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Kate Iles Croft

~ Librarian, Researcher and Lunar Lady

Category Archives: history

Footnoting a post-truth world

31 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by kateilescroft in history

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history

An episode in the latest series of Dave Gorman’s Life is Goodish caused me to wake my snoozing sofa companion with mild alarm when I exclaimed, “And that’s why you don’t fact check with Wikipedia!”  The reason for my outburst goes something like this: Dave Gorman discovered that someone had added a statement on his Wikipedia page that was untrue. This statement was then reported as fact by a local newspaper. Several other local newspapers did the same, giving the story widespread credence. When Dave Gorman pointed out the false statement on Wikipedia was, in fact, false, it was promptly removed, only to reappear sometime later, this time with a footnote to the first newspaper article that had reported the incorrect statement from Wikipedia in the first place.

The circularity of this set of circumstances, which resulted in a lie being given the veneer of truth, thanks to the inclusion of a superscript number in a pair of square brackets, neatly sums up the political landscape in which we appear to find ourselves. We now inhabit a Wikipedia world; a world in which everyone gets the opportunity to editorialise according to their own inclination and/or impishness. Not only do we inhabit this post-truth world, in which facts (as slippery as they can be) are only facts if people chose to believe them, and if not can be discarded as swiftly as an ex-X-Factor finalist, but we seem also to live in a fantasy footnote world, where sources can be made up and scattered throughout the internet like gold-plated confetti at any one of Trump’s three weddings.

I’m a fan of the footnote. Footnotes support analysis and interpretation, they can provide proof of objective facts, offer evidence for supposition and conclusion and they signal the research structure around which good historical writing is built. But the mere existence of footnotes does not make something factually accurate. They offer a breadcrumb trail that can be followed, to find that bedrock of both historical research and contemporary reportage: the source.

History is all about sources and they come in all shapes and formats: written, visual, oral, quantitative, qualitative, political, economic, social, formal, informal. From amongst the jumble of sources available to us (including those that are absent: the sources that have been silenced, lost, ignored or destroyed) the past can be jigsawed together. But those sources should never be taken at face value; they should always be read critically and approached with respectful caution, because no source is unproblematic. We teach students of history to ask searching questions of historical sources: how reliable is it? who wrote it? why did they write it? can it be verified? what evidence is there to support it? The study of history demands that we consider concepts such as bias, subjectivity, objectivity, provenance, motive and audience, in order to think critically and analyse intelligently. And the present demands no less of us than the past. This is why history is so important, for when we learn how to question the past, we learn how to question the present.

At a time when we have never had so many facts, when social media has broken down the old ways of creating, transmitting and consuming information, we have never needed the skills of the historian more. Fake news items have not only permeated our culture, but also our political discourse and have the potential to threaten our future safety. Facing a post-truth future, we need history to remind us that the mere existence of footnotes verifies nothing. It’s where the footnote might lead us that matters. We need to follow the breadcrumbs, and then to analyse and assess in order to make informed judgements as to whether the sources we find are objectively accurate, rooted in reality and verifiably true, rather than merely leading back to themselves and verified only by their existence on a Wikipedia page.

The Eye of the Bird and the Worm

07 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by kateilescroft in feminism, history, women

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feminism, history, women

Leo McGarry, the fictitious White House chief of staff from The West Wing, observed in the episode Five Votes Down, “There are two things in the world you never want to let people see how you make ’em: laws and sausages.” For some reason this quote popped into my head recently, as I was travelling to work and happened to catch a glimpse of the front page of the Metro. I don’t remember what the headline was. It could have been referring to any number of stories that are dominating the news cycle at the moment: the American Presidential election; Brexit; ISIS; the migrant crisis; Syria. Regardless of how I feel about any one of these stories (one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter; one woman’s sexual predator is another woman’s saviour – apparently) I got the feeling that, at the moment, the making of history has become visible.

History is made every day and it is as much a process as an event. It’s in the history of small things and the accumulation of the every day that historians can, with hindsight, piece together the stories of the past, providing a narrative, or more accurately, narratives of what went before and how we ended up where we are now. The people whose present became our past, passed through the every day, so enfolded and enmeshed in the various events, and in the immediacy of their own lives, that history is usually formed unseen. But sometimes there are events so dramatic that they push through the fabric of the present and we become aware of their significance, not just for us but also for the future.

