public history

[Katrina Navickas]

How do public history and heritage institutions understand and explain popular protest, and what relationship do historians need to develop with them?

[shaun0113]

As an amateur historian researching the radical history of Leeds, my only contact with institutionns is using their archives/libraries. As far aas I can see in the main other than a few specialised institutions, there is no interest or understanding of popular protest.
I must say that I am also a member of local history societies and again (and thiis probably reflects members interests) you will not find any active interest but when the subject is discussed there is much enthusiasm.
I find that by talking anfd giving tours that show an alyernative history there is an appetite for knowledge. Academics need to stop being academic and institutions need to look at how they present and where they present information.

[stevepoole]

This depends very much on where you are in the country. The Manchester 'Peoples History Museum' was never going to be set up in Bath, after all... But Manchester's experience of trying to get a replacement plaque, and now a monument, to the fallen at Peterloo shows what an important and divisive question this can be. Newport in South Wales has had much less trouble commemorating the 1839 Chartist rising and building it into the city's material culture (the Civic centre is called John Frost Square; a Chartist mural was unveiled in the 1970s, and there's now an epic scale statue outside the Westgate Hotel). Bristol, on the other hand, still struggles to come to terms with the 1831 rising despite a death toll higher than that for Peterloo. The new city museum (M-Shed) initially thought of focussing its 1831 display on the happy fact that city hero Brunel played a role as a special constable! I've spent quire a bit of time trying to help them sort this out, but I still don't know how it will be resolved.

[shaun0113]

The site of the Northern Star office in leeds is being redeveloped and the Leeds Civic Trust had absolutely no interesat in seeing a plaque go up.

[chriswilliams]

I've just finished supervising a PhD student, Laura Allan, who worked on the representation of criminal justice history in UK criminal justice museums. She focused on how police museums portrayed (or, largely, didn't prortray) the policing of protest, and part of her examined project was an exhibition on the policing of the 1984/85 Miners' Strike. This was on at the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham for several months, but has alas been taken down now.

Laura's completed thesis will be arriving in the Open University library any day now, so anyone who wants to check out this topic could do well to give it a read.

The project was jointly carried out with the Galleries of Justice as an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award. I'm also involved with the GoJ and a number of other criminal justice history museums, libraries and archives in the Crime and Punishment Collections Network - website is here: www.capcollections.org.uk/ One of the things that we try and do is bring together historians, librarians, curators and archivists.