Have you ever wondered what happens to collective trauma as eyewitness memory fades? For descendants of eyewitnesses, do results of violence dissipate, vanish, or evaporate? Gwyn McClelland explores the evidence from Nagasaki.
Can personal photographs become a means to conduct oral histories? Josh Allen explores how the Living Memory Project's methods expand the power of the photograph as a source.
What value do the lessons of the past have in shaping strategies for managing the COVID-19 outbreak? In this article, Guillaume Lachenal and Gaëtan Thomas argue that an over-reliance on the allure of 'pandemic precedents' needs to be…
With debates over the public history of empire and colonialism intensifying across Europe, Afonso Dias Ramos explores the controversy in Portugal over the use of the term “Discoveries” to encompass the country’s complex colonial past.
Commemoration of the Battle of George Square in 1919 has interested diverse groups of researchers, activists and institutions. Respect for tradition meets the desire to create a ‘usable past’ fit for the second decade of the 21st…
A record of suffering: curator Janette Martin examines a report published shortly after the Peterloo Massacre which memorialises the injuries and identities of the victims.
How can different types of historian work together? Laura King argues that collaboration with family historians has the potential to galvanise academic research.
In the second article of our feature on the radical potential of family history, family historian Mark Crail reflects on the power of collaboration in the history of working-class movements.
Not just nostalgia: family historians are at the forefront of challenges to traditional histories that are 'gendered, classed, raced and heteronormative', argues public historian Tanya Evans.
A moving first-hand account of the Siege of Leningrad from a civilian who lived through it, transcribed and introduced by his great nephew, Mikael Kai Zakharov.
In March 1943, 173 people were crushed to death as they took shelter in Bethnal Green’s underground station. Toby Butler led a project remembering the disaster.
Filmmaker Enrica Colusso explores regeneration and community at south London's now demolished Heygate Estate in her film Home Sweet Home and interactive multimedia project Ghost Town.
Designer and photographer Anusha Yadav writes about the Indian Memory Project website, a visual and oral history of the Indian sub-continent through family and personal archives
Michael Rosen and Emma-Louise Williams explain the background to their website, Sec Mod, which is collecting memories of education at secondary modern schools in Britain
Working men’s clubs have a long past, but do they have a future? As June 2012 marks the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Working Men's Club and Institute Union, Ruth Cherrington considers their importance to local economies and…
The shared experiences of people born to refugee parents from Nazism, the 'second generation', as seen through a series of interviews by the author, Merilyn Moos, with children of parents who fled from Germany, Austria, Hungary,…
The British Museum reading room opened in 1857 and was, until recently, the main reading room of the British Library. Phil Cohen gives a moving and at times very funny account of how his life as a (sometime) shoplifter, Situationist,…
