History Workshop - Latest Comments

Re: Campaigning for the Vote: Kate Parry Frye’s Suffrage Diary

H Drummond — Sun, 12 May 2013 11:44:53 -0000

Wow, what an amazing find! Please pass on my sincere and grateful thanks to Elizabeth Crawford for "choosing curosity over commonsense". Her painstaking efforts have made accessible what sounds like a real gem for those of us with an interest in the period/subject Kate Frye's diaries chronicle.

Re: Campaigning for the Vote: Kate Parry Frye’s Suffrage Diary

Grace — Sun, 12 May 2013 05:33:39 -0000

Fascinating. I shall look forward to reading it. I am currently writing about how a Welsh fishing village was touched by the women's suffrage campaign during the two election campaigns of 1910.

Re: Secondary Modern

Doug Holly — Thu, 09 May 2013 12:53:47 -0000

I actually started my teaching career at Blackwell four years after the photo was taken. You may vaguely remember me, Michael - Harold was the external consutant for my PGCE course at Leicester School of Ed. I think the last time I saw you you were about fourteen!

Doug Holly
Leicester

Re: South Asia’s Africans: A Forgotten People

Phyllis Sims — Tue, 07 May 2013 15:34:06 -0000

Check out African resence in Asia documentary by Dr. Eugene Adams

Re: Ethel Carnie Holsdworth This Slavery 1925 cover

Carnie — Wed, 01 May 2013 10:02:47 -0000

This book is still relevant nearly a hundred years after it was written.
Pope Francis has condemned the “slave labour” working conditions in the Bangladesh textile factory that collapsed a week ago killing more than 400 workers and injuring 2,500.

“A headline that really struck me on the day of the tragedy in Bangladesh was ‘Living on €38 a month’. That is what the people who died were being paid. This is called slave labour.

Today in the world, this slavery is being committed against something beautiful that God has given us - the capacity to create, to work, to have dignity. How many brothers and sisters find themselves in this situation!

“Not paying fairly, not giving a job because you are only looking at balance sheets, only looking at how to make a profit."

Re: Reinventing the Academic Journal: The ‘Digital Turn’, Open Access, & Peer Review

Andrew Morrison — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:46:56 -0000

You write:

"Scholarly societies, often the organizations that produce academic
journals, have budgets tied to revenue from journal subscriptions. And,
since they have historically been essential to academia – hosting
conferences, serving as advocates for the profession, and providing a
variety of supplementary benefits – declines in revenue from the
journals have the potential to undermine their viability."

The service to academics, especially the intangible benefits of interacting with other scholars at conferences is especially valuable to me. I love the idea of open access journals. But I worry that professional societies would collapse to the detriment of their fields if they lose the ability to generate revenue from publishing. (I'm coming from the STEM world, so my views are colored with those lenses. I don't pretend to know how professional societies in the humanities would be affected.)

Re: Radical Object: My Mother’s Saucepan

Sara Pennell — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:31:39 -0000

A radical object which unites my academic research into the non-kitchen resonances of pots and pans (see recent Venezuelan disturbances with pro- and contra-Maduro pot-banging, and the early modern skimmington's 'tinging of saucepans'), with connections in my partner's family, to Izzy Maisels, one of the lawyers at the treason trials.
A perfect object to undermine the notion that there is such a category as an 'everyday' thing.

Re: Reinventing the Academic Journal: The ‘Digital Turn’, Open Access, & Peer Review

Bob Nicholson — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:23:02 -0000

There are some interesting issues raised here - the implications for commercially successful scholarship (and the people who produce it) will certainly need to be addressed as we move to open-access platforms.

That said, I'm not entirely sure that academic publishers still qualify as 'vital institutions.' The production of research, the editing of journals, and peer review are all done by scholars (usually for free). The only vital contribution that publishers have made to this process is the dissemination of research - something that we can now do much more effectively using open access platforms. I'm also sceptical about your claims that removing the publisher does nothing to reduce the cost of academic publishing. The cost of hosting 7,000 words of plain text cannot possibly approach the £1000+ fees that have recently been proposed for gold open access.

I want my work to be accessible to the largest possible audience, and for it to be published as soon as possible after I've finished writing it. However, I also want it to be peer reviewed and imbued with academic credibility. I think most researchers feel the same way. The Diamond Open Access model proposed here has long seemed like the obvious solution, and I'm glad that we're finally making progress in this direction. You're right to highlight its destructive implications, but the benefits of freely accessible information surely outweigh these problems.

