1. The latest Carnivalesque is up – plenty of ancient and medieval goodies.
2. The next History Carnival will be hosted by Rob MacDougall at Old is the New New on 1 October.
Email nominations for recently published posts about history (eg, a historical topic, reviews of books or resources, reflections on teaching or researching history) to electromail[at]robmacdougall[dot]org, or use the submission form provided by Blog Carnival.
Non-Philosopher’s Guide to Philosophical Terms. Most entertaining, for this non-philosopher anyway. Plus, moral dilemma of the month (H-T)
The Carnival of Bad History #9 has been posted at World History Blog!
A rather lovely article on the very lovely Mass-Observation movement, by Caleb Crain of Steamboats are ruining everything, which is also worth a leisurely Sunday perusal. (H-T.)
American and other overseas readers may not be familiar with the British Mass-Observation movement, which was founded in 1937 with the aim of creating “an anthropology of ourselves” (and to be honest, I’m not sure just how well-known it is in its homeland these days). Crain has some more links and reading suggestions. The key starting point is the Mass-Observation Archive, which is maintained by Sussex University. The site includes a number of publications, and this is a good introduction to the diaries of some early M-O volunteers. (The BBC’s Woman’s Hour did a piece on them too.)
The founders of M-O were remarkable people in their own right: Charles Madge, a poet and Communist, Tom Harrisson, anthropologist and would-be poet, and – best known of the three – Humphrey Jennings, the leading light of a hugely influential school of British documentary making, an artist and writer. (Who is, wikipedia informs me, buried in Athens near TH White, another very English one-off. Did not know that.) And even if you don’t know about his film-making, you may well have read his monumental anthology of first-hand observations of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, Pandaemonium: the coming of the machine.
It’s not hard to see analogies between blogging and M-O, and the internet has enabled personal observation and publishing on an unprecedented scale. But we shouldn’t forget the BBC’s now almost-venerable Video Nation (since 1993) – which highlights M-O as a predecessor and inspiration.
And I’m wondering: has there ever been anything like Mass-Observation in north America? Or anywhere else in the world? Or is there something peculiarly British about it?
More links!
Humphrey Jennings:
Humphrey Jennings: the man who listened to Britain
Humphrey Jennings biography
wikipedia on Humphrey Jennings
Fires Were Started
A Cultural History of Pandaemonium
Review of Pandaemonium
Visual Mass-Observation – the photographs of Humphrey Spender:
Humphrey Spender’s Worktown (Bolton)
Mass Observation: Humphrey Spender
Images of a vanished Britain
Mass-Observation Today:
Writing for the Mass-Observation project: Bob Rust
How to take part…
Want some sheep poo paper? (H-T)
Send your nominations for an Ancient/Medieval edition of Carnivalesque on or about 25 September at Blogenspiel. Email: carnivalesque [at] earlymodernweb [dot] org [dot] uk or use the submission form.
The next Asian History Carnival is coming up very soon!
Because when you can’t think of anything to write, redesigning the blog always seems like a good idea.
Ralph has posted a wonderful History Carnival at Cliopatria. Go and see for yourself. There’s plenty to keep you occupied.
Edited to add: And if it doesn’t, you can always take a look at the latest Asian History Carnival!
The next History Carnival will be hosted by Rob MacDougall on 1 October at Old is the New New. Email submissions to electromail[at]robmacdougall[dot]org or use the Blog Carnival submission form.
Many thanks to those who have volunteered (or were persuaded) to host in the coming months. The carnival now has hosts through to the end of 2006. (The list should go up at the Blog Carnival page in the next few days.) We’ll still need hosts in the new year though!
Some of you will already know that Google has extended its Book Search facility to enable PDF downloads of many public domain works. This of course, has the potential to make it a tremendous free primary source resource for historians in many fields. So what has it got if you’re interested in British crime and legal history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?