Looking back at the past gives you, with the privilege of hindsight, a bird’s eye view that allows a bigger picture to emerge, but it also hides the grim and gritty reality of the everyday. The trend in recent years for historical recreation programming is still healthily alive if the latest BBC offering, The Victorian Slum, is anything to go by, and while these programmes can be jolly good fun and poignantly revealing, they cannot truly recreate the smelly, noisy, hungry, dangerous and painful reality. Nor should they, because if they did, several centuries of progress, supposedly embodied in legislation and changed social attitudes (hello Health and Safety laws and several anti-discrimination acts), would disappear in a puff of a nineteenth-century coal fires smoke (cue redtop headline: Child forced up chimney for BBC-funded entertainment shock!!)

But right now, it’s not a bird’s eye view we have, it’s that of the worm and with it comes a grim and gritty reality that we can’t avoid. Not only is history being made, but we are witnessing a regression, when old conflicts open up, old attitudes reappear and old ideas are resurgent; reconfigured, but still resurgent.

The results of these events are still unknown. We have no idea what the outcome of the vote by 52 per cent of the British population to leave the European Union will be; if Hillary Clinton will become the first female American President or Donald J. Trump will become one of the most ill qualified. I don’t know when or if we will see peace in Syria; if ISIS will be defeated or will strengthen; if the thousands of displaced men, women and children will ever feel safe enough to return to their homeland, or find peace and acceptance in a new country. For millions of people, their every day has changed forever with the loss of their home, their family and country. For millions more, the consequences of their actions, of exactly in which box they choose place a simple cross, has and will change their future. The accumulation of small things is coinciding with the massive shifts in the geo-politics of nations. In each of these events, history is being visibly made; and like the making of laws and sausages, it ain’t pretty.

The Shadow of Eve

26 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by kateilescroft in feminism, history, women

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feminism, history, women

Once all the wittering and twittering over the Tim Hunt affair has died down, what are we left with? Ill-judged comments that deserved to be ridiculed, a glimpse into the sexism that female scientists and academics encounter on a daily basis and a well-respected Nobel prize winner’s career clouded in controversy.

As the storm in a test tube begins to abate, what remains is a simple but wearisome idea – women really, REALLY shouldn’t have a presence in spaces that men self-identify as theirs. In the Lab, opined Hunt in his subsequent non-apology, it’s TERRIBLY IMPORTANT that people are on a level playing field. The implication being that scientific playing fields which are made up solely of chaps, will always be level and that class, education, sexual orientation, experience, personality, personal and professional allegiances will make not a jot of difference. No, its the GIRLS that are the problem. Girls (not women) are distracting, they cry if you criticise them and oh, you would not believe the sexual tension that arises over a Bunsen burner. With so many chemical substances already flying around the lab, the introduction of oestrogen into the mix is just too much and it is the poor innocent science that suffers!

It’s all utter nonsense, but perhaps the reason his comments touched a nerve and the whole incident spiralled into Twittermob meltdown is that they typify both the anti-female zeitgeist of our current times and the age-old misogyny that has proved to be remarkably cockroach-like in its ability to evolve and survive.

From Gamergate to Twitter, from campaigning for Jane Austen to be on the £10 note to presenting BBC history programmes, from a presence in the boardroom, laboratory or lecture theatre to any sort of online presence, women are currently being horrendously abused and threatened simply for being there and participating. Since Hunt’s now-notorious speech, we’ve had London’s Garrick Club voting to remain a male-only enclave and Ellen Pao forced out of her job with Reddit due to vicious online abuse, to name but two recent examples of the desperate desire of some men to colonise various places and spaces.

