An occasional Newsletter from Preserved Stories.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, I attended a June 5, 2012 Mimico 20/20 workshop and was impressed with how it was organized. A report based on community input at these workshops has been published. You can access the file by clicking on the link below: Feedback Report Community Workshops Spring 2012 On August 17, 2012 Matthew Premru […]
There was nothing liberal about the British empire, claims to the contrary notwithstanding. In Ghosts of Empire (2011), Kwasi Kwarteng argues that “Britain’s empire was not liberal in the sense of being a plural, democratic society. The empire openly repudiated ideas of human equality and put power and responsibility into the hands of a chosen elite, drawn […]
John Vincent in 1966 wrote that the great moral idea of British liberalism was manliness. This is a topic Susan Pedersen discusses in a chapter entitled “What is political history now?” in What is history now? (2002). According to Vincent, for a nineteenth-century man one’s assignment in life was “to provide for his own family, have his own […]
My volunteer work on behalf of people who stutter is largely in the past; my current volunteer work focuses on my local community. By way of example, I’m currently writing a series of blog posts related to the life and times of Colonel Samuel Smith, who built a log cabin in 1797 in what is […]
Update: A Feb. 21, 2014 New Yorker article is entitled: “Why is academic writing so academic?” [End of update] In Myth, ritual and the oral (2010), Jack Goody discusses fiction and non-fiction, the role of narrative in oral and lecto-oral societies, and the history of novels and the theatre. In lecto-oral cultures, one finds […]
Museums have a relationship to history, a relationship that’s been explored in some depth. In Theorizing Museums (1996), there’s a reference to Timothy Mitchell’s observation that in nineteenth-century Europe, the museum exhibit was constructed as a simulation of external reality, with a clear sense of separation between the reality and the representation. A European museum-goer […]
Natalie Zemon Davis has recently been named a Companion of the Order of Canada in recognition of her “distinguished contributions to the field of history, notably her pioneering approach to previously unexamined aspects of social history.” Among her books are Trickster travels: a sixteenth-century Muslim between worlds, Women on the margins: Three seventeenth-century lives, and […]