestling in the English shires to the palaces erected by Scottish dukes and earls in the border counties, and every year millions of us visit them.

Read full story.

Filed Under History Tagged With Downton Abbey, History, Museums, TV Show

The right kind of history?

December 3, 2011 By drbexl Leave a Comment

Interesting story led by Sir David Cannadine:

Historian calls for evidence, not scaremongering, to inform how subject is taught. Matthew Reisz writes

One of Britain’s leading historians has called for “serious evidence-based policymaking about history teaching in schools” and an end to a debate characterised by “too much talk of crisis, too much irresponsible scaremongering, too much polarisation of views”.

Sir David Cannadine, Dodge professor of history at Princeton University, has recently carried out a major research project with Jenny Keating and Nicola Sheldon, research fellows at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research.

The results are now published in a book released last week, The Right Kind of History: Teaching the Past in Twentieth-Century England.

“We have looked at huge amounts of official material, directives from Whitehall going back to the 1900s, and created our own oral history archive of pupils and teachers,” Sir David said. “Much of the discussion is very polarised – by academics, by politicians, by journalists looking for a good story.”

Debates on knowledge versus skills, elite versus popular history, and whether “we want a cheerleading story of national greatness or something more nuanced”, have been around for decades and are unlikely to be sorted out any time soon, he argued. Yet in the classroom, the researchers discovered, “these polarised issues aren’t like that”.

Read full story.

Filed Under History Tagged With David Cannadine, History, Times Higher Education

Sources of Illumination @timeshighered

October 2, 2011 By drbexl Leave a Comment

Characterised by creativity and attuned to the needs of their age, the first European universities have important lessons for higher education today, says Miri Rubin

As a historian of the Middle Ages, I am frequently asked about the links between universities then and now. Given the momentous changes that are affecting modern-day institutions of higher education and that touch the lives of so many people – students, parents, teachers, employers – such questions have become more frequent and more urgent, too.

All historians (especially those of us who focus on more ancient times) delight in pointing out parallels between “our” period and the present. An assessment of the role of medieval universities reveals some telling affinities between higher education then and now – and may hold lessons for today’s turbulent times.

When universities emerged between 1150 and 1200 in Italy, France and then England, they answered the needs of the two main institutions of governance – the Church on the one hand and dynastic kingdoms on the other. These institutions required bureaucrats: people trained in the procedures of government and in its lingua franca, Latin.

The standards of written Latin still depended on the conventions that had developed in the Greco-Roman world, encoded in the liberal arts of rhetoric, logic and grammar. The jobs for university graduates – bachelors of the arts – included the drafting of letters and diplomatic documents and the recording of important transactions, personal and public, ranging from marriage contracts to manorial accounts.

Read full story.

Filed Under History Tagged With History, University

My PhD Examiner: Lord Asa Briggs

September 22, 2011 By drbexl 1 Comment

My PhD Examiner (who passed my thesis with no corrections) is quite well known in the history field, you know. See what has just been created for him at the University of Sussex for the 50th Anniversary Celebrations.
Bust of Asa Briggs unveiledRead more about Lord Asa Briggs, and what’s he’s up to in his 90th year here.

See some of his texts:

Filed Under drbexl Tagged With History, Lord Asa Briggs, Times Higher Education

White Paper: rules may favour the humanities

July 12, 2011 By drbexl Leave a Comment

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1161602The government’s new higher education policies could cut student places in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects and create extra places in cheaper arts and humanities disciplines, vice-chancellors have warned.

A number of senior sector figures are concerned that the core-margin system, unveiled in the government’s higher education White Paper, will deduct places from high-cost STEM subjects and allocate them to cheaper institutions more likely to offer lower-cost arts and humanities places.

Critics also argue that the proportion of AAB students is higher in arts and humanities subjects, creating a further incentive to weight provision towards those disciplines under the new market for elite students.

Some vice-chancellors raised the issue with Prime Minister David Cameron during a meeting at 10 Downing Street last month.

Under the system, universities will lose an average of 8 per cent of their student places, creating a 20,000-strong margin to be auctioned off to institutions – including further education colleges – that offer average fees of less than £7,500.

Read full story.

Filed Under History Tagged With Higher Education, History, Humanities

Public history centre hopes to get the records straight

July 11, 2011 By drbexl Leave a Comment

Digital archives must balance outreach, financial viability and scholarship, Matthew Reisz hears

Researchers at a new centre devoted to public history have warned that spending cuts and ill-conceived digitisation programmes pose a major threat to the archives essential to much academic work.

Kingston University’s Centre for the Historical Record was launched with the aim of promoting “collaborative research, knowledge exchange and discussion between historians, archivists, curators, heritage providers and the public”.

A conference held to mark the opening was devoted to the challenges and opportunities of preserving and presenting public history in the 21st century.

Nicola Phillips, a lecturer in history who co-founded the centre, said that libraries, archives and heritage organisations that faced budget cuts were often tempted to allow commercial companies to “snap up” the rights to archive data.

Although these businesses make the material available to anyone who is interested, it is often at a considerable price and in a form “more geared to people looking to investigate their family trees rather than academics looking at more in-depth trends such as occupations or migration”.

