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.
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 ...
I am the principal investigator on the Redress of the Past project. I’m a senior lecturer in modern British History at King’s College London, where I’ve been based since 2002.
I’ve been interested in historical pageants for some time. This interest was born of displacement activity. Having finished a doctorate on land and landscape in English politics and culture, I needed a break from thinking and writing about smallholdings, allotments, agricultural ...
I’m sitting in a pub near Warwick train station, ruminating on my pageant-related research efforts in the town’s record office over a pint of beer. My ruminations are being interrupted by some awful piped music (Chris de Burgh’s ‘Lady in Red’!), but the place is a certainly cut above those usually found near railway stations. It’s a cavernous black-and-white affair, dating it seems from the fifteenth century. There does seem to ...
As we enter the centenary year of the First World War a fresh battle is taking place in the pages of the national press. Predictably wading in first, with about as much subtlety as a German whiz-bang, was Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education. According to Gove all this talk of the complex geo-political situation pre-1914, the accusation that the war was a shambles presided over by an out-of-touch elite, or the possibility that ...
This post explains my personal interest in historical pageants. I am one of the co-investigators on the ‘Redress of the Past’ project. At the moment I work as a senior lecturer in economic and social history at the University of Glasgow, but in January I’m taking up a new post as senior lecturer in education at the Institute of Education, London.
My research interests are in the history of education in modern Britain, especially ...