People, Place and Community Seminar: Challenging histories? Collaboration, community & remembering the bits ‘best’ forgotten
On the 25th November 2020; Mike Esbester (University of Portsmouth) delivered his seminar on Challenging histories? Collaboration, community & remembering the bits ‘best’ forgotten.
As historians, how do we handle sensitive or traumatic pasts? And what happens when we get a variety of researchers involved? In this seminar, I’ll look at how the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project is engaging with different audiences to explore accidents to British and Irish railway workers before 1939. A joint initiative of the Modern Records Centre, National Railway Museum and University of Portsmouth, and working with The National Archives, we’ve been working with teams of volunteers to transcribe and make freely available accident reports. People who wouldn’t see themselves as railway historians have been coming together to get involved – understanding the expertises they bring will be a theme of this seminar, which will provide a forum to think about some of the challenges of researching difficult pasts in a public way.
