twentieth century

The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain, 1905-2016

Drama and Theatre Studies, Theatre and History | music, performance, twentieth century, United Kingdom

The database contains entries of over 550 pageants (and growing). These list a wealth of information about individual historical pageants, sometimes in great detail. Insofar as records allow (and little trace remains of many pageants), we have sought to record details of the times and places of performances, those involved in organising and staging them, and how many people attended. For each pageant, we have also sought to record, again as fully as possible, whether the pageant made or lost money, details of the music that was played and who composed it, and synopses of the individual episodes which featured. In addition, for each pageant record we provide lists of the names of the notable historical figures that featured in the action. Last but certainly not least, we have prepared a detailed summary essay explaining each pageant and placing it in its wider historical context. We have information on all – or nearly all – of the largest pageants performed in twentieth-century Britain as well as a broadly representative sample of smaller pageants.

Data type: images, spatial, text

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The Windrush Scandal in a Transnational and Commonwealth Context

History, Political History | ethnic minorities, interviews, migration, oral history, race, twentieth century, twenty-first century, United Kingdom

From the Project Abstract on the UKRI Grant List website: The key outputs will be 60 oral history interviews which will be available electronically and a searchable database of existing oral history resources on the 'Windrush generation'. 30 of the interviews will focus on the response of Caribbean governments and their representatives in London to the legal restrictions imposed on immigration to the UK from the Caribbean from the early 1960s, and the plight of those members of the diaspora community whose right to remain in the UK was challenged by the British state. The other 30 interviews will focus on members of the diaspora community, those who found themselves under threat of deportation or actually deported, and their supporters and legal and political representatives. The interviews will explore the extent to which the complexities and ambiguities of the law governing nationality exacerbated confusion around competing notions of Caribbean and British identity and belonging. They will seek to identify the extent to which members of the diaspora community were aware of changes to their rights and obligations brought about by successive acts of parliament from 1962, and the stages by which it became clear that significant numbers of people were having their right to remain in the UK challenged. This oral history research will be supplemented by archival research in collections in the UK and the Caribbean. Selected documents will be digitized and made available on the project website alongside the recordings of the interviews and supporting explanatory materials including a series of podcasts produced by the project team.

Data type: text

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UK RED

English Language and Literature, Languages and Literature | autobiography, diary, eighteenth century, fifteenth century, interviews, letters, nineteenth century, seventeenth century, sixteenth century, twentieth century, United Kingdom

The Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945 (RED), housed and developed at the OU is the world's largest database about reading habits. An online, open-access project with over 30,000 entries, it is revolutionising public understanding of the history of reading. RED is democratising scholarship about the history of reading by encouraging ordinary members of the public from any location to contribute and use information about readers through history. 120+ volunteers from outside academia have already contributed some 6,000 entries. RED attracts over 1500 users per month from over 135 countries and has inspired partner projects in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand.

Data type: text

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War Widows’ Stories

Economic and Social History, History | gender, interviews, oral history, twentieth century, United Kingdom, war and conflict, women's studies, World War II

The War Widows' Stories website hosts all transcripts and recordings of the oral history interviews we have conducted in the course of the War Widows' Stories project, and they can be access and downloaded for free by anyone. Recordings can be streamed or downloaded; transcripts can be read and searched online or downloaded as PDFs.

Data type: audio, text

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Whittingehame College Old Boy Interviews

Cultural History, History | England, ethnic minorities, interviews, Judaism, Middle East, migration, twentieth century

Whittingehame College was a Jewish boys' school located in Brighton and Hove between 1931 and 1958 and in Handcross Park from 1958 until 1967. Whittingehame's founder was the British Zionist, Jakob Halévy (1898 - 1978). During the years of its existence, the school underwent significant transformations. From educating British Jewry in the early 1930s, Whittingehame attracted Jewish students from Germany and central Europe in the mid-1930s. After the war, Jewish students from Muslim-majorities countries in West Asia and North Africa (especially Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Sudan, Iran and Afghanistan) increasingly sought admission to the school. This data comprises twelve videos of interviews conducted by Magnus Marsden and Paul Anderson with former students at the College. The interviews were conducted and recorded in Brighton on 10th September 2023, in the context of a College reunion.

Data type: video

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The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913

Economic and Social History, History | court cases, crime, Early Modern, eighteenth century, England, law, nineteenth century, seventeenth century, twentieth century

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts between 1676 and 1772. It allows access to 197,752 trials and biographical details of approximately 2,500 men and women executed at Tyburn, free of charge for non-commercial use. In addition to the text, accessible through both keyword and structured searching, this website provides digital images of all 190,000 original pages of the Proceedings and 4,000 pages of Ordinary’s Accounts, advice on methods of searching this resource, information on the historical and legal background to the Old Bailey court and its Proceedings, and descriptions of published and manuscript materials relating to the trials covered.

Data type: images, temporal, text

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The Digital Panopticon: The Global Impact of London Punishments, 1780-1925

Economic and Social History, History | Australia, colonialism, court cases, crime, eighteenth century, England, law, nineteenth century, twentieth century

This [dataset] allows you to search millions of records from around fifty datasets, relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey. Use our site to search individual convict life archives, explore and visualise data, and learn more about crime and criminal justice in the past.

Data type: images, temporal, text

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The James Madison Carpenter Collection Online Catalogue

Ethnography and Anthropology, Languages and Literature | England, ethnography, folklore, irish, music, performance, Scotland, twentieth century, United States, Wales

The James Madison Carpenter Collection is a major collection of traditional song and drama, plus some items of traditional instrumental music, dance, custom, narrative and children's folklore, from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the USA, documented in the period 1927-55.

Data type: text

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Spaces of Hope: Peoples’ Plans

Historical Geography, Human Geography | social-networks, twentieth century, twenty-first century, United Kingdom

SPACES OF HOPE: the Hidden History of Community Led Planning in the UK has explored the often-overlooked ways in which local people and organisations have come together to improve their physical and social environments. Since the 1960s a rich but hidden history has emerged of communities campaigning, drawing up their own land-use plans, owning, occupying and developing sites and initiating creative community projects. Bringing together universities, artists and archivists and working in partnership with the Town and Country Planning Association, SPACES OF HOPE: PEOPLES’ PLANS is an AHRC-funded research project that aims to reveal these histories and spark debate about how lessons can be applied to current community place-shaping.

Data type: images, spatial, temporal, text

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Protestants Behind the Iron Curtain: Religious Belief, Identity, and Narrative in Russia and Ukraine since 1945

Economic and Social History, History | Christianity, court cases, interviews, Latvia, Protestantism, Russia, twentieth century, Ukraine, USSR

This project examines the experience of Baptist and Pentecostal communities in the USSR.

Data type: audio, images, text

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