Tag: History

Categories
Old Heritage Archive

My Top 5 for Promoting Industrial History and Heritage

Aberfulais Falls, near Neath, Wales, site of early copperworking, then tinplate industry (Tehmina Goskar)
Aberfulais Falls, near Neath, Wales, site of early copperworking, then tinplate industry (Tehmina Goskar)

Having had the opportunity to work on various industrial heritage projects over the years and now focusing both my research and professional work in this area, I am publishing what I consider to be five key areas that should be addressed as part of any industrial heritage project. They are particularly aimed at groups and organisations that want to think about promoting their site or collections beyond the locality and beyond immediate interest groups and traditional audiences. They are also aimed at any knowledge exchange collaboration or project that wish to raise awareness of a particular historic industry and its impact on people and societies.

It makes reference to examples based on Welsh copper industrial heritage as that is the project on which I have most recently worked. The Top 5 was originally written in July 2010.

You may freely make use of this guide provided you ensure full attribution is made to me, Tehmina Goskar, and its source on this website.

Continue reading “My Top 5 for Promoting Industrial History and Heritage”
Categories
Old Heritage Archive

Copper-bottomed days

Copper Day poster, 5 March 2011
Copper Day poster, 5 March 2011
Copper Day was an unexpected development of the ESRC Global and Local Worlds of Welsh Copper Project that I am currently working on at Swansea University. In addition to the summer exhibition, the development of web-accessible resources on copper history, digitisation and liaison with project partners and other bodies, Copper Day has emerged as probably what most people will remember the project for. It was initially an idea raised to respond to what some thought of as a rather elitist event held last October at the National Waterfront Museum on History, Heritage and Urban Regeneration. This was organised jointly by the project and the Institute of Welsh Affairs. That day had a specific aim in mind and that was to raise the issues surrounding heritage-led regeneration, what this has meant for other areas of Britain such as Cornwall and New Lanark in Scotland, and what this could mean in the future for Swansea. However, there was still a need to address how to satisfy a growing thirst for information on Swansea’s global copper heritage. What began as an idea for a ‘free people’s meeting to discuss things’ has ended up as, thanks to the willing and voluntary contributions and efforts of several individuals and organisations, a city-wide free festival of all things copper. On Saturday 5 March, (parts of) Swansea will once again (metaphorically) hear the clatter of the copperworks and (with no threat to health) smell the smog that choked the valley that was at the centre of a world industry for almost two centuries. From the Big Screen in Castle Square to the Richard Burton Archives at Swansea University, we hope there will be something for everyone.

Read more about why we thought Copper Day was important.

Read more about Swansea Copper Day and find out what’s going on

Categories
Old Curatorial Archive

Finding history in material culture

Being an historian of material culture isn’t easy. It confuses, it contradicts and it doesn’t categorise elegantly. When does material culture become more than just pretty pictures to illustrate your otherwise colourless prose? This has been something that I have been bothered with for as long as I have been working with objects and their interpretation. Doing this from the discipline of history has certainly caused moments of ‘it is a bird, is it a plane, no, it’s an artefact!’. But it has also been alluring and affirming, a bit like catching a glimpse of a colourful jay in your garden amongst the usual blackbirds, sparrows and magpies. You remember they exist and actually have been around and part of the scenery forever. Embracing material culture enables you to treat history as a genuine continuum of undulating change accented by sharper contrasts (evolution and events). Our material worlds are what has made, and continue to make us human. Our creation, destruction and manipulation of material things set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom that does not embrace the permanency of arte-fact quite like we do. There is a reason why monastics and ascetics feel compelled to eschew the things that remind them of ‘worldliness’. So, isn’t this worth more attention than a bookcover?

Part of the difficulty of explaining my approaches has been that there is never a short one. I wish I could say I work on Saint Not-Appearing-in-this-Blog, or on the Unusual Family Papers of a Private Library. It would be easy, people would give an approving nod as something they expect an historian to say they did, and we could then move on to complaining about our positions of privilege. I ought now to gently dismount from my high horse and do some explaining of what my approach to history and material culture actually comprises.