Re: Reinventing the Academic Journal: The ‘Digital Turn’, Open Access, & Peer Review

closetothetruth — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:48:50 -0000

Look, I will begin by disclaiming that I am deeply distrustful of open access for a lot of reasons, which I will not go into in great detail here, other than to say that like a lot of instances of "creative destruction" where enthusiasts focus on the "creation" half, the "destruction" half gets severely backgrounded. I hear calls to destroy a lot of things that we should be thinking much more carefully about protecting and keeping. But, take what I say with a grain of salt; I am suspicious of all initiatives that use the word "open," as I think that's become a buzzword that often points us unthinkingly down exactly the roads we don't want to go down.

Here are six points that seem vital to me:

1) every study I know has found that, contrary to what you at least imply here, online publishing is at least as expensive as paper publishing.

2) most humanities and even social sciences publishers are non-profits. that is, their costs go solely to paying for their services. suggesting that they can no longer charge for those services is depriving a vital institution of the bare income it needs.

3) the idea that government funding deprives the recipient of the ability to otherwise charge for his or her work is a terrible philosophical and practical argument to make. it is factually incorrect, despite sounding good. In the US, at least, there are a huge number of things that are directly federally- or state-funded that nevertheless charge user fees and licenses, and/or impose access restrictions, and until now nobody has made the argument that these structures are illegal. National parks, toll roads, museums, charge for access. Many Federal institutions charge for access or services, do not necessarily allow citizens to freely use those services, or do not allow the public access at all.

4) while the notion that public funding implies free public access has gained some traction in the medical sciences for what appear to be humanitarian reasons, even there it is troubling, because the effect is to make research results freely available to for-profit corporations without even the minimal subscription payments to publishers they made previously. The effect is to make the rich even richer.

5) Making philosophical arguments for requiring free access to publications puts academic journal articles in the spotlight and ignores books and for-profit periodical publication. Some people counter by saying "academics don't earn money off of books," but that is wildly incorrect. At any given time, about half of the books on both the NYTimes Fiction and Nonfiction bestseller lists are written by academics, sometimes with NEH or NEA grants. Suggesting that these folks--and you know their names--must choose between their academic jobs or their publishing careers is tremendously bad news for the academy. take a look at the faculty roster of any university's English, History, and many other departments--many of the faculty have published mass market books. Creative Writing is a particularly notable case. Further, many more have published articles in for-profit magazines that pay authors directly and charge for access. Preventing authors from accessing these revenue streams is an awful idea. If you tell Toni Morrison (at Princeton last I heard) that she had to give away her books if she continues to teach at Princeton, I would think it likely that she would quit her Princeton job. Who wins that way?

6) One more, connected issue regarding the public-funding notion is that many Universities, like Princeton, are private. If the argument is accepted all the way down, we could have this equation: teach at Princeton, you can keep the income from your writing. Teach at University of Michigan, you must give your work away for free. That is a recipe for destroying what is left of public-funded education and handing the remainder over to the already-richer private institutions. Why is that desirable?

Finally, as a general note, the presumption that publishing equals restricting access to information is turning 400 years of history on its head. Publishing is what got us here. Publishing is *providing* access to information. It may not be freely open to everyone, but it seems to me that Stephen King, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Toni Morrison, Robert Caro, and many others have reached millions and milliions of people despite having their work "paywalled" by "gatekeepers"--or, actually, published by professional information distributors.

Re: Reinventing the Academic Journal: The ‘Digital Turn’, Open Access, & Peer Review

Jason_M_Kelly — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:08:25 -0000

Thanks for the comments, Jack. I appreciate it. Tim Gowers was the one who coined "diamond open access" earlier this year. (https://gowers.wordpress.com/2...

For now, the funding for OSP will be a combination of institutional support (for things like hosting) and philanthropy. We are considering some models for editing. I personally prefer an approach as follows. In order to post your work, you have some responsibility for reviewing and editing other people's work. That way, the entire community is invested in more than just their own essays.

Thanks for the notes on the federal policies. These are quite useful. And another thank you for noting Christian Wach's work. If we get a chance to revise this essay, I will make sure that his name goes into the text above.

