calimac

I suppose people will never not be interested in the Mary Toft rabbit-birth case: this however is a somewhat different take born of going into a particular archive, Mary Toft and the Radical Birth Control Movement (an archive of which I have knowledge), though I am perhaps more interested that Griffith was asking Helena Wright to ask her side-piece, Kenneth Bruce MacFarlane, a distinguished historian, for reading recommendations. But that is because the ladies running that clinic, who were trying to make birth control a respectable cause were all into all sorts of what would now be considered polyamorous configurations.

(I will not advance my critiques from my personal knowledge of the birth control movement of the 20s and 30s....)

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Baptism record at Manchester Cathedral offers insight into Black Mancunian life in Georgian-era England:

When the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson gave a sermon in 1787 at Manchester Cathedral – during the city’s first mass meeting against the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans – he saw a “great crowd of black people standing round the pulpit”.
However, little is known about Black Mancunians in the Georgian era, which makes one recently rediscovered entry in parish records at Manchester Cathedral particularly significant.

The 6‑7 craze offered a brief window into the hidden world of children:

But as media scholars who study children’s culture, we didn’t view the meme with bewilderment or exasperation. Instead, we thought back to our own childhoods on three different continents – and all the secret languages we spoke.
....
With or without access to the internet, children will continue to transform language and games to suit their needs – which, yes, includes getting under the skin of adults.

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Not precisely 'history from below' - this was still the monarch's court, after all - but looking beyond the obvious players and how much there is to discover about them beyond the immediately apparent: Dwarfism, Institutionalisation and Marginalisation at the Court in Early Bourbon France:

I aim to demonstrate through my new Transactions article that a meticulous examination of archival sources can reveal far more about the lives and activities of people with dwarfism – and marginalised people in general – than the archive’s apparent silence initially suggests.
At the same time, I hope this study can serve as another example, alongside my book on Louis XIII’s court, of the rich potential in an approach to court studies that de-centres the monarch, his ministers and absolutism to better understand the court – its institutions and its culture – in its own right.

The man who invented the Tube: or rather, had the idea and campaigned for it, died shortly before the opening of the Metropolitan line, which may have something to do with his absence from the annals.

Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1,000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students.

This would be rather startling to the ladies who had studied as home students, at Somerville, Lady Margaret Hall, St Hugh's and St Hilda's, before women were admitted to Oxford degrees which was what actually happened in 1920 -

- and those ladies who were still around were there to collect the degrees they were now entitled to.

I am so hoping that this is a blurb produced either by AI or by some intern at the publishers who has not actually read the book but has gathered that it is about women going to Oxford in 1920?

Because if the book is written in some apprehension that there were No Female Students among the dreaming spires before 1920 I hope the author is visited in her sleep by the shades of all, or at least some of, the women who were, who included some notoriously stroppy and acerbic characters.

This is even more egregious than the historical romance which posited a daughter of an Oxford prof at a date of obligatory celibacy for College fellows, which is a bit niche perhaps, but Women's Struggle for Education is surely well-documented???

(Come on down, Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford: a fragment of history)

In further Did Not Do The Research, or at least have a Brit-Picker, JD Robb Stolen in Death has significant plot around theft of Important Jewels - from the Tate in London, wtf, surely you meant the V&A....