This post is the sixth in a series of six blogs which will document and critically engage with a workshop series hosted by Dr. David Geiringer (QMUL) and Dr. Helen McCarthy (Cambridge) under the title ‘Rethinking Britain in the 1990s: Towards a new research agenda’. Running between January and March 2021, the series brings together contemporary historians from a range of career stages to map existing work and stimulate new thinking on a decade which, from the perspective of our present times, looks very unfamiliar indeed. by Amy Gower (University of Reading) Neoliberal consensus? A digital revolution? A cultural feedback loop? Over this past term, historians have problematised these metanarratives of Britain in the nineties and suggested alternative frameworks of analysis. But how might the collections, archives, and sources of the nineties help us to answer these questions? In this final workshop, a panel of historians and archivists explored the archive of the nineties as it stands, and crucially, what we might shape it into. Government papers, voluntary sector archives, and the Mass Observation Project were all shown to be potentially transformative for understanding the nebulous relationships between citizen and state, the connections between high politics and the everyday, and […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present‘s Co-editors Prof. Mathew Hilton (Queen Mary College, London), Prof. Alexandra Walsham (Jesus College, Cambridge) and the Chair of the Board Prof. Joanna Innes (Sommerfield College, Oxford) have co-signed the letter below which was partially published in the Sunday Times on the 21st March 2021. The Royal Historical Society, together with the heads of other leading UK historical organisations, has written asking the Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden MP, to clarify the government’s position on the funding of historical research. An excerpt of the letter has today been published in The Sunday Times (Letters, p.26). The letter comes with the news that Dame Helen Ghosh, master of Balliol College, Oxford, has apologised for the historical acceptance of donations linked to the Atlantic slave trade. The full text of the letter, together with its signatories: “Dear Sir, We write to express our concern as historians about ministers’ illegitimate interference in the research and interpretation done by our arm’s length heritage bodies such as museums, galleries, the Arts Council and the lottery heritage fund. In particular we deplore the position, attributed to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Department in the press recently, that Professor Corinne Fowler’s […]

This post is the fifth in a series of six blogs which will document and critically engage with a workshop series hosted by Dr. David Geiringer (QMUL) and Dr. Helen McCarthy (Cambridge) under the title ‘Rethinking Britain in the 1990s: Towards a new research agenda’. Running between January and March 2021, the series brings together contemporary historians from a range of career stages to map existing work and stimulate new thinking on a decade which, from the perspective of our present times, looks very unfamiliar indeed. by David Dahlborn (St. John’s College, University of Cambridge) Do we historians, by privileging digital technology with its own theories and interpretations, risk replicating technologically deterministic narratives of ‘digital revolution’ in the 1990s and beyond? What makes digital technology special to the extent that it deserves its own history, alongside political history or cultural history? How is it fundamentally different from analogue technology, to the extent that it is considered epoch-making? Having considered the many thoughtful contributions at last week’s workshop, I think Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s remarkable essay ‘The Californian Ideology’ from 1996 still holds up. I recommend it to contemporary historians, not least as some of the most lucid comments at […]