The Small Politics of Everyday Life: Local History Society Archives and the Production of Public Histories

Thousands of small, private archives sit in attics, cupboard, church halls and computer hard drives around the country; they are the archives of local history societies. Simultaneously freed from the control of archives sector and government initiatives, and yet saturated with local peculiarities and biases, local history society archives can seem to be the very antithesis of the wider archives movement, apparently private and parochial, undemocratic and uncatalogued. Consequently, local history society archives are rarely included in ‘the politics of the archive’ discussions. But if the activity of archiving is to be understood as a political act, what are the politics and meanings of local history and their archives? In this article, I suggest that certain types of local history society archive collections can help us paint a picture of the everyday lives of working-class people in Britain in the twentieth century. They detail the small politics of people’s lives – family, work, leisure, and beliefs. They give ordinary people a name, a face, and a life lived. Moreover, the workings of local history society archives raise important questions about historical production, for these groups play a significant role in rescuing and preserving archival collections, and in creating and curating their own histories

\u3ci\u3eBringing Christ to our friends in Russia\u3c/i\u3e

Ron Warpole\u27s sermon, Bringing Christ to our friends in Russia. This sermon on Luke 5:17-20 was preached Sunday evening, 16 January 1994, at Prestoncrest Church of Christ in Dallas, Texas

A research agenda for geographies of everyday intergenerational encounter

This paper calls for a research agenda that attends to the geographies of everyday intergenerational encounter that occur informally in communities. Using the theoretical framing of social infrastructure and encounter, it argues that we need to better understand the potential of the everyday, mundane, and often fleeting social interactions we have in the everyday shared spaces of our neighbourhoods, and that it is these interactions that can have the biggest impact on intergenerational relations. This argument is made in response to a lack of research on “naturally occurring” intergenerational encounters when compared to a more well-established body of research on intentional intergenerational practice and design. To demonstrate the value of attending to encounters of the everyday, the paper draws on a body of research within social and cultural geography on intercultural encounters that points to the value of “everyday civics” in contributing to community cohesion in the context of cultural diversity