It’s pretty straightforward to use. You need to check the ‘Full view’ button on the Book Search page; do your search, visit the result for any book you’re interested in and if a download is available, there will be a button on the righthand side of the page. (A note: as far as I can tell, you can only get the complete downloads, not selected chapters or sections, and so some of the PDF files are going to be pretty large and take a while to download…)
You’ll probably need the Advanced search to narrow down searches, eg by specifying publication date ranges, words in title, author, etc), and once you’ve done that a couple of times you’ll be able to see that the advanced search syntax is really quite simple to type straight into the search box. So, for example, I just did a search for “intitle:justices peace date:1700-1900″. That was too narrow (although it did return this), but after all part of the fun with Google Book Search has been experimenting to find out what’s likely to be most useful, and being prepared to follow unexpected paths. Being able to get a PDF to save/print and read later just made doing all that much more worthwhile.
I decided to focus on the nineteenth century, for a change and since that’s where I’m in most need of help (and also because Google is unlikely to be able to surpass the range of texts I can already access at work for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). A search for ““old bailey” date:1800-1930” produces a promising number of results; a similar search for the more formal term “central criminal court” gives a smaller and only partly overlapping set of results. The phrase “criminal law” needs the addition of ‘england’ for manageability, but returns potentially useful results like this 1830 constables’ guide.
(Mind you, using the ‘date’ restriction can produce odd results. When I just searched for “old bailey” one interesting-looking text appeared on the second results page; in the restricted date search above, it didn’t turn up until the third page. Very strange.)
Google are clearly still working on this; for example, the download for Howell’s State Trials (1826) isn’t yet available [update (21 September): it is now, but it's a big 'un, over 50MB...]. I don’t yet know just how good this is going to be. But this very cursory examination suggests that it’s made the book search facility far more usable and useful for serious researchers than it has been so far. Which can’t be bad.
I expected that blogging frequency would be lower than in the past, for a while at least, but I didn’t mean to leave it so long since my last proper post (History Carnival notices don’t count). I don’t have the excuse that I have zillions of classes to prep, unlike my American blogging friends. (I wouldn’t have that excuse yet even if I had a teaching job, since the British university year doesn’t get going for a few weeks.) But the job does tend to occupy a lot of my brainspace, along with the ongoing settling-in to the new place. So, you’ll have to make do with a few random observations.
… The gaps in my knowledge of what happened to English criminal law and punishment after the second half of the 18th century are shocking. (But it increasingly seems to me that in general our gaps in understanding what happened to English criminal justice and punishment after the late 18th century are fairly shocking. Or is that just my ignorance and early modern prejudices at work?)
… Having just ordered one that I don’t have to pay for (great fun!), I am absolutely astounded at just how much high-spec desktop PC one can buy for absurdly small sums of money these days. Someone in the office suggested it’s because everyone wants laptops now, so slashing prices is the only way these lumbering mammoths are going to sell. Seems a reasonable proposition.
… In less than two weeks, I become a real ‘manager’, as there’ll be someone at the next desk I’m actually in charge of. This is somewhat scary. Much more scary than the working-in-a-real-office experience, which I think I’m settling into now.
… Right now, I’m playing around with wikis, since we’re thinking of setting one up for the projects. This is something I’ve avoided for some time now; I feared they’d be terribly addictive. (I think I was right. Wikis are dangerous.) If anyone has good tips or links for using wikis for work-related collaboration, documentation, support and so on, do pass them on. It’ll be much appreciated.
Jonathan has done a splendid job over at Frog in a Well. Something for everyone – go over and see!
NB: I urgently need a host for the 1 October edition. If you’re interested, please get in touch as soon as possible.* (I also need hosts for the rest of the autumn/winter (except for 15 October).) Email me: sharon {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk
Remember: No host = no carnival.
*I have a volunteer! (Amazing what a bit of blackmail can do.) But still need hosts later in the autumn.
… It took me nearly three hours to notice that I’d got my carnivals muddled up there in the title. Sheesh.