Search
For much of the last century the literature on the history of documentary film was small and virtually every book-length contribution intimately familiar to its committed but specialist readership.
Towards the end of this fascinating study, Heather Shore reflects on the difficulty of ‘trying to uncover or reconstruct something that does not exist in a concrete form’ (p. 192). For Shore, the ‘underworld’ is a ‘cipher’, through which the press, the police, the government, and the wider society represents, and tries to understand, crime as a social problem.
In between small model spitfires and Sherman tank key rings, visitors browsing the shelves of the Imperial War Museum’s gift shop will find their gaze met by the reassuringly familiar smile of a round-faced rag doll, beaming from the side of a tote bag.
The general outline for this project, when the call for papers first appeared in June 2013, requested contributions for essays on the entertainments and popular culture of the First World War, offering a lot of promise for the study of humour in an historical context, which has, it would seem, only recently become of interest to cultural historians.(1) As a self-procla
Next year will witness the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, the pivotal event that initiated the traumatic creation of the Irish Republic.
Somewhat late in the day, Tate Britain has got around to an exhibition about the British Empire and its legacies.
Thomas Dixon’s Weeping Britannia is a tour through six centuries of British tears, from ‘extreme weeper’ Margery Kempe to the televised ‘sob-fests’ of Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor, via tear-stained judges, the emotionally extravagant novel of sensibility, supposedly stiff-upper-lipped politicians, and the bemused disdain of dry-eyed journalists observing the
The 1950 feature film Dance Hall is one of Ealing Studios lesser-known releases. Crafted around the lives of four working-class women – played by Natasha Perry, Petula Clark, Jane Hylton and Diana Dors – the narrative shifts between the spaces of factory work, domestic life and commercial leisure. The most significance location is, however, the Chiswick Palais de Danse.
Few authors are as well qualified as Paul Rouse to attempt this ambitious undertaking, the first scholarly overview of the history of sport in Ireland during the last millennium.
In a recent blog post for the Women’s History Association of Ireland, Caitriona Clear reflected on how Irish women’s history had now reached a critical mass ‘whereby it does not need to be identified with any one historian or any group of historians’.