History Workshop Research Articles

Editorial: Remembering The Radical Seventies

In this issue, as we approach the hundredth issue and the fiftieth anniversary of History Workshop Journal, we are beginning a series of reflections on the decade in which both the movement and the Journal emerged with a mini-feature encompassing two memoirs of the radical Seventies as experienced by two historians in different parts of the world. The acclaimed historian Martin Duberman, now in his nineties, reflects on his participation in an obscure moment of antiwar activism in the Vietnam-era United States. Manas Ray follows on from his much-anthologized 2002 memoir ‘Growing Up Refugee: On Memory and Locality’ (HWJ 53) to explore his years at college in Calcutta/Kolkata in the midst of the Bangladeshi War. While the pieces are very different in tone and style, what unites them (beyond the decade on which they focus) is the light both shed on the subjective experience of periods of intense political change. Duberman’s account of a small group of (not quite openly) gay activists struggling to devise meaningful activism against the Vietnam war spotlights the ‘strange mixture of conviction and confusion’ that dogged all their efforts to raise awareness and forge coalitions. In the process he reflects on the tangled emotions that generate and accompany activism: fear, rage, grandiosity, self-aggrandizement, commitment, conviction, and exhilaration – feelings that (in words he quotes from Daniel Ellsberg) ‘can lead to naïve euphoria but also to a discovery of power’. Ray recounts his close-up and sometimes terrifying encounters with the Maoist Naxalite uprising in West Bengal, which the Indian government brutally repressed. In a series of beautifully drawn vignettes, sometimes comic, sometimes haunting, he illuminates ‘the fragmented interiorized experience that traditionally practised protocols of history-writing miss out’, the subtle ways that political upheavals formed the backdrop for his intellectual and sexual coming of age.

Review: Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism, edited by Denise D. Meringolo

Review: <i>Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism</i>, edited by Denise D. Meringolo

Spatial Relevance: Teaching History to Medical Students at a Medical Museum in Hong Kong.

This article examines the pedagogical significance of history workshops as part of the mandatory medical curriculum in Hong Kong. At the University of Hong Kong, year one medical students must take a three-hour long history workshop at the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences. We argue that by immersing experiential museum learning into the official medical curriculum, students can grow interest in Hong Kong's local medical history and discover its spatial relevance to their future practice. Moreover, students are equipped with analytical skills to tackle important agendas, such as historical contingency, multicausality of diseases, and perspectivism in dealing with conflicting narratives. However, we also notice that the way histories are curated in the museum and through the heritage trail could potentially constrain students to develop a limited historiography. The museum exhibitions and the trail walk mostly curated by medical professionals emphasize too much of the comparison of the bubonic plague and SARS that took place in 1894 and 2003. Students might assume the linear progression of medical sciences and the oversimplified dichotomy between traditional and modern medicine. In addition, disproportionate narratives of infectious and non-infectious disease in Hong Kong might result in oversight of the chronicity of general ill health conditions that have long been suffered by local people. Workshop conveners, therefore, need to constantly modify discussion questions to balance demands between the advancement of contemporary medicine emphasized in medical education and the critical thinking process offered by history.

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

The Peasant Revolution in Naddniprianshchyna (1917–1920) on the pages of «The Chervona Kalyna Chronicle»