Re: Reinventing the Academic Journal: The ‘Digital Turn’, Open Access, & Peer Review

Jack Dougherty — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:38:11 -0000

Thanks for sharing this thoughtful essay on the Open Scholarship Project and introducing the phrase, "Diamond Open Access," which is new to me. You write that "The major debates centre around two things: economic sustainability and academic quality," and pose Diamond as an alternative that merges the best of Gold (publication fees) and Green (self-archiving institutional repositories) models. But it was not clear to me how the Diamond approach deals with publication costs of hosting and editing. Perhaps you've addressed this elsewhere?

Two additional small points:

First, you write that "the Obama administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy has mandated open access publication of all publicly funded US research." But that's too optimistic a reading of US federal policy at this point. In Feb 2013, the White House issued a narrower statement: "OSTP Director John Holdren has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication. . . "
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog...
Some observers have questioned whether the directive extends beyond "scientific research" and legally applies to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH): see Tim McCormick's comment on Peter Suber's post, Feb 2013, https://plus.google.com/109377...
However, NEH chairman Jim Leach has publicly supported the OA directive. See Suber's March 2013 OA newsletter: http://legacy.earlham.edu/~pet...

Second, since your essay mentions (more than once) the CommentPress plugin for page-or-paragraph-level commenting, it's important to credit Christian Wach (UK), who has led open-source software development for the past couple of years. See newest version at http://wordpress.org/extend/pl...

Re: Work, Health and Love: Margaret Backhouse and the Camp Fire Girls

Mary Alice — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 13:18:10 -0000

I would like to more about the Camp Fire collection in the library of the Society of Friends. I have researched Edith Kempthorne, Field Secretary for the Camp Fire Girls in the U.S. from 1915 until 1949. She made frequent trips to England and probably met with Margaret Backhouse. Is there anything about Kempthorne in this collection? I have seen Margaret Backhouse mentioned in "Everygirls' Magazine" but did not know much about her until I cam across this entry.
Mary Alice Sanguinetti
Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.

Re: The Indian Memory Project

Anna Davin — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 14:31:00 -0000

Great project, wonderful images. Good luck.

Re: A Response to the Proposed National Curriculum in History

Oli Mitchell — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:32:13 -0000

What a surprise,an academic who knows nothing of the 'Saxon Heptarchy'

The sooner our teaching of history is transformed the better

Re: The Making of the English Working Class Fifty Years On

David McInerney — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:26:39 -0000

It is one of those books that I had been meaning to read properly for years. I had read several of Thompson's essays, and the odd chapter out of this book, but it was only the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary that prompted me to read the whole book cover-to-cover, together with several of Thompson's other books that I had previously only dipped into here and there, including The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, Whigs and Hunters, Albion's Fatal Tree, and Customs in Common. Much of what I thought I knew about this texts from commentaries on them was overturned in the process. I strongly recommend that everyone from the Marxist tradition take the time this year to read these books carefully.

Re: About Us

Greglanningtv — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 06:30:33 -0000

Looking forward to being in touch with the workshop after a gap of some years

Re: The Compositor in London: The Rise and Fall of a Labour Aristocracy

Trog — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:02:35 -0000

I recall attending an LSC AGM at the Albert Hall (I think) c. 1953, where the Gen. Sec. Bob Willis, opened the proceedings with "Lady and gentlemen" - the only female member of the LSC - a Linotype op.
This remark was greeted with a big round of applause!
As one of the group of now defunct compositors, I feel that my embalmed body should go on display in Ottawa - "The last of the Comps"!

Re: Lincoln Again

FrancisHamit — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:48:01 -0000

Well first of all, a film maker has no obligation to be 100% true to history. This is fiction based upon fact and the needs of providing the audience a great entertainment experience come first. People do not go to the movies to be "educated". So all the whining about how Mr. Spielberg should have done it differently are inappropriate and misplaced. That said, he got a lot closer to "truth" than most.

The Emancipation Proclamation was inspired by the cold fact that of the nine million people in the Confederate States, four million were slaves. Declaring them free deprived the Rebellion of a critical military asset, their labor. It also disrupted military operations and undermined the Confederate Government's effort to gain international recognition.

Re: A Response to the Proposed National Curriculum in History

Danlyndon — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:17:16 -0000

Hi Anne, well you can find them in all good book shops! On a more serious note you do raise an interesting point and its close to the way I teach my year 7 history course. We take a chronological trawl through invasions and migrations starting with the Romans and ending with the recent migrants from Eastern Europe via the expulsion of the Jews in 1290, the Blackmoors in Tudor times, Irish migration, Brick Lane and the Windrush.

