Family history is one of the most widely practiced forms of public history around the globe, especially in settler migrant nations like Australia and Canada. It empowers millions of researchers, linking the past to the present in powerful ways, transforming individuals' understandings of themselves and the world. This book examines the practice, meanings and impact of undertaking family history research for individuals and society more broadly. In this ground-breaking new book, Tanya Evans shows how family history fosters inter-generational and cross-cultural, religious and ethnic knowledge, how it shapes historical empathy and consciousness and combats social exclusion, producing active citizens. Evans draws on her extensive research on family history, including survey data, oral history interviews and focus groups undertaken with family historians in Australia, England and Canada collected since 2016. Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship reveals that family historians collect and analyse varied historical sources, including oral testimony, archival documents, pictures and objects of material culture. This book reveals how people are thinking historically outside academia, what historical skills they are using to produce historical knowledge, what knowledge is being produced and what impact that can have on them, their communities and scholars. The result is a necessary revival of the current perceptions of family history.

The second edition of Public History: A Textbook of Practice offers an updated guide to the many opportunities and challenges that public history practitioners can encounter in the field. Historians can play a dynamic and essential role in contributing to public understanding of the past, and those who work in historic preservation, in museums and archives, in government agencies, as consultants, as oral historians, or who manage crowdsourcing projects need very specific skills. This book links theory and practice and provides students and practitioners with the tools to do public history in a wide range of settings. This new edition reflects how much the field of public history has changed in the past few years, with public history now being more established and international. New chapters have therefore been added on the definition, history, and international scope of public history, as well as on specific practices and theories such as historical fictions, digital public history, and shared authority. Split into four sections, this textbook provides approaches, methodologies, and tools for historians and other public history practitioners to play a bigger role in public debates and public productions of historical interpretations: Part I focuses on the past, present, and future of public history. Part II explores public history sources, and offers an overview of the creation, collection, management, and preservation of materials (archives, material culture, oral history, or historical sites). Part III deals with the different ways in which public history practitioners can produce historical narratives through different media (including texts, fictions, audio-visual productions, exhibitions, and performances). Part IV discusses the opportunities and challenges that public history practitioners encounter when working with different collaborators. Whether in public history methods courses or as a resource for practicing public historians, this book lays the groundwork for making meaningful connections between historical sources and popular audiences.

This book explores the challenges of teaching European history in the 21st century and provides research-informed approaches to history teaching that combine civic education, historical consciousness, and the teaching of controversial social issues. With contributions from researchers across Europe, the book includes both theoretical and case study chapters. The first part of the book addresses issues such as globalization and teaching in an interconnected world, using multicultural and critical approaches, decolonizing education, and teaching uncomfortable narratives of the past. The second part of the book showcases thematic chapters dedicated to teaching intersecting topics in the European curriculum such as violence and armed conflict, social inequality, gender equality, the technological revolution, and religion. Ultimately, this volume promotes criticality, civic engagement, and reflection on social issues, thereby prompting methodological change in the teaching of history as we know it. It will appeal to researchers and students of history education, democratic education, and citizenship education, as well as teacher educators and trainee teachers in history. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Why are the daughters and sons of Far East prisoners of war still captivated by the stories of their fathers? What is it that compels so many of the children, after so many years, to search for the details of their fathers' captivity? And how, over the decades, have they come to terms with their childhood memories? In his book Terry Smyth treads new ground by examining the processes through which the children's memory practices came to be rooted in the POW experiences of their fathers. By following a life course approach, and a psychosocial methodology, the book demonstrates how memory and trauma were 'worked into' the social and cultural lives of individual children, and explores how the relationship between their inner psychic worlds and subsequent memory practices unfolded against a challenging and morally ambivalent geopolitical background. The book invites readers to engage with the author in a journey of exploration and self-reflection, with elements of auto-ethnography adding richness to the text. Enlivened by interview extracts, case study material and ethnographic observations, this work opens up fresh and ambitious perspectives on the personal legacies of war.

This book skilfully combines cutting-edge historical research by leading and emerging researchers in the field to investigate the utilization of British humour during the Second World War as well as its legacy in British popular culture. Juliette Pattinson and Linsey Robb bring together case studies that address a variety of situations in which humour was generated, including wartime jokes, films, radio, cartoons and private drawings, as well as post-war recollections, museum exhibitions and television comedy. By adopting an original interpretative framework of various wartime and post-war sites, this books opens up the possibility for a more variegated, richer analysis of Britain's wartime experience and its place thereafter in the cultural imagination. Through the lens of humour, this book promises to add critical nuance to our understanding of the functioning of British wartime society. Covering sources such as The British Cartoon Archive, BBC World War II People's War Archive and The Ministry of Information, and including analysis of the lasting role of comedy in Britain's memories and depictions of the war, the result is a rich addition to existing literature of use to students and scholars studying the cultural history of war.