Why? Because of the simple contention that men and women are different and within that difference lies inequality. This is nothing new and the shadow of Eve hangs over us still. For millennia female subordination was predicated on the outcome of the most ill-fated garden stroll in history, and for some, it still is. Even when Enlightened science and philosophy began to undermine the old, long held prejudices, Eve’s legacy lived on in the new ways people found, and continue to find, to justify the subordination of women. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, science began to replace God as the reason for female inferiority and it was biology, rather than sin, that justified women’s submissive role. Women have children and for that reason, their own reason is subordinated to their womb. To produce and raise their husband’s children is both the only, and supreme, role of women.

“The whole education of women ought to relate to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to make herself loved and honoured by them, to raise them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, to make the lives agreeable and sweet – these are the duties of women at all times and they ought to be taught from childhood,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1764, summing up the new attitude of a world which was no longer quite so sure of the validity of the old religious truths, but desperate not to allow women to think all the chatter around the new and exciting concept of ‘rights’ could apply to them.

Trouble is, women were already thinking exactly that: “If all Men are born Free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?” asked Mary Astell in 1700, beating Rousseau’s revelation that, “Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains” by sixty-two years and signalling the beginnings of the intellectual debate about the basis on which male superiority was built.

Women have always challenged the idea that there are spaces, physical and metaphorical, into which they should not enter and for it they have been sneered at, abused and too-often killed. They have been branded heretics and witches; infuriated the sour-faced John Knox into blasting his first trumpet against their monstrous regiment; likened to hyenas in petticoats, and dismissed as unsex’d creatures. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea summed it up in verse:

“Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,
Such an intruder on the rights of men,
Such a presumptuous creature, is esteemed,
The fault can by no virtue be redeemed.
They tell us we mistake our sex and way;
Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play
Are the accomplishments we should desire;
To write, or read, or think, or to inquire
Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time,
And interrupt the conquests of our prime;
Whilst the dull manage of a servile house
Is held by some our outmost art, and use.”

The vitriol directed at these women has always revealed more about the insecurity on which the gender hierarchy has been based, than the women themselves, and has largely been based on the notion that there is a naturally ‘right’ way for women to behave, and the natural space in which they should exist is the domestic one. If they should they have ambitions beyond it or don’t behave in the way sanctioned by society as feminine, then they should be made to know their place. They should be threatened, harassed and intimidated back into the dark places of subservience and submission.

Today, after the first, second and third wave feminisms which has fought for and won many victories for the notion that women are, in fact, rational creatures and not children of a larger growth, we find ourselves once again facing the vitriol of gender insecurity. The language is different, but the arguments are the same. Women shouldn’t intrude on the rights of men. Whether it is the right to science, business, politics, the digital space or the public space, somehow we are still labouring under the notion that these are spaces that are presumptively gendered and that gender is male.

Glimmers of hope exist. The Garrick Club’s vote to continue to exclude women didn’t pass without controversy and many of its members were infuriated not that women should be allow in, but that they continue to be kept out. But they are glimmers only, and they are lost in a culture still saturated by a petulant sexism; a sexism that ultimately hurts both men and women in its continued desire to draw rigid and uncompromising lines of demarcation between the genders.

So maybe the real significance of Tim Hunt’s comments is that they have no significance; they are simply a continuation of Eve’s legacy, reminding us of the battles still ahead. But history tells us that too much progress has been made by too many people, men and women alike, for us to sink beneath its shadow now.

Twisting the Ribbons of Time

25 Monday May 2015

Posted by kateilescroft in heritage, history

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heritage, history, museums

In the 1990s television series Quantum Leap, the central character Sam Beckett (played by the magnificent Scott Bakula) posited the following theory of time travel. A person’s life is like a piece of string; tie the two ends together and the string becomes a loop. Roll the loop into a ball and points in one’s life criss-cross, making it possible to leap forwards and backwards in time.

It’s not surprising the idea of past and present crossing each other for brief moments appeals to me; of time, like a ribbon, curling back and two disparate points in history touching. During my adventures in research there have been plenty of instances when it felt like time had done just that; folded in on itself and my present has touched another’s past. The day I first found Sabrina’s name in the Foundling Hospital Records; the moment I unfolded the Apprentice Indenture that bound her to Richard Lovell Edgeworth; sitting in the National Library of Ireland holding her letters; standing before the slab of stone worn blank in Kensal Green cemetery that marked her grave.