Re: A Response to the Proposed National Curriculum in History

Anne Summers — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 12:33:15 -0000

Hello Dan, you make me want to read your textbooks! You also make me wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to combine chronology with inclusiveness by writing the history of Britain as a history of successive groups of incomers. Perhaps you're already doing that? It might also be fun for a class to do a micro-study along those lines of the area they live in. Best, Anne Summers

Re: Why it was Kicking off Then

Anna Davin — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 09:01:20 -0000

Thanks for a splendid posting - great to learn about new research and sources, and to see some of the photos too.
     My own first knowledge of the Paris Commune came in the late 1960s at Warwick University, when history lecturer Dick Parker showed us a wonderful Russian silent film about it, La Nouvelle Babylon (1929), whose heroine works for a pittance in a new department store. Then I read The Women Incendiaries with excitement.
    In March 1971 I set up a talk for my sisters in the London Women's Liberation Workshop, in a cavernous hall in Camden Town, planning to share my enthusiasm and to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Paris Commune. It was probably my first attempt at giving a talk.
     What a flop! I had too many notes and insufficient grasp of my subject. Moreover late notice and poor advertising emant that very few showed up, and several of those who did were expecting a talk on women and communes.

Re: History Workshop 7

Sid Wills — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 14:07:14 -0000

Hi Terry Spot on! Hope you are well? SID WILLS

Re: Secondary Modern

Alan_Theasby — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 05:07:52 -0000

The 11-plus exam system forced us into allotted categories depending on what we were allegedly suited for. It was a ridiculous system.

I passed AND failed the 11-plus in 1958: "failed" because I did not get to garmmar school, but "passed" in that I went to "the Tech" (Hartlepool Technical High School) rather than a "Sec". The Tech was a maths, science and technology-focused school for training a layer of technicians, maths & science teachers, scientists, civil engineers, and the like (a "professional elite" of the educated worhing class). Some became skilled tradesmen in the "labour aristocracy" as it existed then.

Those who attended the Tech were - and still are - regarded as "middle-class" by most "ordinary" working class people, in a form of "inverted snobbery" with perceived "class" differences based on a certain past "reality" in which such "proffessionals" were encouraged to think of themselves as above the workers, and to become part of management - "bosses" as they were loosely called, acting for the employers. The divicive (and humiliating) 11+ system reflected and reinforced this perception.

However, I knew I was working-class, and so did my friends at Tech. I don't know what happened to most of them: some, like the son of a small shop-owner, may well have become truly "petty-bourgeoise" - but it's likely that those who went into the steel, chemical, port, mining, engineering and civil engineering industries (big industries locally/ regionally in the 70s), had very mixed fortunes. Maybe some of "the class of 65" got into computing, and surely others went into teaching & lecturing - retiring just in time(?!)

There are two school friends I know have "done good" - one became a nuclear physisist, and the other shocked & annoyed our headmaster by taking up Psychology (not a "proper" science) to become a forensic psychologist at Durham prison. Both are now "high fliers" renowned in their fields.

I could not afford to go to Uni, as I was the family bread-winner (I do nor worry about this, it was just the way it was). After started training "in a trade" as a lathe setter-operator in telecommunications engineering (I am not a practical /technical sort of person at all, despite my "Tech" education), I went "on the buses" for many years, where I worked alongside a mix of "basic" working-class and well-educated workers, active trade unionists and even a couple of Communist Party members...... and so becan my practical political life.

Re: Secondary Modern

Debbie Epstein — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 17:45:34 -0000

And, of course, the 11+ was gendered. Girls (notwithstanding the girl in Michael Rosen's primary school class) had to gain higher scores than boys to get into grammar schools. See Epstein, D. et al (eds) (1998) Failing Boys? Issues in Gender and Education. Buckingham: Open University Press

Re: Maids, Au Pairs and Treasures

Simonpayne — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 13:20:56 -0000

Simon Payne:
What w2ould be of further interest to me is 'the use and abuse of women in the 21st Century'. In Britain and many other western countries and elsewhere there is still the use of women in very low paid hotel and factory employment that imay also be an unsafe working environment and along with accompanying bad living conditions that are also unhealthy. Many trapped in these kinds of areas also make it very hard if not impossible to provide adequate living and health conditions for children as well as education provision. Then there is the extensive use and abuse of women and girls, most of whom are from immigrant communities as well as vunerable women and girls already living here, for use in the sex trade and drug trafficking or both. IT'S HIGH TIME SOMETHING WAS DONE.