Blog

The final part of Mass Observation Online has been released today making the Mass Observation Archive available to researchers in its entirety. But where did it all begin?

On 11 November the UK, and many other nations around the world, will observe the annual memorial day for all those who have lost their lives through war. This blog reflects upon some of the chosen customs and symbols that are used to commemorate Remembrance Day. 

Halloween is here again, and ghouls and monsters will roam our streets tonight. In honour of this spookiest day of the year, today’s blog will explore the dark art of Psychic Photography, as revealed in Adam Matthew’s Victorian Popular Culture resource.

After a BBC story about a UFO today, it got me thinking about how the UFO phenomenon was handled in the 1950’s and onwards.

At the height of the apartheid era, in 1964, ten leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) stood accused of a number of charges, including acts of sabotage, which was, in extreme cases, punishable by death. In what was known as the Rivonia Trial, one of the accused was a man called Nelson Mandela.

Unfortunately Emma Watson throwing down the UN HeForShe gauntlet this week came too late for the male-dominated mid-20th century advertising industry. They were well aware that 75% of the buying power in America was held by homemaking women, so actively reinforced gender inequality, in fear that their industry would crumble without it.

Being one of the frustrated Scots unable to vote in the forthcoming historic Scottish independence referendum I got to thinking about cultural identity and just what it means to part of the United Kingdom. Personally, I have always thought of myself as being both Scottish and British and this is something that is really being called into question as the Yes and No campaigns make their final bids for votes.

Unless you have been living on another planet this week you will have at some point witnessed friends and family dousing themselves in icy water to raise money for ALS (Motor Neurone Disease in the UK) and, increasingly, some other charities. Many of you will have braved the Arctic bath yourselves.

Visiting New York a few years ago, I decided I wanted to see what remained of the very beginnings of the city: New Amsterdam, the Dutch settlement which was taken over by the English and rechristened after King Charles II’s brother, the Duke of York, in 1664. Sadly for my niche historical interest, the plain truth is that there is nothing to see. New Amsterdam was no more than a large village on the site of what is now Manhattan’s financial district; fires and rebuilding and time have erased it.

This letter from a man called Pete Muggins to Abraham Lincoln, responding to Lincoln’s recent election to the office of US President in 1860, reveals to us that hate mail and trolling are far from a modern phenomenon.

Correspondence and diaries are often the first objects that spring to mind when wanting to better understand the experiences of others, but ephemeral items can also offer surprising insights into the past. Whilst working on material from the Gilder Lehrman Collection for the American History resource, I came across an interesting re-working of the Ten Commandments in an article sent home by a miner. They had been adapted for those employed by companies during the gold rush of the 1850s

So many contemporary idioms are based on lines from Shakespeare that it can be hard to avoid using them. One of the best known (and most often raked out for unimaginative newspaper headlines and blog titles) is from Romeo and Juliet, Act II Scene II, where the eponymous star-cross’d lover asks, sighing on her balcony, “What’s in a name?”

Alex Salmond has offered repeated public assurances in the months leading up to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, which opened on Wednesday evening, that the sporting spectacle will not be turned into a political battlefield over Scotland’s continued membership of the United Kingdom, with the decisive referendum looming in just under eight weeks’ time. Correspondence from the 1970s, however, shows that British diplomats have long considered the act of hosting the Games in Britain to be inherently politicised, as organisers strive to maintain delicate balances within the Commonwealth.

This week's Object of the Week (and I feel a little like a character from Sesame Street now) was inspired by a fruit salad consumed earlier in the week and features a particularly juicy file available in the forthcoming Apartheid South Africa resource.

Summer 2014 may have already given us some glorious sunshine, but spirits have definitely been dampened by dismal sporting performances. We've all experienced the uplifting effect that a successful campaign can have on the nation and, more relevantly in recent weeks, the opposite.

On 28th June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, an incident that stunned Europe and set in motion a series of events leading to the outbreak of World War I. AM’s First World War Portal contains documents, images and video footage that help to tell the story of the shooting and its aftermath.

Cats: love them or hate them, they’re here to stay. In fact, cats in Britain seem to be more popular than ever, as a survey by one of the mobile phone networks recently revealed; apparently we post 3.8 million photos or videos a day onto the internet. Indeed, over 350,000 cat owners have even set up social network accounts on behalf of their beloved furry friends.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been working with the Henry Knox collection held at the Gilder Lehrman Institute; a collection that looks at one of the key military figures of the Revolutionary War.

Did you vote in the elections two weeks ago? Horror, apathy, fatalism and despair are all emotions I’ve come across since the results were published, from many different people from various walks of life. Everybody sees politics slightly differently, but nobody ever seems to be particularly happy about the outcome.

I, for one, adore the theatre; the bright lights, the energy, the set, the somewhat mystical quality that envelops you when confronted with the stage, upon which unfurls anything from a deeply moving fictitious work to light-hearted and humorous banter. After all, we all seek a sense of escapism and a yearning for pure entertainment.

It’s not exactly a common occurrence these days that the mere mention of tobacco is met with an audible gasp of wonder. But this was precisely the reaction I encountered recently whilst delivering a webinar showcasing our resource Global Commodities: Trade, Exploration & Cultural Exchange

Long experience has shown the human race that the surest way to provoke technological innovation is to fight a war. This being so, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find in the papers of Henry Knox, general in the Continental Army and artillery specialist during the American War of Independence, a design from about 1775 for an improved, and rather intriguing, type of naval vessel.

After months of rain and grey skies we are finally seeing glimpses of a proper spring. New lambs are in the fields and my garden, which has resembled a muddy swamp for most of the winter, is now beginning to pop with colour. Even the chickens, who have sulked in their coop for months, have begun to lay again

To the mind of the twenty-first-century tourist, Hawaiian hula dancing is symbolic of Pacific island paradise. Against a backdrop of golden sands and blue waters, we envision dancers bedecked in grass skirts, moving effortlessly to lilting ukuleles. However, if we travel back almost two hundred years, to over a century before Hawaii became an American state, we see the hula at the centre of a moral battleground.