1 1 This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Women in transnational history : connecting the local and the global on 5 th May 2016, available online: https://www.routledge.com/Women-in-Transnational-History-Connecting-the-Local-and-the-Global/Midgley-Twells-Carlier/p/book/9781138905788 2 2 CHAPTER 9Women at the intersection of the local and the global in schools and community history in Britain since the 1980s Alison TwellsThis final chapter moves beyond academic history to explore the relationship between women's history and the intersecting histories of the 'local' and the 'global' through the lens of schools and community history. Its focus is the 2007 bicentenery commemorations of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the context of debates since the 1980s about the history that should be taught in British schools. The chapter argues that the practice of history in schools and community contexts continues to provide a fertile ground for the development of transnational perspectives in history.In addition, extra-academic history enables the exploration of what Pierre-Yves Saunier has termed 'problem-oriented' history, which engages explicitly with issues of social inclusion, personal and political post-imperial identities and the purpose of history. 1 The interconnection between local and global history has been a neglected dimension in the scholarship concerning the debates over the school history curriculum in Britain since the 1980s, which has focused instead on the status of global in relation to national history. On the one hand, scholars have explored the resistance of successive Conservative governments to global history. The Thatcher governments of the 1980s, responsible for the centralising Education Reform Act (1988) which brought in the national curriculum for England and Wales, were especially antagonistic to the focus on peoples' and world history topics in the 'New History', the curricula developed by the Schools History Project to address the problem of the declining popularity of history in 3 3 schools in the postwar years. Thus historians have discussed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's opposition to what she described as the 'shop steward syllabus' of the New History and the related argument of Education Secretary Keith Joseph that understanding of, and pride in, 'the development of the shared values which are a distinctive feature of British society and culture' could not, 'however expert the teaching, be conveyed through Roman history or American history or Caribbean history'. 2 They have also critiqued the claims of the more recent Conservative Education Secretary Michael Gove that History teaching is too influenced by 'postcolonial guilt' and his argument that a traditional chronological run through key landmarks in British political and constitutional history is essential in order to instil national identity and pride. 3 Robert Phillips' argument that the 'history debates' of the 1980s and 1990s were part of a 'hegemonic struggle over cu...
Hannah Kilham (1774-1832), a Sheffield Quaker, was involved in philanthropic, educational and missionary work with women in Britain, Ireland and West Africa in the early nineteenth century. In this article the author focuses upon Hannah Kilham's engagement in the religious and domestic education of African girls and women in the 1820s and 1830s. Through representations of African women as in need of her 'civilising influence', Kilham was able to construct a powerful role for herself, and for other white middle-class British women, in the colonial/missionary enterprise. The article explores the significance of notions of gender, domesticity and the Protestant family to the construction of ideas about Africa's 'difference' and, through this, British national identity.
The last two decades have seen the emergence of an 'emotional turn' within social and cultural history. Groundbreaking studies by William Reddy, Peter Stearns and Barbara Rosenwein, building on the pioneering work of Norbert Elias, Lucien Febvre and others in the early decades of the twentieth century, have inspired a substantial body of work which interrogates the argument that emotions are to some degree shaped by culture. 1 As Susan Matt has recently argued, Febvre was right to suggest that 'the study of emotions would bring new energy to the field', citing as examples recent work on political change and religious life. 2 However, despite the emergence of studies attentive to the difference between discourses about emotion and the experience of emotion within women's history, gay history, men's studies and more, 3 social class has been a neglected category. More specifically, those historical sources which enable engagement with a subject's emotional life have been largely produced by middle-class and elite individuals and groups. 4 It remains notoriously difficult to gain access to the interior lives of 'ordinary' people. 5 Scholarly interest in emotions has been one impetus for a new enthusiasm for diaries as historical sources. Recent work has explored the diary not just as a 'chronicle of the everyday' 6 but as 'a template for personal change, a means of means of the tracking of the self in time.' 7 The diary, in the words of James Hinton, is a 'technology of the self... "the room behind the shop", in which the diarist reflects on and prepares his or her performance, mask, persona', enabling the construction of the self over time. 8 Emotions-their concealment, management and expressionare central to this process. Here again, however, despite the extensive recovery work that has been a feature of feminist scholarship over the last thirty years and which has included the re-evaluation of the sgnificance of the feminine, private and domestic spheres, ordinary diaries have been largely ignored. 9 Literary scholars, concerned to expand the canon to admit previously marginalised women writers, have been keen to identify the literary qualities of some previously neglected diaries. When making selections for inclusion in Revelations: Diaries of Women, for example,
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.