Clare Carolin visits Limerick to see Still (the) Barbarians: EVA International the Irish Biennale, curated by Koyo Kouoh

Author: ccarolin
Date: Monday, October 3, 2016
Section: Research

A History of Stone, Origin and Myth (2016), Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley, Photo courtesy of Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley

A History of Stone, Origin and Myth (2016), Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley, Photo courtesy of Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley ‘I grew up with that border and I wouldn’t want it back again...’ intones the septuagenarian taxi driver taking me from Shannon Airport to Limerick. He is speaking of the boundary separating British-governed Ulster in the north from the Republic of Ireland, which since 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, abolished border controls, symbolically softening an 800 year-long conflict. Now, in the aftermath of June’s referendum, the border’s return seems inevitable:  a clear indicator of the disruption to the Irish peace process resulting from Brexit.

Read article >>

Working Lives and Memories of the Home Front

Author: jdouthwaite
Date: Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Section: Research

Part-time women war workers inspect cables in the Inspection Department of the ‘factory’ at Perrings furniture showrooms. They are producing electrical equipment for the Royal Air Force.

War generates unique and unexpected experiences in civilians’ ordinary lives. But war can also exist as a surprisingly uneventful setting for everyday working lives. At the European Social Sciences and History Conference three talks encouraged me to consider ways in which war work impacted civilians’ ordinary lives through memories that reclaim, forget and negotiate popular experiences of the Second World War.

Read article >>

Resistance to the First World War Conference

Author: sgrimshaw
Date: Friday, April 15, 2016
Section: Research

Community day: Conscientious objection and resistance to the first world war

Over the weekend of 18-20 March an international conference took place in Leeds, focusing on resistance to the First World War. The conference, which I helped to organise, brought together academics, community groups, poets and storytellers from across the globe, including delegates who had travelled from Australia and the USA. The conference was envisaged following the suggestion that the prominent narratives during the First World War Centenary were limited to stories of those who had actively participated in the war effort.

Read article >>

Fighting Extremes: From Ebola to ISIS

Author: mbrosnan
Date: Friday, February 19, 2016
Section: Research

Image of British Army Personnel in Sierra Leone

Since 2009 IWM has been running a project to collect the experiences of British military personnel serving in contemporary conflicts. Until last year, the dominant experience was the war in Afghanistan. But as this conflict began to draw down, British forces were deployed to help with other pressing concerns.

Read article >>

'The Day After' 1983: real and imagined nuclear attack in the Cold War

Author: jbulgin
Date: Thursday, February 11, 2016
Section: Research

A large mushroom cloud from a British nuclear test in the 1950s

On the evening of November 20 1983, 100 million Americans settled down to watch Nicholas Meyer's made-for-TV film The Day After. The film’s focus was a familiarly normal community in rural Eastern Kansas in the lead up to, and aftermath of, nuclear war. It is shocking and arrestingly bleak viewing; moreover it was, and remained for years afterwards, the most highly rated TV film in US broadcast history. Its importance however, lies less in its status as a landmark media event than in what it demonstrates about the cultural imagination in the 1980s.

Read article >>

The Imperial War Museum Sound Collection

Author: arichards
Date: Wednesday, January 6, 2016
Section: Research

The Imperial War Museum Sound Archive contains well over 60,000 hours of professionally recorded, documented and preserved material.

As we look forward to the New Year and begin to plan the various projects which will keep us busy over 2016, it is always useful to take a step back and consider the progress already made.  For over forty years, IWM has preserved one of the most important sound archives of its kind in the world.  Established in 1972, the Department of Sound Records, as it was then called, was an offspring of the museum’s Library which at that point included a handful of gramophone records.  The following decades saw the collection grow in size until, following a major restructuring in 2010, it was merged wi

Read article >>

Popular History, Publicity and Film at IWM

Author: rcoll
Date: Friday, October 9, 2015
Section: Research

In a frame from the film THE TRUE GLORY, a British Army Film and Photographic Unit cameraman and photographer, Sgt Mike Lewis, is caught on camera as he films the burial of the dead following the liberation of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, staff at IWM engaged with popular forms of history in order to publicise its collections, exhibitions and research facilities. In particular, the use of film in understanding history was increasingly significant in attracting public audiences, and as a subject for debate in universities.

Read article >>

Dissecting Warsaw’s new museum of Polish Jewish history

Author: sbardgett
Date: Monday, August 24, 2015
Section: Research

Warsaw museum image 1

‘It took an army to make this exhibition’, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett told her audience and ‘having scholars in charge of each section had been the key to the Museum’s success’.  In May I attended a conference seven months after the opening of the core exhibition of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. At the conclusion of the eight- year project, those involved in the Museum’s creation were keen to open debate on what had worked well and what less so, and to identify the gaps in Polish Jewish history requiring further historical effort.  The core exhibition offered a starting point for that discussion.

Read article >>