Last week the temperature under my collar was raised twice over. Both times it concerned a poor representation of the past. One probably down to lazy journalism (but with no real excuses) and the other possibly down to poor editing choices and an over-reliance on a ‘pat narrative’. Here I discuss the first of these, [...]
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Paddington history for kids
Last November I blogged about my experience demonstrating the wonders of history school children at Hallfield Primary School, my first alma mater. I continued the theme with the local Cub Scouts Group based at another Paddington primary school, St Mary Magdalene (5th Paddington). My tack was slightly different here. The incentive to listen and learn [...]
When did William the Conqueror burst? Or Back to School History
This afternoon was spent back at my old Primary School. The chairs and tables have shrunk but everything else is pretty much the same. That more or less is what the study of history is like. We look for things that changed and can’t help but notice what hasn’t. The reason I found myself faced [...]
Exhibition reviews on Creative Spaces
I thought about using Past Thinking as the place for exhibition and book reviews on museumy subjects that interest me, but instead I would like to contribute to content creation on Creative Spaces (National Museums Online Learning Project) particularly when the reviews related to items in the nine museum collections it hosts. I have recently [...]
Bringing President Lincoln "back to life"
Combining laser scans of casts of Lincoln’s ‘life mask’, with photogrammetric techniques, specialists in the USA have created a highly accurate-looking computer generated model of President Lincoln for a documentary entitled “Stealing Lincoln’s Body”. Using photographs, they have created highly detailed texture maps to make his face look as natural as possible. The documentary explores [...]
Historyscape: new heritage mashup
Alun Salt from ClioAudio has created a new service called Historyscape, which is an RSS feed that grabs user-submitted websites from Netscape which have been tagged with “Ancient”, “Ancient History”, “Archaeology” and “History”. The feed is ordered by the number of votes each item has received. You can subscribe to Historyscape via this RSS feed: [...]
Learn medieval Latin online
Much of our past is contained in documents few of us can read, let alone understand and interpret. The National Archives have created a set of online tutorials in beginner’s and advanced medieval Latin and palaeography, or, how to read old handwriting. It is the first time a course like this has been offered, free [...]
What was here?
This week sees the launch of wherewashere.com: whatwasHere.com wants to revolutionise how history is written. Its pilot website in Liverpool tells history like it’s never been told before: by everyone. It doesn’t only tell the capital H history of Liverpool, but the everything-interesting-that-ever-happened-to-the-people-who-actually-live-there history of Liverpool. It’s oral history for the My Space era. Based [...]
One Day in History
‘One Day in History’ is a one off opportunity for you to join in a mass blog for the national record. We want as many people as possible to record a ‘blog’ diary which will be stored by the British Library as a historical record of our national life. Head over to the History Matters [...]