The effect, Dr Phillips said, is to “restrict their full education and research potential”, while any royalties to the archives tend to dry up quickly.

Read full story.

Filed Under Digitisation, History Tagged With Digital History, History, Kingston University

Fancy a p/t job as Web Manager for History Workshop Online?

May 21, 2011 By drbexl Leave a Comment

A friend sent this to me, as it fits my skillset, but I’m already over-subscribed with work for next year, but keen to see someone who’ll be good at this take post!

NEW JOB AT HISTORY WORKSHOP JOURNAL

History Workshop Online: Web Manager

The editors of History Workshop Journal are looking for a part-time web manager and administrator to help establish and run a new website, History Workshop Online<http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/>. This WordPress website is intended to reach beyond an academic audience and to be both a discussion forum and a resource for radical historians and for those interested in the interplay between past and present. The job involves an average of six hours work a week at an hourly rate of £16.50.

The post-holder will:

  • assist editors in commissioning material for the website and sub-edit contributions for publication
  • post material on the website, including picture research and layout
  • ensure the website is refreshed regularly, with the best use of images and design
  • maintain the noticeboard and forthcoming events sections of the site
  • ensure that the website is compliant with copyright, legal and other requirements
  • generate traffic to the site through search engine optimisation, posting of links on other relevant sites, and arranging mutual click throughs with other appropriate sites
  • use social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to promote the site
  • organise and attend meetings of the web committee (roughly every six weeks)
  • attend general meetings of the editorial collective (roughly every six months) and  prepare for these a brief report on the progress of the site
  • liaise with the web designer as appropriate
  • seek approval and account for any expenditure required for the upkeep and improvement of the site

We are looking for someone who:

  • has experience in website management and administration
  • can work independently
  • has good IT and design skills
  • has an interest in history
  • can attend evening and occasional weekend meetings, usually in London
  • has good oral and written communication skills
  • is very organised

To apply for the post please send your CV with a covering letter, plus links to any websites on which you have worked, to historyworkshopjournal@gmail.com. The deadline for applications isJune 10th.

For further information about this post, email Barbara Taylor on b.taylor@uel.ac.uk

 

Filed Under History Tagged With History, History Workshop Journal, Job Vacancy

Words as weapons @timeshighered

May 6, 2011 By drbexl Leave a Comment

But something more urgent presses upon the day. It seems to me to be the case that a new, drastic hiatus impends in our civilisation, matching two of the great historical splits of the past, those of the 17th and 19th centuries. The old order is breaking down, economically, environmentally, meaningfully. The official forces will fight to the end to restore things as they were; they will fail.

In these circumstances, it will prove the responsibility of university teachers of the humanities – philosophy, history, literature – and like-minded allies in social science to rediscover a language capable of speaking of matters of life and death, whether in lectures, books for the risible research excellence framework, seminars and conferences or, indeed, in the long, drawn-out disputes with management about the whole horrible hoo-ha over balancing the rigged books as handed over by the government. The language to hand is Leavis’, and we had better learn to speak it again before it is too late.

Read full story.

 

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

Who speaks for historians? #YestoAV

May 5, 2011 By drbexl Leave a Comment

Twenty-five historians, coordinated by Conservative MP Chris Skidmore, have written to the Times, claiming that AV would be a betrayal of the sacrifice of past generations of democracy campaigners. But claiming to speak for the dead on a referendum they never contemplated seems to us a betrayal of academic standards that we as historians hold dear.

They claim to speak for historians, indeed for history, in defending FPTP. But as on any such serious political question, historians are as divided as the population at large. The notion that “History teaches us to vote ‘No to AV’”, as the Times headline put it, or that it gives any such clear lesson on the rightful configuration of the voting system again leads us to question the signatories’ scholarly acumen in supporting this petition.

Invoking the spirit of Winston Churchill on account of his 1931 objection to AV is a cheap bid for public resonance and bad use of historic example. His opposition to votes for women and to the introduction of direct elections in India make him a poor guide to future voting systems.

It is misleading to claim that under AV one citizen’s vote could be “worth six times that of another”. Instant run-off voting, of which AV is a form, retains the equal vote which the signatories of the Times letter fear is under threat. Further research would have shown that its compatibility with the principle of voter equality has already been tested in court in the US, where it was found that “no voter is given greater weight in his or her vote over the vote of another voter”.

Simon Szreter
Pat Thane
Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal

 

Filed Under Election Campaign, History Tagged With #yestoav, History

Challenges To Biography (AHRC)

April 19, 2011 By drbexl Leave a Comment

Why the network?

Clearly academic biographers from different disciplines, freelance biographers, and theorists of biography can and do meet – but too often their engagement with each other is haphazard. A research network can consolidate fragile lines of communication across disciplines, between practitioners and theorists, and between scholars and non-academic writers.

How easy to join in?

That was incredibly simple to do. I went to ‘comment’, which prompted me to register. Before too long I was in the WordPress interface (which I’m used to using/is incredibly straightforward anyway), and had posted  short entry re: my artist biographies (always great to be able to share the knowledge that has been collated more widely).

Filed Under Artist, History Tagged With AHRC, Artist, Biography, History
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