The purpose of the article is to explore and evaluate the attitude towards the events of the peasant revolution in Naddniprianshchyna among the eyewitnesses – soldiers of the Galician units, participants of the national liberation movement of 1914–1921 in «Greater Ukraine». Research methods: historical-chronological, comparative, and descriptive. The main results: the article reveals the specifics of the military-historical memoirs published on the pages of the journal «The Chervona Kalyna Chronicle», as a source of the history of the Peasant revolution in Naddniprianshchyna. Four categories of authors writing for «The Chervona Kalyna Chronicle» on peasant issues were identified: participants of the Ukrainian national movement in Naddniprianshchyna (M. Mykhailyk, F. Meleshko, Ya. Vodianyi); prisoners of war of the Austro-Hungarian army and the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (S. Stechyshyn, V. Struk); senior officers of the «Kyiv» Sich Riflemen (I. Andrukh and I. Vyslotskyi); foremen and riflemen of the UGA (Ukrainian Galician Army). The first two categories of authors were either local residents or lived among the peasantry for a long time and painted a coherent, albeit contradictory, picture of the development of events in the Ukrainian countryside in 1917 – early 1918: their main concern was the activation of national-democratic forces and the growth of social struggle in peasants against landlords, radicalization of military-political confrontation. The authors of the third category, who came from the ranks of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, pointed out the indifferent attitude of the peasants to the national idea, traced the evolution of the attitudes of the peasantry of Naddniprianshchyna under the conditions of the Hetmanate of P. Skoropadskyi and other political regimes. The fourth group of authors (the UGA soldiers) is the largest. Their articles are devoted to the turning points in the development of the Ukrainian revolution: the transition to Zbruch, the typhus epidemic, and the split of the UGA, alliances with the Volunteer Army of A. Denikin and the Bolsheviks. Against the background of these military and political events, the problem of relations between the military and the peasantry can be clearly traced throughout the entire path of the UGA. The UGA soldiers focused their attention on such negative phenomena among the peasants as desertion, reluctance to fight for Ukrainian statehood, theft of military property, and hostile attitude towards sick soldiers. At the same time, the UGA soldiers contributed to the growth of the national consciousness of the population of Naddniprianshchyna. The mosaic fragments of relations with the peasantry, which contain memories, diaries, and essays of the UGA soldiers, are a valuable source of the history of the Peasant revolution in Naddniprianshchyna in 1917–1920. Practical significance: the results of the research can be useful in conducting general studies on the peasantry, compiling textbooks, and training manuals, in the preparation of lectures and seminar courses in institutions of higher education, and in local history workshops. Scientific innovation: for the first time, a complex of military-historical memoirs published in the «The Chervona Kalyna Chronicle» has been summarized and considered in the context of peasant research discourse and, in particular, the peasant revolution. Type of the article: research.

Integration of Sex and Gender Minority Standardized Patients into a Workshop on Gender-Inclusive Patient Care: Exploring Medical Student Perspectives.

Sexual and gender minority (SGM) communities experience significant health disparities. Although coverage of health issues specific to these communities has increased in the undergraduate medical curriculum, there is still opportunity for improved teaching about sexual diversity and inclusive care. The goal of this study was to assess students' perceptions of and satisfaction with a half-day workshop focused on sexual history taking and transgender health. The second-year clinical skills course at the Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine includes a sexual history workshop that starts with a 1-hour lecture on sexual history taking. This is followed by a faculty-facilitated small group session during which students interview an SGM patient and debrief about this experience. In 2020, for the first time, the standardized patients were members of the SGM community, and the session was on Zoom. Students completed an optional, anonymous postsession survey assessing the workshop. Students overwhelmingly believed that the integration of SGM standardized patients into the session helped improve their knowledge, attitudes, and skills related to providing care for this population. They noted that the standardized patient interaction and debriefing were the most beneficial parts of the session. Given the positive feedback, future iterations of this session will continue to use the SGM community as standardized patients. In addition, student competency related to SGM patient care will be assessed through observed structured clinical examinations.

Editorial: New Editors

With this issue, seven new editors join the collective of History Workshop Journal, significantly enlarging our expertise. We’re delighted to welcome them: Meleisa Ono-George (Queens College, Oxford) is a social-cultural historian of race and gender, with a focus on Black women’s histories in Britain and the Anglo-Caribbean. She is currently conducting research for a book that focuses on the lives of several Black women in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. She has also begun to develop her next project which looks at the history of Black mothering in Britain and the politics of historical production. Kennetta Hammond Perry is Director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre, DeMontfort University. Her research interests include Black British history, transnational race politics, Black women’s history, archives of Black Europe, and anti-racist movements for citizenship, recognition and social justice throughout the African Diaspora. She has published widely, including a book-length study on Afro-Caribbean migration to Britain following the Second World War titled London is the Place For Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2016). Currently, she is researching histories of state-sanctioned racial violence and the relationship between the decline of the welfare state and the expansion of the carceral state in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century.

A new archival hub at Wits University

For some years, the archives in South Africa have faced a series of unprecedented challenges that threaten the high quality of the documentation and the functioning of the centers that maintain them. The crises facing the State Archives reflect problems in the state more generally including inadequate strategic investment and lack of training, which jeopardise the potential renewal of archivists. At the same time, the wide array of political activities and social movements, the dynamics of civil society organizations and activism require more than ever to curate documentation and expand the archives’ capacities. To answer this paradox, a team working in two independent archives and a research center at Wits University is experimenting with a new “hub” to constitute an important center of independent archives in South Africa. Noor Nieftagodien, director of the Wits History Workshop - the research center that has played a role in the creation of the hub - and a member of the board of the South African Historical Archives, sheds light on the new enterprise.

