Take a look at the NRM's latest online exhibition: Caution! Railway safety since 1913.
It was based on research by Mike Ebester, a senior lecturer at Portsmouth, who specializes in the history of health & safety. With his expertise and interest in railways (both his MA and PhD were in railway studies), this exhibition has academic clout behind it, yet has been presented in a very accessible way for the general public. Also of note is the decision to put the exhibition online. This allows people from around the world to see it and also makes some of the NRM's archival material available to a much wider audience.
Academic work is increasingly expected to have public impact. Working on museum exhibits is a good way to do this. An important part of being a historian is translating research into a variety of forms: lectures, books, articles, theses and so forth. Museums offer yet another avenue for that hard-earned research material.
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
From the Academic to the Public: Using Academic Research in Museums
Sunday, November 09, 2014
Can history and mobilities ever get along?
This
past weekend, the Social Science History Association (SSHA) held its
39th annual conference in Toronto at the iconic Royal York Hotel.
Being right on my doorstep, I decided to attend. The SSHA is a
global group of scholars (although primarily American) who combine
social science topics and concepts with the canon of historical
study: temporality. I have always thought that history and the social
sciences would work well together, but my penchant for highly social
topics of study appears to be an unusual choice for historians.
I attended three
paper sessions, each of which was tied to one of my areas of
interest, but all of them unique and interesting in their own ways.
The first, Migration to Tropical Frontiers, although
disappointingly lacking two of the four presenters, allowed me to
learn about a facet of the twentieth century's Jewish diaspora that I
had never encountered before, namely a small enclave of
migrants-cum-dairy farmers under the Trujillo dictatorship in the
Dominican Republic. Of particular interest in Allen Wells' paper on
the subject was how the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which
had been bankrolling the group of 750 Jews, found itself in 1946 torn
between the project and the enormous task of funding the urgent
resettlement of Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine. In the end,
the Dominican project gradually lost its funding as Israel's needs
became central to Jewish fundraising around the world. Just like my
local case study of how Toronto's United Jewish Appeal became
increasingly focused on Israel, the Joint Distribution Committee
found itself shifting its priorities from multiple diasporic spaces
to just one: the nascent State of Israel.
Two panels on
Saturday attracted my attention. Toronto, European Suburb: Postwar
Migrant Communities and their Visions of Homeland in Canada's Largest
Diasporic City looked at how migrant communities in Toronto
continued to stay connected to their places of origin. While my
research on Jewish Toronto showed an increasingly vocal and assertive
community, these papers showed that Toronto's other immigrant groups,
including the Portuguese, Polish, Macedonians and Italians, were also
gaining their voices at the same time, often using the same
techniques of political lobbying, internal sponsorship, fundraising
and public demonstrations. I was particularly interested to learn in
Gilberto Fernandes' paper that the Portuguese community found itself
divided by the 1961 'Bay Street Riot,' when rival groups fought for
and against the Portuguese dictatorship of the time. It is quite
similar to 1965, when Toronto's Jews took part in the 'Allan Gardens
Riot' against neo-Nazis.
The last, and
best-attended of the sessions I chose was Migration History and
the 'Mobilities Turn.' My interest in transport history has
introduced me to both pure transport history and also the world of
mobilities, a new sociological sub-field which examines how people
move around and how their movement becomes part of their daily
routine. However, as two of the papers showed (one delivered by the
geographer Colin Pooley and the other by historian Donna Gabaccia),
while historians and social scientists study almost the same thing,
they rarely communicate or collaborate. As Pooley showed, mobilities
work is rarely historical. Most scholarship is theoretical and often
uses field work undertaken in the present to address today's mobility
landscape. Rarely does it venture into mobilities of the past.
Likewise, Gabaccia clearly demonstrated that leading journals in the
field of migration history and mobilities (The Journal of World
History and Mobilities respectively) do not cite each
other and, while both are ostensibly talking about people moving
around, they use incompatible vocabularies.
Both papers came to
a very similar conclusion. In short, these two sub-disciplines (and,
as Pooley did, I would add transport history as a third) need to
collaborate and realize that they both have techniques and ideas to
share with each other. Mobilities offers insight into the
experiential side of moving around, while history allows us to see
change over time and whether mobility was different in the past. It
is, however, early days. As Gabaccia explained, the social sciences
need a "rupture" from their current dichotomy of the
present and a contiguous past to appreciate that past events are not
homogenous. Until then, mobilities cannot effectively be implemented
into historical study. As Pooley demonstrated in his own extremely
interesting work reconstructing everyday mobility from life writing
in the 19th and 20th centuries, the gaps in historical sources make a
social science-like analysis problematic. Several people in the panel
suggested a roundtable at next year's SSHA meeting to begin the
process of reconciling historians and social scientists in a joint
study of mobilities and (as several people correctly mentioned)
immobilities with migration and other histories of moving around.
Reflecting on the
mobilities debate, I wonder if the sides really are that far apart. I
think immediately of the copious work on 'railway spine' and similar
imagined ailments in Victorian rail travel. In the latter part of the
19th century, reports of mysterious ailments afflicting railway
travellers began to appear in the press and even in he pages of the
Lancet.[1] Freud spoke of the sexual excitation caused by the
rhythmic movement of trains.[2] The railway compartment was an
ambiguous mix of public and private, cosy and threatening (especially
after the Briggs Murder).[3] The railway compartment necessitated a
new set of behaviours. Reading while travelling became a popular
activity to respect the privacy of fellow travellers. This, in turn,
spawned the mass publishing of books.[4]
As these examples
show, the history of Victorian railway travel seems to mix the
temporality of history with the experience of travel as outlined by
mobility studies. Part of the difficulty in reconciling these two
fields is that much of the work on Victorian railway travel is part
of yet another discipline – Victorian Studies – which combines
history, literature and social science. Similarly, my introduction to
much of this was through railway studies, a discipline combining
history, geography, archaeology, social science and economics. Could
it simply be that social scientists and historians are being a little
stubborn? As this debate unfolds, we may find that the differences
are not so insurmountable as we once thought.
Notes:
1. Ralph Harrington,
“The Railway Journey and the Neuroses of Modernity,” in
Pathologies of Travel, ed. Richard Wrigley and George Revill
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 229–59.
2. Sigmund Freud,
Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex,
[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Three_Contributions_to_the_Theory_of_Sex]
3. Harrington, “The
Railway Journey,” 229-59; Matthew Beaumont, “Railway Mania: The
Train Compartment as the Scene of the Crime,” in The Railway and
Modernity: Time, Space and the Machine Ensemble, ed. Matthew
Beaumont and Michael Freeman (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 125–53;
Kate Colquhoun, Mr. Brigg’s Hat: A Sensational Account of
Britain’s First Railway Murder (London: Little, Brown, 2011).
4. Wolfgang
Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time
and Space in the 19th Century (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986).
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