Politics, populism, and professionalism: Reflections on the role of the academic historian in the production of public history

This article explores some of the challenges and opportunities facing academic historians involved in large British public history projects and examines how government priorities and the particular ways in which public funds are deployed can affect the critical intellectual content of such projects. To this end it first broadly outlines the context in which British public history has recently developed and then focuses on my own experiences as leader of a British public history project on 1001 years of ethnic minorities in Bristol, England, which was sponsored by the "England's Past for Everyone" initiative. © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History. All rights reserved

Reaching out from the archive: minority history and academic method

Paper given at History in British Education (first conference

Remembering slavery and abolition in Bristol

This article charts how the public commemoration of slavery and abolition in the former slaving port of Bristol, England, evolved from the late nineteenth century to the bicentennial of the abolition of the British slave trade in 2007. It argues that by the late twentieth century, demographic changes in the city and the explosion in slavery scholarship helped to destabilise the consensus about how the city's slaving past should be characterised. It critically examines the different constituencies within the city who responded in a variety of ways to official calls to mark 'Abolition 200'. © 2009 Taylor & Francis

Set in stone? Statues and slavery in London

This article examines public monuments in London and their relationship to slavery and abolition, a topic that has attracted remarkably little empirical research. It argues that a significant proportion of the individuals commemorated by public statues in London during the long eighteenth century had important links with the slave-trade or plantation slavery and that these links need to be unearthed, contextualized and made explicit. It goes on to analyse those public statues and memorials which explicitly honour British abolitionists and finds that the way they are conceived and executed has generally favoured a conservatively self-congratulatory and defensive political agenda which has consistently marginalized the experience of enslaved Africans. However, the subsequent social lives of such monuments, it is further contended, merit closer investigation since their meaning is not set in stone but can be subverted and transformed according to context. © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved

Why history matters: further perspectives from a historian and an archaeologist - Madge Dresser

Paper given at Why History Matter