ラスキン・カレッジにおける1970年代のヒストリー・ワークショップ--ラファエル・サミュエルによる男女に開かれた労働者教育の視点

ラスキン・カレッジにおける1970年代のヒストリー・ワークショップ--ラファエル・サミュエルによる男女に開かれた労働者教育の視点

‘Working together is like a partnership of entangled knowledge’: exploring the sensitivities of doing participatory data analysis with people with learning disabilities

ABSTRACT While there have been significant developments in the field of inclusive research with people with learning disabilities, there is limited knowledge about the ways inclusive research teams have conducted participatory data analysis. The authors argue this is inherently tied to the sensitivities involved in the inclusive research process. In this article, we present the experiences of two inclusive research teams (from the UK and Australia) who developed ways of working together to collaborate on data analysis. Both studies touched upon sensitive topics and crossed disciplinary boundaries. One was an evaluation of a series of history workshops with young people with learning disabilities; the other was an exploration of effective models of peer support for parents with learning disabilities. The authors explore different approaches to data analysis in inclusive research teams, and reflect on the politics of ‘sensitive’ research in this field, especially in relation to expectations of funders, ethics committees, and stakeholders.

Mőcsényi Mihály Kertművészeti és Kerttörténeti Műhely és Konferenciasorozat

Idén második alkalommal adott otthont a fertődi Esterházy-kastély a magyar tájépítészeti oktatás kiemelkedő alakjáról, Mőcsényi Mihály Széchenyi-, Kossuth- és Geoffrey Jellicoe-díjas tájépítészről elnevezett konferenciasorozatnak. Míg tavaly a nemzetközi hírű magyar tájépítész munkásságának szentelték a konferenciát, ezúttal a barokk kertművészet került fókuszba.

Crafting New Narratives of Diasporic Resistance with Indo-Caribbean Women and Gender-Expansive People across Generations

This study used participatory oral history and digital archiving to explore two interrelated questions: How do Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people across generations experience processes of storytelling? What are the challenges and possibilities of oral history and digital archiving for constructing alternative histories and genealogies of resistance? In the first phase of the study, twelve Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people across generations participated in an oral history workshop where they were introduced to oral history methods, co-created an interview guide, conducted oral history interviews of one another, and engaged in collective reflection about processes of storytelling. In the second phase, four co-authors of a community-owned digital archive participated in semi-structured interviews about their work to craft new narratives of diasporic resistance rooted in the everyday stories of Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people. In this paper, I analyze how Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people practice resistance by breaking silences in their communities around gender-based oppression, shift norms through producing analyses of their own stories, and reshape community narratives. Furthermore, I explore how oral history participants and co-authors of a digital archive understand the risks associated with sharing stories, raising the ethical dilemmas associated with conceptualizing storytelling as purely liberatory.

Collective and Democratic Experiments in the Politics of Knowledge in Britain since 1968:

The tumultuous events of 1968 had a profound and lasting impact on society, culture and politics on a global scale. In Britain, the effects of the upswing in radicalism were powerfully registered in developments and departures in cultural and intellectual life. Recent contributions to the history of the intellectual Left during this period, including the traditions of the New Left, cultural studies, and feminism, have documented many of the decisive shifts in theoretical outlooks and thematic focus. Less frequently acknowledged, however, has been the formation of a distinctive ‘politics of knowledge’, which contested established hierarchies and norms of academic work through forms of collective and democratic practice. This article argues that this project was a decisive outcome and achievement of the post-68 conjuncture, becoming part of a much broader democratising front in the 1970s and 80s that centred upon sites of cultural and intellectual expression. The key features of this alternative apparatus of intellectual production are explored in the context of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, History Workshop, and the scholarly endeavours of second-wave feminism, which paid critical attention to the possibilities, tensions and open contradictions intrinsic to this way of combining politics and intellectual practice.

Intellectual lives, performance and persona: The making of a people’s historian

The most important aspect of British historian Raphael Samuel (1934-1996) was his entire way of being a historian. Samuel, a former youth member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, is best known as a founder of the first British New Left (1956-62), the driving force behind the first History Workshop movement (1963-79), which pioneered a distinctive 'history-from-below', and as the author of Theatres of Memory (1994), an idiosyncratic exploration of the past in contemporary culture. Despite all this, he did not advance an especially ground-breaking historical argument or historiographical theory. He set his sights elsewhere, on the democratisation of history making. To achieve this end, he created a distinctive persona as a people's historian through which he projected a radical transformation of what it meant to study history. Yet posterity was both condescending and neglectful, and until recently the full …

“Guest Workers” in Mining

Over the past five to six decades, oral history has become a complex and diverse tool, not only for uncovering and analysing individual and collective patterns of memory but also to inscribe them into public historical narratives. In the wake of the decline of the mining industry in the Ruhr region, local history workshops, academic historians, filmmakers, and museum practitioners began to construe miners and mining communities as historical subjects from the bottom up. Throughout this time, personal narrations played an increasingly important role as both a source of research and a tool for public historical representations. Using the case study of the Ruhr area, this article deals with the functions of public oral history narrations about the region’s mining past. It will particularly address the question of how the work and life stories of Turkish immigrant labourers, officially labelled as “guest workers”, have been represented in regional historical culture. To what extent did they become narrative agents in the Ruhr’s historiography, from a democratic and participatory “history from below” to an increasingly institutionalised approach in public history?