During the past few weeks I have visited both the National Arboretum at Alrewas in Staffordshire and the Red at Night event at the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley. Both got me thinking about how the past and present interact.

One of the criticisms of heritage sites and the ways in which the past is presented is that, in order to be acceptable the past has to be sanitised, neutralised and commodified. The grime and smells, the illness and death, brutality and grinding dullness of our ancestors lives have to be erased from their stories, otherwise heritage just won’t sell – and let’s face it, selling our past is, in some cases, the only way it is going to survive. But to some, this is fraught with danger and the past becomes some sort of banal Heritage Fun Park.

The response to last year’s installation at the Tower of London to mark the start of the First World War is a case in point. Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red drew a particular harsh response from the Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones, who called it “a deeply aestheticised, prettified and toothless war memorial.” Jones dismissed the installation as fake nobility and included a handy link to what he clearly saw as a more appropriate memorial, Otto Dix’s images of the waste and hell of the battlefields of 1914 – 1918.

I have some sympathy with Jones. The First World War was a monumental waste of human life; the culmination of centuries of imperialism, empire-building, one Royal, extended family’s dysfunction writ large and the quieter patriotism of ordinary people put to the ultimate test. It was brutal, vile, dehumanising and devastating and the images of Dix should be seen and not forgotten.

But here’s the thing – people flocked to see Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red. It touched a cord; something happened to awaken an understanding in some people, possibly for the first time, of the impact of four years of war, one hundred years previously. Just for a brief moment, the past spoke to the present, even if it was only to visually represent the sheer numbers of British men who lost their lives.

People also flocked to the Black Country Living Museum for the Red by Night event. “Deeply aestheticised, prettified and toothless” is a phrase that some might apply to the Black Country Museum, and Ironbridge Gorge Museums, Beamish Living Museum of the North and most other heritage sites in the country. As the evening darkened, crowds flocked to the Halahan Mill, replicated within the museum from the Birchley Rolling Mill at Oldbury, as men demonstrated the skills of dragging and throwing red-hot steel in and out of a rolling mill.

Hand rolling steel image

Hand rolling steel at the Red by Night event at The Black Country Living Museum

Across the heritage site, smoke from the strategically placed braziers, also blazing bright with light and flame, sent a pall of thin smog into the night air, giving a small sense of the blackness by day and redness by night that the event was trying to recreate.

Hand rolling steel image

But it would be nothing compared to the heat, the smell, the noise, and the grime of the real thing. Nothing will bring back those days, because nothing can, for no other reason than the Clean Air Acts have done their job. The past is precisely that; the past, gone, we cannot bring it back as it was; we cannot experience what our forefathers and mothers experienced (would they want us to?). We cannot feel the full sensory experience of a region in the full throes of an industrial revolution (or, as is possibly more accurate, an evolution) or the full horror of the First World War battlefields; all we can do is remember.

But remembering is a powerful act. While we can’t reclaim the past, we can listen to it, we can find ways of reaching out and touching it, briefly. We can try to imagine some of the grimness of life in an industrial town; the hard work, disease and industrial accidents, and be thankful for the progress made to change and make life better. But we must also remember our ancestors loved, laughed, danced and sang. The past was made up as much colour as darkness.

And surely we can find more than one way of remembering the death fields of the wars that have gone before; sometimes through ceramic poppies, sometimes through the war art of men like Otto Dix.

Last year, I attended a memorial service to mark ANZAC day. I stood on Cannock Chase on a breezy April morning, listening as the fallen of that most iconic of wars were remembered. Amazing Grace was sung, The Last Post was played and Laurence Binyon’s words were spoken,

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

I saw an elderly gentleman, the medals lined across his overcoated chest testifying to his service, struggle with his emotions. In front of me lines of British Legion standards were raised, lowered and raised again in honour of the dead. Young men carried some of those standards and in the crowds were teenagers and children, listening and watching. On that Sunday, the past and the present touched and for a fleeting moment, generations met and remembered the lives, death and sacrifices of those who had gone before. Maybe there is no nobility in war, but there is a nobility in remembrance and that can only happened when the past and present meet.

