St. Albans Pageant, 1907: Queen Elizabeth at Gorhambury.
Courtesy of St. Albans Museums.
The project team produced regular blog posts over the course of the period 2013-2017 (covering the years funded by the first AHRC) grant. These blog posts can be found below.
Last to join the team, I'm a Research Associate based at the University of Glasgow and am responsible for undertaking research on pageants from Orkney to em... quite a lot further south! I came to the Redress of the Past project from another funded research programme at the University of Edinburgh that looked at the history of community policing in Scotland. Although I've ranged widely across the social and cultural history of modern ...
As well as producing articles, books and oral histories on historical pageantry we also hope to encourage popular public engagement, especially through our website and twitter - @Pageantry_AHRC – as well as through the creation of a publically accessible database of the pageants we’ve researched. We’d like to get feedback on these aspects of the project, and so are looking for volunteers to participate in a user-group workshop. The purpose of this event is to ...
*Guest post by Laura Morgan - you can find her blog here*
There’s very little information on the internet about the 1909 Bath Pageant. All I knew as I found myself there one March morning recently was that a plaque commemorating the pageant could be found in Sydney Gardens, to the east of the city centre, so thence I wended my investigative way.
Sydney Gardens is a delight in itself – a beautifully laid-out and almost ...
Three members of the team – Paul Readman, Tom Hulme and myself – attended the Social History Society annual conference at Northumbria University. I presented a paper on behalf of all of us. We were in the first session of the conference and got a good audience turnout. In the same session were papers by Tosh Warwick and Ben Roberts, both on civic ritual in Middlesbrough, which linked nicely with the theme of our paper. Tosh circulated ...
The question "Do you Padge?" enjoyed some currency in the early to middle decades of the twentieth century. But padging was not of course popular with everyone, or everywhere. Indeed, I've just heard from Linda that Stirling doesn't seem to have had a pageant. On the face of it, this is astonishing, not least because of the importance of Stirling as a site of Scottish national memory. After all, Stirling is home to ...
One important aspect of historical pageants was their ability to carve out a space of social citizenship, providing a chance for participants to make a visible claim to membership in the life and culture of the village, town, or nation. Often, in the twentieth century, this cut across categories of class and gender, as the carnivalesque characteristics of local dramatic theatre allowed performers to be a King, Queen, Mayor, or folk-hero for the day. Pageant ...
One of the key objectives of this project is to recover the experiences of the men, women and children who caught ‘pageant fever’ over the course of the twentieth century. What did performing in pageants mean to them? What were their views on the historical events they were re-enacting? It’s difficult for historians to answer these questions. This is partly because the experience of individuals was so variable, but mainly because most people don ...
I come to the study of pageants as an historian of education, among other things. I now work at the Institute of Education, University of London, and co-edit the journal History of Education.
On the face of it, historical pageants might not seem an obvious
subject for an historian of education, but, as I emphasised in a poster presentation
at the History of Education Society annual conference in 2012, pageants
were one aspect of the ...
I am one of the co-investigators on the Redress of the Past project. I’m a lecturer in History and a core member of the Scottish Oral History Centre team in the School of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde.
I’ve come a bit later to historical pageants than other members of the team. For a number of years I’ve worked on the history of arts festivals, specifically the Edinburgh Festivals (which includes ...
I am the King’s College London based researcher for the Redress of the Past project, responsible for archival research in the South of England and parts of the Midlands and Wales; maintaining the website and blog; and organizing the large conference that will take place in 2016. Previous to taking up this position I was based at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, where I completed a PhD in October 2013.
It ...