Thompson on the highveld? Social history and humanist socialism in South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s

ABSTRACT This largely autobiographical essay tries to assess the impact of E.P. Thompson’s work on the South African social history movement during the politically turbulent 1980s. In particular it focuses on the University of the Witwatersrand, which was home to the South African History Workshop. Thompson, I argue, was only one of a number of equally significant figures who shaped the movement. Some of Thompson’s ideas were certainly embraced in the critique of structuralist Marxism, which had been enormously persuasive in the 1970s, and his concept of the moral economy was developed by some historians in South Africa. Thompson was also part of, though not central to, the British History Workshop, which had important connections to the South African offshoot. Yet post-independence Africanist scholarship, radical anthropology and the burgeoning oral history movement were probably more important intellectual influences. Politically, I suggest, Thompson may have been more influential in that he offered a humanist socialist alternative for leftists disillusioned with the Leninist tradition in South Africa. He demonstrated in his own work that democratic institutions and freedoms were central to any egalitarian project.

Notes from the Community: La cultura cura: Oral History on the Border

This standing feature highlights Project Coco, a 2018 collaboration between the authors; high school teacher of Mexican American studies, Joel Rodríguez; and high school students in El Paso, Texas. The authors discuss the various components of Project Coco–El Día de los Muertos, oral history workshops, history lessons, and altar creation. Following students’ responses to the project, the authors suggest that Project Coco is an act of reclamation.

Using a Hybrid Lecture and Small-Group Standardized Patient Case to Teach the Inclusive Sexual History and Transgender Patient Care.

Previous negative experiences with the medical community often leave transgender people reluctant to seek medical care. Inadequate teaching and exposure to transgender health during medical training perpetuates the health disparities experienced by this community. Although undergraduate medical education is uniquely positioned to address these disparities, curricular coverage of these topics remains inadequate. The second-year clinical skills course at the Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine includes a workshop consisting of a 1-hour lecture about the inclusive sexual history, followed by a 1.5-hour small group during which students interview a standardized patient playing the role of a transgender man and participate in a faculty-facilitated debriefing. To evaluate the 2019 workshop, students were provided with an optional, anonymous, pre- and postsession survey consisting of multiple choice and Likert-type questions. After the session, there was a statistically significant increase in students' knowledge of the components of an inclusive sexual history, in the number of students who believed that their medical training had prepared them to effectively provide care for transgender patients, and in the number who reported feeling comfortable taking a sexual history from a patient who identifies as transgender. Most students thought the standardized patient case was realistic and found the postencounter debriefing session helpful in identifying their own strengths and weaknesses. Our findings suggest that students found this brief, interactive sexual history workshop, which included a lecture and standardized patient case, to be an effective component of their medical training. Although our transgender patient case was acted primarily by cis-gender people, students perceived this as a realistic opportunity to actively explore the nuances of obtaining a history from a transgender patient. In addition, our findings suggest that it is possible to merge teaching on sexual history and transgender health care, which is important in time-limited undergraduate medical education curricula.

Movimentos políticos negros no Atlântico

A escola e o ensino de história vêm sendo profundamente transformados por novas propostas epistemológicas, que buscam combater narrativas excludentes. A partir de um aporte teórico decolonial, pretendemos analisar a experiência da aplicação de uma oficina pedagógica de história no ensino básico, em duas turmas de oitavo ano do Ensino Fundamental II, sobre três movimentos políticos majoritariamente negros no Atlântico: a Conjuração Baiana (1798), a Revolução Haitiana (1791-1804) e a Conspiração de Aponte (1812). Para isso, mobilizaremos reflexões a partir de materiais produzidos pelos estudantes. Pretendemos, desse modo, lançar pistas sobre a construção de saberes acerca desses movimentos, a percepção dos estudantes sobre a narrativa histórica e a potencialidade de uma educação antirracista e decolonial no ensino de história.

Global Geographies of Meiji Japan: Two perspectives

The following two essays were originally presented at the Meiji Japan in Global History workshop held in September 2017 at SOAS University in London (sponsored by the British Association of Japanes...