Rachel Bryant Davies and Erin Johnson-Williams lead a cast of renowned scholars to initiate an interdisciplinary conversation about the mechanisms of power that have shaped the nineteenth-century archive, to ask: What is a nineteenth-century archive, broadly defined? This landmark collection of essays will broach critical and topical questions about how the complex discourses of power involved in constructions of the nineteenth-century archive have impacted, and continue to impact, constructions of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, and beyond academic confines. The essays, written from a range of disciplinary perspectives, grapple with urgent problems of how to deal with potentially sensitive nineteenth-century archival items, both within academic scholarship and in present-day public-facing institutions, which often reflect erotic, colonial and imperial, racist, sexist, violent, or elitist ideologies. Each contribution grapples with these questions from a range of perspectives: Musicology, Classics, English, History, Visual Culture, and Museums and Archives. The result is far-reaching historical excavation of archival experiences.

Women born in mid twentieth-century Britain were the 'welfare state generation' – not only were their lives fundamentally shaped by the welfare state, they helped to transform it. In this ground-breaking work, Eve Worth examines the impact of the welfare state on the life course of women whose opportunities and social experiences were formed by it in the post-1945 period. Centred around an oral history study, this book argues that the welfare state was so central to the lives of women born in Britain between the late 1930s and early 1950s that they should be considered the 'welfare state generation'. The post-war expansion of the welfare state was one of the most transformative political changes of the twentieth century, yet we know little about its development in practice, nor its long-term impact on those who grew up within it. Using a ground-breaking life history methodology to examine women from their birth in the long 1940s to retirement in the mid-2010s, it includes thirty-six original life history interviews alongside social surveys and the Census for wider context By deploying a cross-class approach, this book moves the discussion on from just looking at university-educated women, to include women often overlooked in gender and social studies. Re-conceptualising the causes of social mobility in post-war Britain, exploring a new understanding of work and an updated periodisation of welfare state development, The Welfare State Generation offers a new approach to the history of class and gender, arguing that we need to move beyond the focus on women's emotions and personal identity, to consider their experiences and relationships with the state as employer, educator and provider.

The aftermath of the Second World War marked a radical new moment in the history of migration. For the millions of refugees stranded in Europe, China and Africa, it offered the possibility of mobility to the 'new world' of the West; for countries like Australia that accepted them, it marked the beginning of a radical reimagining of its identity as an immigrant nation. For the next few decades, Australia was transformed by waves of migrants and refugees. However, two of the five million who came between 1947 and 1985 later left. When Migrants Fail to Stay examines why this happened. This innovative collection of essays explores a distinctive form of departure, and its importance in shaping and defining the reordering of societies after World War II. Esteemed historians Ruth Balint, Joy Damousi, and Sheila Fitzpatrick lead a cast of emerging and established scholars to probe this overlooked phenomenon. In doing so, this book enhances our understanding of the migration and its history.

The last several decades have witnessed an explosion of new empirical research into representations of the past and the conditions of their production, prompting claims that we have entered a new era in which the past has become more “present” than ever before. Contemplating Historical Consciousness brings together leading historians, ethnographers, and other scholars who give illuminating reflections on the aims, methods, and conceptualization of their own research as well as the successes and failures they have encountered. This rich collective account provides valuable perspectives for current scholars while charting new avenues for future research.

House museums act as both sources and suppliers of history. Functioning first as private residences, they are then preserved as commemorative monuments and become living history museums offering theme-based tours led by period-costumed interpreters so that visitors might experience "what it felt like to live back then." In Family Ties, Andrea Terry considers the appeal and relevance of domesticated representations of Victorian material culture in a contemporary multicultural context. Through three case studies, Terry examines Victorian homes that have been repurposed as living history museums that host speculative performances of the past. The credibility of Dundurn Castle in Hamilton, William Lyon Mackenzie House in Toronto, and the Sir George-Étienne Cartier National Historic Site of Canada in Montreal, Terry argues, relies on the belief that architectural monuments and the objects they contain are evidence of the time, culture, nation, or people that produced them. Family Ties connects residential artifacts to performance by examining the Victorian Christmas programs offered annually at each site to demonstrate the complex nuances of living history. Through a detailed exploration of the relationship between heritage, living history, and memory, Family Ties illuminates the effects of institutional interpretations of the past that privilege nationalist myths.