Blog

Whilst delving into an intriguing batch of Chinese artwork for our project China America and the Pacific, I was arrested by the sight of a man’s bare buttocks. Said buttocks were receiving a thorough spanking via the medium of a bamboo paddle administered by a law enforcement officer who looked decidedly happy in his work.

It’s always fascinating when you come across old photographs of your local area. Not only can you see how a place has been completely modernised, but they also serve as a captivating snapshot of the past, particularly if they show a particular event or people in motion.

One year ago I found myself in one of my favourite places in the world, scrambling around the monstrous peaks of Yosemite National Park, California, generally gawping in awe of the picturesque landscape that enriched my view. So it has been exciting to be reminded of the park and descendants of its first inhabitants whilst indexing some evocative photographs belonging to the Newberry Library’s Ayer Collection, featured within Adam Matthew’s forthcoming publication American Indian Histories and Cultures.

One of America’s most famous battles concluded 137 years ago today. The battle saw an overwhelming victory for the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, while almost half the entire 7th Cavalry Regiment was wiped out, including George Armstrong Custer. In the media fallout Custer was declared a hero, while the Sioux were described (by the New York Times, at least) as “cruel, cowardly robbers”.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Like many of her generation who struggled to manage a household during wartime rationing, my grandmother was steadfastly against margarine. Yucky, tasteless stuff, she said. Give her good old farmhouse butter any day of the week.

Whilst exploring the visual collections of Victorian Popular Culture, a photograph caught my eye. It showed a group of elephants processing down Milsom Street in Bath – not a sight you see every day! The caption was simply “Barnum’s procession through Bath” and I was intrigued to find out more.

It may surprise you to learn that fad diets are not a recent phenomenon; the 1830s saw a health food craze, founded by Sylvester Graham (1794-1851), sweep across the US. Graham’s philosophy resonates with current trends; championing fresh fruit and vegetables and wholegrains while cutting out fat, meat and sugar.

Migration to New Worlds: A Century of Immigration reminds me of a photo-mosaic. The resource sweeps across several cultures, tens of decades and thousands of miles to explore the mass migration of peoples in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but this rich narrative is actually comprised of a multitude of stories of the individuals, families and communities that decided to up sticks and ship themselves off to a whole new life.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been spending most of my time indexing documents for our forthcoming Colonial America resource, which consists of British Colonial Office files from The National Archives, Kew. This material covers all aspects of life in the Thirteen Colonies and beyond, from the everyday administrative grind of council meetings and petitions about land rights to the more evocative subjects (from the comfortable vantage point of twenty-first-century Britain) of battles with the French, parlays with Indians, and pirates – or ‘pyrates’, as most writers of the time rather pleasingly spelled it.

Today marks the US federal holiday Labor Day; a day dedicated to honouring the American labour movement and recognizing the contributions and social and economic achievements of American workers. It is a day to celebrate strength and prosperity and to have one last hurrah for summer.

Before the close of the Nuremberg trials in October 1946, the Mass Observation team sent out a number of directives asking the public’s opinion on the trials of the Nazi war criminals. The primary response was that they were a waste of time, a waste of tax payer’s money and the verdict a foregone conclusion. The thought process was that these men were guilty, and would be found so, and that the simplest, and cheapest option, would have been to shoot them on the spot (though some had some more brutal ideas).

Alongside turkey lies other Thanksgiving traditions that many Americans hold dear which are distinctly products of the “New World,” such as cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and our brand of football, each of which have impressively old historical roots in their own rights. It is a day in which we are all meant to reflect on the bountiful supplies of food and material wealth of our nation.

In 1960 the anthropologist Tom Harrisson returned from Borneo to Blackpool, where 23 years earlier he had directed survey work for Mass Observation. His stay was recorded in the MO book Britain Revisited, which took a shapshot of contemporary British life and compared it to what the ‘mass observers’ had seen and heard in 1937. Much in post-war Blackpool, Harrisson found, was as it had been, but the entertainments on the seafront had changed.

Last month I travelled out to Atlanta, Georgia to attend the four-day 130th American Historical Association (AHA) conference. This was a chance to get some real insight into the hot topics currently being discussed within the field of migration studies and was attended not just by movers and shakers from American Universities, but by academics from the UK, South Africa, Japan, Germany and many other countries across the globe.

Newly arrived African-American migrants to St. Louis during the opening of the Great Migration became part of an already established cosmopolitan community with deep roots dating back to the city’s early beginnings. A major center of social welfare progressivism, St. Louis was also particularly weeded to residential segregation.

An item I assessed back in 2014 provided a challenge in terms of how to digitise it; Spooner’s Perspective View of the Great Exhibition is a folding concertina peepshow. It is made of ten pieces of card, each with a different layer of a scene from inside Crystal Palace, where the 1851 Great Exhibition was held (widely regarded as the most influential single event in the history of design and industry). Folded out and viewed through the peephole, these pieces make up a three-dimensional perspective of a long architectural gallery.

Summer 2016 will see the release of Adam Matthew’s History of Mass Tourism, a highly visual and searchable collection celebrating the growth of tourism from the mid-1800s to 1960s. One of the treasures found in this resource is a photograph album belonging to a young Alfred Ghirardelli, heir to the Ghirardelli chocolate empire, depicting a trip to Yosemite in the summer of 1903.

On a recent trip, I was lucky enough to take a detour and visit Niagara Falls, a tourist hotspot since the mid-nineteenth century. This stunning, natural phenomenon is one of the world’s most popular attractions, with more than 12 million visitors each year – and it’s not hard to see why.