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heritage’ of their work ‘in their communication activities’ ( Red Cross Council of Delegates, 2015 ), allow access to their audiovisual archives, or have established units for ‘historical communication’ within their headquarters. 1 Here as well, however, exchange and cooperation between professional historians and communication practitioners seems marginal at best and has only recently started to evolve. 2 New collaborative approaches between academics and practitioners, such as the initiative
The substantive and methodological contributions of professional historians to development policy debates was marginal, whether because of the dominance of economists or the inability of historians to contribute. There are broadly three ways in which history matters for development policy. These include insistence on the methodological principles of respect for context, process and difference; history is a resource of critical and reflective self-awareness about the nature of the discipline of development itself; and history brings a particular kind of perspective to development problems . After establishing the key issues, this book explores the broad theme of the institutional origins of economic development, focusing on the cases of nineteenth-century India and Africa. It demonstrates that scholarship on the origins of industrialisation in England in the late eighteenth century suggests a gestation reaching back to a period during which a series of social institutional innovations were pioneered and extended to most citizens of England. The book examines a paradox in China where an emphasis on human welfare characterized the rule of the eighteenth-century Qing dynasty, and has been demonstrated in modern-day China's emphasis on health and education. It provides a discussion on the history of the relationship between ideology and policy in public health, sanitation in India's modern history and the poor health of Native Americans. The book unpacks the origins of public education, with a focus on the emergency of mass literacy in Victorian England and excavates the processes by which colonial education was indigenized throughout South-East Asia.
volunteers, to the rescue of archives in danger, the preparation of exhibits and documentary films, the celebration of anniversaries, the writing of policy briefs, the visit of humanitarians in university courses, and the visit of historians to humanitarian conferences. For professional historians of aid and development, such joint ventures provide a unique way to find and create documents required to understand the actions and the words of as many of those involved as possible, in as many contexts as possible. The five media specialists encountered in December 2020 for
improve and deepen collaborations between professional historians and humanitarian institutions (see Borton, 2016 ; O’Sullivan and Chéilleachair, 2019 ; Taithe and Borton, 2016 ), this essay seeks to explore how public historians and their work may enrich and contribute to extending the uses of history among humanitarian practitioners. In what follows, I depart from the assumption that Red Cross museums, like other humanitarian media, are about seeing
isolated in much the same way as few churchgoers know much about the Biblical criticism practised in university theology departments. Without much doubt, interest in the many aspects of local history at a non-academic level has burgeoned. Those authors influenced by the work of professional historians try to widen the context in which they work, or to treat special themes or periods. Others are content to produce old photographs of trams, people, street scenes, picture postcards, and items with nostalgia value. Videos and visual displays for heritage centres serve a
deeply relevant to their own times. I have tried to explain why the debate mattered to them and not simply what the debate was. Their contribution to the development of history as a discipline and as a philosophy as well as to Reformation historiography is underlined. Chapters 5 to 8 discuss the history of the sixteenth-century Reformation as written by modernist professional historians of the later nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries who, whatever their personal religious or political commitment, have attempted to treat it objectively. They have brought
, and keeping track of, the local digs organised by the societies. By contrast, historians, mindful of Professor Freeman’s suggestion in 1884, maintained a lofty distance, while always hoping that relevant illustrations would be found to help with the business of writing national history. Local history flourished, but at the same time it was frowned upon, hence the schizophrenia. We can identify three consequences. First, professional historians working in a local context had to justify their work in national terms, because their findings could be used only to test
, which was believed to be best studied through the national archives on a national basis. Antiquarianism seemed alien to this position. Professional historians sought to distance themselves from what they saw as the amateur and the unscholarly. They promoted journals for disseminating their findings among their professional colleagues, and they sought to hide links they may have enjoyed with the societies. By the end of the nineteenth century local history was marginalised: even the Victoria County History, founded in 1899, was primarily concerned with studying the
into their present successors. The past begins in the present, and for the local historian it begins where we are. Local history encompasses a wide range of interests, concerns, and outputs, serious and amusing, amateur and professional. Written local history can range from a few pages of extracts about a particular place or community produced on a desktop PC, to a full-length scholarly tome compiled by a professional historian and published by a university press. But the written word is only a part of the story. Modern media has altered the range and tone of local
the familial frame of empire and colonial endeavour, and were of concern to amateur and professional historians alike. In part the importance of such values centred on the perception of their fundamentality to success of the colonial project, with monuments and historic sites seen as reminders of pioneering virtue and sacrifice while history’s duty more generally was to highlight the inevitability of