If history does anything, it does this. It allows the past to whisper to us, not of its full horror, or even its full joy, that we cannot know; but of its existence, its stories, its lessons, its part in the on-going chain of life, of which we too are part. We are both the present of today and the past of future generations. If, as a part of history, heritage and remembrance sites do anything, they do this; find places for the past and present to meet, twisting the ribbons of time so the past is not forgotten.

Memorial at the National Arboretum, Alrewas.

Memorial at the National Arboretum, Alrewas.

Fifty Shades of Subtlety

05 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by kateilescroft in feminism, history, women

≈ 1 Comment

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feminism, history, women

Labour MP Chuka Amunna recently commented during BBC’s Question Time that when it comes to politics, people want only black and white answers. As disconcerting as it is to find yourself agreeing with a politician, this echoed a thought that has been bothering me for some time.  If anybody wanders into the public domain and offers an opinion or observation that isn’t bombastic in conviction and absolute in content, they get lambasted or ridiculed. It seems that, unless they come complete with a blindfold, leather whip and incredibly dodgy prose, we really do not like shades of grey.

The problem with this is that most of life is exactly that – grey.  Life is nuanced, problematic and shifting. The issues we face every day, both personally and collectively, often require a thoughtful and balanced response and do not have black and white answers. Yet as soon as you look at the debates around those issues you find strident voices telling you black and white is all you have. Problems with the NHS? Blame the immigrants, No jobs? Blame the immigrants (again), Too many immigrants? Blame the EU, Don’t like the EU? Leave and all our problems will be solved. Society breaking down? Blame anybody – immigrants, schools, working mothers, single mothers, feckless dads, feminism…

And so we come to feminism. Most of the most ridiculous blacknwhite rhetoric I’ve ever come across revolves around feminism; what it is and what it isn’t – its aims, its impacts, its history, its winners and its losers.  The debates into which feminism, both ideologically and practically, can be brought are many and varied, but in all of them it doesn’t take long for blacknwhitism to surface.  At one level the statements, on both sides, are so crude they are laughable; feminism is a Marxist plot (or a capitalist one) to destabilise society; housewives are stupid; feminists hate men; men can’t be victims and so on. But as crude as these statements are, they pose a problem for those of us who do accept and embrace the grey, because they block positive, healthy debate. In this sort of debate, we accept not every one will agree and people may draw different conclusions from the same source. This type of debate, where we have the possibility of gaining insight and change, can only occur if we step into the grey. In the grey, we can discuss why, and if, we needed feminism and where it came from historically. We can explore that history (or histories) and it’s various alliances with other political ideologies, while seeing it as a diffuse and developing idea. We can acknowledge that, while feminism is celebrated by some, others including both men and women, view it only as a negative and argue for its reversal.

As a feminist historian the grey is important to me, because if there are those who argue that feminism has made things worse (a common contention), then you have to accept the past was somehow better. And that is a tricky argument to make, precisely because of the grey. Not only is life nuanced, problematic and shifting, it always was and trying to unearth the historical reality of people’s lives is a complex task. More than that, it is a task that will rarely uncover hard “facts” about those lives from which can be drawn the blacknwhite statements so beloved of contemporary commentators.  “Facts” are notoriously slippery things.  So no, history doesn’t tell us all women were desperate for feminism nor does it tell us all women were blissfully happy under patriarchy, it tells us something far more difficult and subtle; that the truth (another problematic concept, but one for a different time) lies somewhere in the middle, in the grey.

In the grey, the observation can be made that both patriarchy and feminism have a checkered past, but only by looking to that past and the lessons it teaches us can we move forward and try and meet in middle.

So this is a call to arms for those of us who understand that life is not black and white and that it is in the shades of grey that understanding, change and progress is to be found. We will never stop those who revel in blacknwhitism, either because they can’t see the grey or don’t care too. But those of us who appreciate the grey can try and find it in our debates and discussions, and by doing so can make life a little more colourful. Step into the grey and you just might find the rainbow.

And on that note – who wants to discuss religion?

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  • Footnoting a post-truth world
  • The Eye of the Bird and the Worm
  • The Shadow of Eve
  • Twisting the Ribbons of Time

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