Making History Move

Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film consolidates decades of scholarship investigating history in visual culture in the fields of film and media, cultural studies, and history. The book develops insights across these fields, including philosophical considerations of film and history, to clarify the form and function of history in moving images. It addresses the implications of the historical film on public historical consciousness in a systematic way, presenting criteria for engaging and assessing the truth status of depictions of the past. Its chapters offer a detailed methodology for analyzing history in moving images for the digital age, proposing five principles of analysis to organize past and future scholarship in this vital, interdisciplinary field of study. Including films such as The Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, and Saving Private Ryan the book sets the stage to examine the most influential form of history with the most significant impact on public perceptions of the past.

Peasants have been despised, underrated, or disregarded in the past. Historians and archaeologists are now giving them a more positive assessment, and in Peasants Making History, Christopher Dyer sets a new agenda for this kind of study. Using as his example the peasants of the west midlands of England, Dyer examines peasant society in relation to their social superiors (their lords), their neighbours, and their households, and finds them making decisions and taking options to improve their lives. In their management of farming, both cultivation of fields and keeping of livestock, they made a series of modifications and some dramatic changes, not just reacting to shifts in circumstances but also devising creative initiatives. Peasants played an active role in the development of towns, both by migrating into urban settings, but also by trading actively in urban markets. Industry in the countryside was not imposed on the rural population, but often the result of peasant enterprise and flexibility. If we examine peasant attitudes and mentalities, we find them engaging in political life, making a major contribution to religion, recognizing the need to conserve the environment, and balancing the interests of individuals with those of the communities in which they lived. Many features of our world have medieval roots, and peasants played an important part in the development of the rural landscape, participation of ordinary people in government, parish church buildings, towns, and social welfare. The evidence to support this peasant-centred view has to be recovered by imaginative interpretation, and by using every type of source, including the testimony of archaeology and landscape.

This book explores the puzzling phenomenon of new veiling practices among lower middle class women in Cairo, Egypt. Although these women are part of a modernizing middle class, they also voluntarily adopt a traditional symbol of female subordination. How can this paradox be explained? An explanation emerges which reconceptualizes what appears to be reactionary behavior as a new style of political struggle--as accommodating protest. These women, most of them clerical workers in the large government bureaucracy, are ambivalent about working outside the home, considering it a change which brings new burdens as well as some important benefits. At the same time they realize that leaving home and family is creating an intolerable situation of the erosion of their social status and the loss of their traditional identity. The new veiling expresses women's protest against this. MacLeod argues that the symbolism of the new veiling emerges from this tense subcultural dilemma, involving elements of both resistance and acquiescence.

In 1973, Jocelyn Cohen and Nancy Poore established Helaine Victoria Press to publish women's history postcards. Spurred by the energy of the second wave feminist movement, they learned how to research histories buried in old books and archives and how to print on a vintage letterpress. The press attracted more participants, closing only in 1991 in response to changing communication technologies. Drawing on feminist and material rhetorics, the authors of Women Making History demonstrate that, by creating postcards, Helaine Victoria Press aimed to do more than provide a convenient writing surface or even affect collective memory; instead, they argue, the press generated feminist memory. The cards, each with the picture of a woman or group of women from history, were multimodal. Pictures were framed in colors and borders appropriate to the era and subject. Lengthy captions offered details about the lives of the women pictured. Unlike other memorials, the cards were mobile; they traveled through the postal system, viewed along the way by the purchasers, mail sorters, mail carriers, and recipients. Upon arriving at their destinations, cards were often posted on office bulletin boards or refrigerators at home, where surroundings shaped their meanings. Women Making History shows that Helaine Victoria Press's cards, like the movement from which they emanated, were dynamic and participatory. They were, in short, a multidirectional, open ended, rhetorically evolving process of transforming feminist consciousness. The print edition includes many images from the press's records, and the digital edition offers additional images plus audio and video clips from press participants. This is the first book to demonstrate the relationships between the feminist art movement, the women in print movement, and the scholars studying women's history. Readers will be drawn to both the large quantity of illustrative materials and the theoretical framework of the book, as it provides an expanded understanding of rhetorical multimodality. Scholars of gender and women's studies, art history, media studies, and the history of rhetoric, as well as members of the public with interests in feminism, Lesbian feminist culture, postcards, fine letterpress printing, and papermaking will be inspired by this richly produced history.

£80 million in debt and with financial meltdown a matter of weeks away, in July 2003 Chelsea Football Club were saved from almost certain penury by Roman Abramovich, a reclusive young billionaire that few people outside his native Russia had heard of. Making History, Not Reliving It recounts the first decade of Roman’s rule in London mirrored against a backdrop of an ever-changing, social-media-driven, angst and envy-ridden world where the revolving door of change seems to spin as fast as that of the manager’s at Stamford Bridge. Granular season-by-season detail of exactly how Chelsea amassed three league titles, four FA Cups, two League Cups, a Champions League and a Europa League in ten eventful years is entertainingly supplemented with news and entertainment bulletins and rounded off with enlightening and diverse points of view provided by a broad cross section of supporters unified by their blissful enjoyment of the desperate jealousy of rival fans now only able to relive the history that their own precious club’s once made.

Making History offers a fresh perspective on the study of the past. It is an exhaustive exploration of the practice of history, historical traditions and the theories that surround them. Discussing the development and growth of history as a discipline and of the profession of the historian, the book encompasses a huge diversity of influences, organized around the following themes: the professionalization of the discipline the most significant movements in historical scholarship in the last century, including the Annales School the increasing interdisciplinary trends in scholarship theory in historical practice including Marxism, post-modernism and gender history historical practice outside the academy. The volume offers a coherent set of chapters to support undergraduates, postgraduates and others interested in the historical processes that have shaped the discipline of history.

'Making History New' explores how several British modernists such as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Rebecca West, applied the experimental methods of literary modernism to the writing of narrative history and historical novels.

While first person interpretation and historic crafts have long been part of the museum world, current movements in the maker movement in libraries and schools have occurred mostly outside of the museum world. Instead, Makerspace in Museums: Hands-On History in Museums and Historic Sites shows the importance of the Maker Movement for museums and historic sites, and presents a roadmap to building, planning, researching, and using a makerspace alongside more traditional museum programming. It calls for a revitalization of living history, which can be done through makerspaces and the maker movement. Highlights include: Why museums and makerspaces are a natural fit together Ways to organize and create a makerspace in a museum of any budget Creating a makerspace and culture of making that is inclusive and for the entirety of the community Strategies for researching historic making techniques and adapting them to the modern world Creating meaningful makerspace-centered programming The processes and methods explored in this book will help produce a sustainable makerspace that will help the museum or historic site that adopts it reach new audiences, creating growth and new museums stakeholders. Likewise, through calling for a recalibration of living history through the language of the makerspace, this project calls for new approaches to living history. Thus, it is a call for a disruption to the status quo and a push towards sustainable and meaningful living history.