Food, Gangs, and War: Three Concurrent Eighteenth-Century Crises Locating the Voice of Britain’s Lower Ranks

Here is the presentation paper I gave at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Bristol, ‘Rethinking History from Below: Origins, Trajectories, Prospects’, held on 16 June, 2017.

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I want you to imagine a riot. I want you to place yourself in the midst of that riot, dead center. What do you see? What’s going down?

Now let me show you one in which there was a sale. The year:1766. The town: Cirencester in Gloucestershire. A crowd numbering about a thousand descended upon the town. They came from

 

Distracted by Guts: 270-year old thought processes and a struggle to immerse

“One learns best about an ocean by swimming in it,” said a neighbor to me when I was about seven or eight and writing a school report about the Atlantic. Of course, I had no idea then about what he meant, after all the library was chock full of books about the oceans. Why couldn’t one just read about

 

Eureka! “Restricted” Document Reveals Eighteenth-Century Backdoor Deals

A remarkable, and may I add “restricted,” document discovered deep within the archives of the British Library revealed much of the politics that surrounded Admiral John Byng’s court martial as well as the subsequent government inquiry into how the island of Minorca fell to the French in April of 1756. Those two went together. But prior to both, the Newcastle government collapsed: too many

 

Creativity, Experimentation, Illumination: Lessons from an IHR Microhistory Workshop

A question came from the conference audience aimed at Professor Tom Robisheaux. “Would you recommend Ph.D. students to write dissertations using microhistory as methodology?”

“No!” came Tom’s commanding bellow. Something about how the “professionals” of the discipline still do not fully grasp or embrace the

 

Yet More Missing Documents: The Case of the Drummond Papers

There are two remarkable volumes in the manuscripts collection at the British Library. The topic covered is the trade and commerce Great Britain exacted in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. A British Consul named Alexander Drummond worked for the Levant Company in the ancient city of Aleppo. From 1747 up until February of 1756, Drummond transcribed and saved those copies of outgoing mail, both official and

 

London in the Cross-hairs: 4 questions on Admiral John Byng

I’ve just over a week until I leave California and return to the archives in London. The four chapters I wrote for my dissertation are simply not enough to produce a serious book: a few chapters too short! There remain four unanswered questions which are: 

 

Interactive Primaries: Or “Seminar-styled” activity for medium to large classrooms

Assigning reading is easy, getting students to actually read the assigned work – well, that’s a bit of a bugger. Some of my colleagues create multiple-choice quizzes to ensure students glanced at the readings. But if I had assigned eight primary documents, I now have the unenviable task of crafting exam style queries for all of them: besides, a multiple-choice quiz on readings seems somehow punitive. I want students to think, not practice rote memorization.

A cure may be found in