I use close-object analysis in equal measure to archives, photographs, illustrations and the raw data of an object record. Deconstructing technique and materials is as important as ascertaining the economic, social and cultural contexts of what necessitated / desired creation. Materials-based enquiry also allows me to throw off the shackles of periodisation. While there is nothing wrong with studying the material culture of a particular time span, the richness of information I can glean from studying a particular object or material over a longue dureé, e.g. copper working technique from the hearth to the factory. I want to know how and when changes in prospecting, mining, smelting, alloying, casting, beating, drawing, rolling, plating and recycling changed over a period 10,000 years. Extending the idea of object biographies to life cycle and spans of materials.

Categories
Old Curatorial Archive Old Heritage Archive

A history of Welsh copper in 29 objects: displaying the Latin American connection

Monkey puzzle tree, Chile
Monkey puzzle tree, Chile

On Thursday 16 December at 4pm I shall be giving a paper to this title for the Centre for the Comparative Study of the Americas (CECSAM) at Swansea University.

This will be the first time I have delved into a brand new region’s material culture since my foray into medieval southern Italy for my PhD. My learning curve has been steep and I hope that I do justice to the work of scholars of Latin America on which I will be heavily relying. However, this paper will not be about Wales’ relationship with Latin America during the boom years of the world copper industry in the middle two-thirds of the 19th century, but will rather suggest how this relationship can be interpreted through objects. Through the project I am currently working on, the Global and Local Worlds of Welsh Copper, I am tasked with doing just this. It isn’t just the Latin American connections that need to be made tangible through the objects and illustrations we will feature in the forthcoming exhibition at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea in July 2011, but those closer and farther from Wales such as Australia, South Africa, Anglesey and Cornwall. How can this story be told through the things that remain to us? Copper wasn’t the only thing that connected Latin America to Wales. The well-known Monkey-puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana, previously known as Chile Pine in Britain), native to Chile and Argentina, came to the British Isles in the 1850s and a handsome specimen was planted in the estates of Singleton Abbey, previously the home of copper magnates the Vivians, now the core of Swansea University. Did the copper connection bring this particular one to Swansea?

This paper will give me the opportunity to talk about my intellectual approach to choosing objects for exhibitions (and for history writing) and provide a discrete case-study to do this. To be a little out of my comfort zone with a new region’s history will sharpen, I hope, my questions and improve my answers. The title is in homage to copper’s elemental number, 29, and my expectation that 29 key objects can tell the story of the world of Welsh copper.

An enhanced version of my slideshow presentation will now form a part of the 2011 Swansea Latin American Association (Asociación Latinoamericana de Swansea Swansea Latin American Association) festival at the Dylan Thomas Centre where people will be able to learn about the Welsh-Latin American copper connections.

Continue reading “A history of Welsh copper in 29 objects: displaying the Latin American connection”
Categories
Old Heritage Archive

New horizons in Welsh copper

Looking out from the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea
Looking out from the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea

In a little under two weeks I shall be starting a new job in the department of History & Classics at the University of Swansea. I will be Research Assistant on an ESRC-funded project entitled, History, heritage, and urban regeneration: the global and local worlds of Welsh copper. Project Leader, Prof Huw Bowen, won the £95,000 funding for this project which will be conducted in partnership with the University of Glamorgan, the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, and the City and County of Swansea.

Continue reading “New horizons in Welsh copper”
Categories
Old Heritage Archive

History at the End of the World?

History at the End of the World?
History at the End of the World?

I am very excited to announce the forthcoming publication of what promises to be one of the signature books on history and human survival. My own contribution to this book is not on my usual topic of research, but on the example of the Parsis, Zoroastrian Indians of Persian descent and their diaspora. It is entitled, ‘A Zoroastrian Dilemma? Parsi Responses to Global Catastrophe’ and is in the final part of the book (Part VI: Surviving Catastrophe: Creating Conditions for Renewal) where I discuss how Parsis have reconciled life and religion throughout their history to survive a series of crises that have challenged this tiny community whose impact on the world has nevertheless been greater than most realise. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the editors, Mark Levene (University of Southampton), Rob Johnson (University of Oxford) and Penny Roberts (University of Warwick) for their brilliant shepherding of this project.

