The proliferation of websites, blogs and tweets is re-shaping the practice of history at large. This is a good place to reflect on the significance of these not-so-new electronic media for the ways in which people relate to the past.
Histories of the Present
Telling a Truth About Kashmir – In Fiction
The publication of a telling literary depiction of the most bitter period in Kashmir’s insurgency twenty years ago prompts Andrew Whitehead to consider the value to historians of fictional accounts of conflict.
Mapping Crisis in the ‘MidEast’: Geopolitics Redux
As news websites try to make sense of what some describe as the ‘Arab spring’, ever more inventive maps are appearing online. History Workshop Journal editor Felix Driver has been mapping the maps.
Is This ‘Why History Still Matters’?
Why history still matters’ – that’s the title (in the paper at least) of a piece by Simon Schama in the Guardian’s g2. Is the teaching of history principally about instilling a common identity – to help kids ‘grasp what it means to be British today’?
Archives Against the Museum
Could it happen anywhere other than France? Two weeks ago, the staff of the National Archives staged a two-day strike to protest the announced construction of a “Maison de l’Histoire”–in effect, a national history museum–on the site currently(and historically) occupied by the Archives. While the AN reading rooms are now open again, various series have been “exceptionally closed” due to personnel shortages and it seems likely this may go on for some months, if not years, to come.
