Blog

This weekend marks the 93rd Academy Awards, the biggest annual event in the Hollywood calendar. The 2021 nominations made Chadwick Boseman the seventh actor nominated for an acting Oscar posthumously. In honour of this, and his potential upcoming win, I took a deep dive into Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975 to see what I could uncover about some of the previous posthumous Oscar nominees.

Re-watching the excellent drama series The Terror, recently shown on BBC2, has inspired me to scour through AM’s Age of Exploration resource once again for material on Arctic exploration and, in particular, on Franklin’s Lost Expedition of 1845. 

Many of us may have spent the last few days surrounded by a glut of chocolate eggs – large or small, hidden or not, the chocolate Easter egg has become a staple springtime treat.

This Sunday, March 21 2021 marks World Poetry Day. I have taken this opportunity to explore the John Murray Archive, digitised from the National Library of Scotland in AM’s Nineteenth Century Literary Society: The John Murray Publishing Archive.

Lena Richard was a trailblazer, and a savvy entrepreneur committed to the well-being and heritage of her community. She was also an exceptionally talented chef and educator, passionate about Creole cuisine.

“In a pandemic, babies don’t stop coming”, commented a midwife from Bradford Royal Infirmary in a 2020 BBC interview. There seems no better time than women’s history month to turn to narratives regarding this constant human experience in 1993 directive on “Birth” from the newly released Mass Observation Project Module II: 1990s.

“Self-control is strength. Thought is mastery. Calmness is power”. You would be forgiven for thinking these words were from a modern-day mindfulness expert, or perhaps an Instagram influencer. But no, they are found in the notes of an American prisoner of war from the Second World War, published in America in World War Two: Oral Histories and Personal Accounts.

Perhaps one of the most personal experiences LGBTQ+ people face is the decision to come out (or not) and, inevitably, each person has their own story to tell. Here are three of them from a 1995 directive titled All About Out.

Friday 12th February 2021 marks the 212th birthday of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution. Granted, it’s hardly a landmark number, but here at AM we’ll take any excuse to dive into one of our collections and let our inner history nerds run free. This blog comes with a warning, though – vegetarians, you might want to look away now…

In this blog, we consider how the history of human sexuality and gender identity can be explored through the diaries of a historic lesbian figure, Anne Lister (1791-1840). Published with Handwritten Text Recognition software, the manuscript material is now searchable for the first time.

Sex & Sexuality: Self-Expression, Community and Identity publishes this week by AM. A follow-up to the first module which was published in January 2020, this second module presents documents that focus on the lived sexual experiences of individuals, activism within the LGBTQ+ community, among other major events within LGBTQ+ history, including the Stonewall riots.

In an episode of Russell T. Davies’s new drama, It’s a Sin, the protagonists, a group of young gay men, cluster around the television in their battered but cheerful London flat. Crammed onto the sofa, they have obviously anticipated this moment. But what they are watching isn’t 1986’s latest, now nostalgic, primetime hit, but a new government advertisement.

In this guest blog, Zachary Bodnar, Archivist, Congregational Library & Archives (CLA), discusses why Quartex was selected as the platform to support CLA’s digital future. Much has been said about how Quartex will change, and make better, the ways in which we present our digital resources to our users. 

2021 is the year of the sea shanty and we at AM have proven less than immune to the glorious sounds of bearded postmen and Tik-tokers harmonising from far and wide across the land. Inundated with renditions of drunken sailors, The Wellerman and a variety of unexpected remixes, I set course to find some historical examples from the golden age of sail.

Children’s Literature and Culture is packed with many wonderful adventures and fantastical stories. This blog explores the life of Marie-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, commonly known as Madame d’Aulnoy, who was a pioneering fairy tale writer.

The festive season has many attractions and can evoke many emotions depending on what you like: there’s the family time, the food, the time off, the music, the holiness, the general atmosphere of nostalgia, warm emotion and, of course, the presents and gift giving.

Telling ghost stories is now a pastime most commonly associated with Halloween but surprisingly it was once a time-honoured Christmas tradition. 

This week marked 65 years since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her act of defiance sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which is now regarded as the first large-scale demonstration against segregation in the US. Primary sources in AM resource Race Relations in America can begin to tell us about this story first-hand.

While most of us will be fortunate to earn one genuine ‘claim to fame’ in our lifetime, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) has two. Best known today for her contributions to the fields of mathematics and computer science, she also happened to be the daughter of a certain George Gordon Byron, the most famous poet of the Romantic era. 

As we approach the end of November, most of us will be beginning to think about our Christmas shopping, baking our Christmas cakes and Christmas puddings and starting to stock up on all the festive treats that we enjoy over the Christmas period. Having recently started some of my own festive preparations and with Christmas very much on my mind, I turned to our Food and Drink in History resource for a little bit of festive food inspiration.

The fourth module of East India Company, Correspondence: Early Voyages, Formation and Conflict, released this week, showcases a vast quantity of archival material from Series E of the India Office Records held at the British Library. Documents relating developments in not only South Asia, but also Venice, Persia, Syria, China, Japan, Madagascar, Singapore and modern-day Indonesia (among other places) all feature.

A perennial favourite of the autumn calendar, Bonfire Night – or Guy Fawkes’ – passed quietly in lockdown yesterday with nary a whiff of gunpowder nor plotting on the cold November air. It is not to the attempted parliamentary fireworks of 1605 that I turn today, however, but another bonfire, both literal and literary.

With COVID-19 scuppering so many holiday plans in 2020 I was determined to still get my Halloween fix this year. Pumpkins have been carved, I’m ready to consume my body weight in pick ‘n’ mix and I’ve been delving back into one of my favourite productions of Shakespeare’s famously gruesome Titus Andronicus in Shakespeare’s Globe Archive.