The book will be published in e-book and paperback form on 15 April, History at the End of the World? History, Climate Change and the Possibility of Closure edited by Mark Levene, Rob Johnson and Penny Roberts and is available from the following sources:

History at the End of the World? Out 15 April 2010:

Paperback via Troubador

E-book direct from Humanities Ebooks

Download the flyer for History at the End of the World

The collection has been produced under the auspices of Rescue!History , a network of historian activists with broadminded and sometimes radical approaches to thinking, life and the world. Rescue!History is the sister network to Crisis Forum. I will be reviewing the book on Past Thinking in due course.

Continue reading “History at the End of the World?”
Categories
Old Curatorial Archive

Shared cultures in the medieval Mediterranean

View to the Mediterranean from Bari, Apulia
View to the Mediterranean from Bari, Apulia

I am currently writing up a paper based on two pieces of research which compares material culture from southern Italy with that of its central and eastern Mediterranean neighbours (e.g. Sicily, Greece, Egypt, North Africa). It is based on a conference paper I gave last July, at the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean conference at the University of Exeter, on the shared cultures of dress and textiles in the eleventh to tweflth century, and on a research paper I most recently gave on earrings in the Mediterranean, mainly dating to the seventh to eighth centuries, to the Islamic Art and Archaeology seminar at SOAS. Both papers problematised the idea of using the Mediterranean as an heuristic device (a framework for investigation) for studying material culture and both attempted to use basic anthropological techniques to question whether the elements of description and style we identify as being similar would have been recognised by those who made and wore these items. Do our typologies and philological designations do justice to the variety of experience and taste that objects held for their contemporaries?

Of particular inspiration has been the work of anthropologist Michael Herzfeld and the conceptual masterpiece, The Corrupting Sea by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell. Whether or not you agree with the latter’s approaches to Mediterranean history, there is no doubting its importance in making scholars question their own disciplinary boundaries. From a medieval southern Italian viewpoint, it has been quite liberating to centralise the region in this geo-historical space, rather than fight against its peripheral situation in the wider historiographies of medieval Europe, Byzantium and even the early Islamic world.

I am thinking of calling it ‘Material Girls in their Material Worlds: The Shared Cultures of Southern Italy and its Mediterranean Neighbours’. You’ll just have to read the paper when it is out, for more.

Categories
Old Curatorial Archive

What makes a medieval topic important?

As another academic year turns, so do I. This time, to emerge from the provinces and from behind my charters and museum objects, and join in London’s medieval scene. This evening’s first seminar of the European History 1150-1500 series was a discussion led by David Carpenter and Miri Rubin entitled What Makes a Medieval Topic Important? A very keenly attended seminar, we all squeezed in anticipation into the modest Low Countries Room at the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, in Bloomsbury.

Prof. Miri Rubin began with the most deft and breathless exposé of intellectual movements that have had great impacts on medieval history writing. From the Annales School establishment of social and economic histories of the longue durée to the Marxian approaches of late Prof. Rodney Hilton and the history of peasantry, to radical gender historians of North America, historians of ethnicity, identity and the mandala of fields and sub-fields which have resulted from these, we were reminded that it was this question, what is important? that has been asked over and over by historians who have wanted to change our thinking of the past, and by extension, of us today. All of this was gold-threaded with the idea that historians in the last century began to want to know more about European ‘peoples’ than its institutions. In other words, those affected by big decisions, rather than the decision makers. In in a current climate of political activity on ‘Europe’ and ‘Europeans’ (and the prospect of a President Blair–Il presidente del popolo, presumably) this point was made even more apposite.

Continue reading “What makes a medieval topic important?”