History Newsletter Summer 2018 Edited by Norma Hiebert-Duffy What to watch out for this semester: History Programme Special Guest Lectures Autumn 2018 Friday 5 October, 12-1 in W3 Professor Máire Cross (Newcastle University) Blazing A Trail For Gender Equality: Flora Tristan (1803‑1844), Utopian Socialist and Feminist and Her Modern Influence Professor Cross is Emerita Professor of French Studies at Newcastle University and a former President both of the Society for the Study of French History and of the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France. A specialist in the history of gender, the history of political ideas and the history of letter-writing, she is the world’s leading expert on Flora Tristan. Professor Cross is currently writing In the Footsteps of Flora Tristan. A Political Biography in Motion, which examines the intertwined lives of Flora Tristan and her biographer Jules-Louis Puech, an early twentieth century pacifist, feminist and socialist. Compulsory for students on HIS2033 Introduction to Contemporary History, this will also be of interest to students taking HIS1012 Interpreting European History: the Nineteenth Century. In association with Edge Hill's Gender and Sexuality Research Group. All welcome. Tuesday 20 November, 4-6 in CE102 Richard Hall (Cambridge University) Fathers' and Sons' Educational Experiences in Britain Richard Hall is completing a PhD in the Faculty of History at Cambridge University on The Emotional Lives and Legacies of Fathers and Sons in Britain, 1945-1974. Richard has published on working men’s clubs in post-war Britain, and emotions and subjectivity in oral history interviews. His interests include gender and masculinity, histories of emotions, memory, national identity, and more broadly, the social and cultural history of modern Britain. After some time away from academia, he returned to study degree modules in History at the Open University, before completing an MA in Contemporary History at the University of Sussex. Richard also has a BA in Music from the University of Liverpool. Compulsory for students on the HIS3038 Special Subject route 1968 And All That: Protest in Western Europe, this will also be of interest to students planning to take this module in future, and for those considering careers in the creative and not-profit sectors, which our speaker has previously worked in, including at the BBC. All welcome. 1 History Programme Field Trips Autumn 2018 Thursday 11 October: First year trip to Manchester To commemorate the approaching centenary of the Peterloo Massacre, the first year students will be taken on a field trip to Manchester, where we will visit the Manchester Science and Industry Museum and the People’s History Museum and attend the Peterloo Living History Performance. Friday 14 December: Fernand Léger Exhibition, Tate Liverpool The exhibition brings together more than fifty works by renowned artist Fernand Léger (1881– 1955). Léger was enthralled by the vibrancy of modern life. His paintings, murals, film and textiles were infused with the bustle and rhythm of the metropolis. He drew on photography and new forms of communication that boomed during the ‘mechanical age’ of the twentieth- century such as typography, advertising and graphic design. Léger’s work was heavily influenced by his surroundings and his experience of modern life. Included in the exhibition are his collaborations with architects Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perrand. This, the first major UK exhibition dedicated to Léger’s work in thirty years, celebrates the artist’s desire to make art part of everyday life. Compulsory for students taking HIS2033 Introduction to Contemporary French History. Other students welcome to join us: please contact Daniel Gordon for details. Introduction BY ROGER SPALDING, PROGRAMME LEADER OF HISTORY BA Every now and then As far back as the fourteenth century the a journalist or a Oxford academic, John Wycliffe railed politician will make against clerical privilege and produced his disparaging remarks own English translation of the Bible. about universities, Wycliffe’s ideas were seen as very along the lines that dangerous by the establishment of the such institutions are day, and may have played a part in ‘ivory towers’ inspiring the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. obsessed with abstract ideas that have no One can certainly see why the nobility and relation to the ‘real world’. In truth this the princes of the Church would not want has never been the case; there are the common people having access to countless examples of interactions passages of this kind: between universities and the wider world. 2 Go to now, ye rich men, weep and Academics, and that goes for historians howl in your miseries, which shall too, are not detached from the wider come upon you…Your gold and world, they are fully engaged with it. This silver is cankered: and the rust of is amply demonstrated by the current them shall be for a testimony issue of the History Newsletter. The work against you, and shall eat your flesh of Professor Paul Ward, the department’s like fire…Behold the hire of the new head, has a strong focus on the active labourers, who have reaped down and continuing role of people at large in your fields, which by fraud has been shaping their own identities and, in the kept back by you, crieth: and the cry process offering academic historians new of them hath entered into the ears insights into an ongoing process and of the Lord…(Epistle of St James, relationship. The article on John Stuart 5:1) Mill does not present him as a dead Ideas can lead to actions, as the figure, but as someone with continuing London lawyers – custodians of the rights influence. The late Lady Thatcher who of privilege and property – found to their expressed her admiration for Victorian costs, when they were slaughtered by the values, would certainly have found enraged peasants. something positive in Mill’s individualism. In the nineteenth century the claims The piece on York notes the interaction made by historians, like William Stubbs, between old and new in that city: the that the English had a unique capacity for nexus of ‘Heritage’ and commerce? good government, helped to underpin the The various pieces on the Erasmus drive for imperial expansion: If we were so Programme also demonstrate another good at shaping governments, then feature of the university tradition, the perhaps we ought to confer the benefits readiness to embrace people and ideas of our capacity on other races. In the from other cultures and societies. This twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes, tradition has enormously enriched our a product of King’s College, Cambridge, academic life for many years, bringing us developed a form of economics that philosophers like Isiah Berlin, political transformed Britain’s wartime economy, historians like Isaac Deutscher and G. R. and dominated economic thinking down Elton, anthropologists like Bronislaw to the 1970s. Malinowski and a host of others. This In more recent times academic continuing process of cross-fertilisation historians like Dominic Sandbrook, cannot be anything but positive for Andrew Roberts, Simon Schama, Richard national life and specifically for our Starkey, Lucy Worsley and many others, students at Edge Hill; long may it continue appear regularly on our TV screens and in whatever solution our politicians stumble our newspapers. On TV their towards over our relations with the popularisations of the past also help to European Community. shape ideas of what it means to be English I commend to you this positive, (British?) now. In the press historical engaging and vibrant History Newsletter. I knowledge is deployed to promote a wide must also thank all of those who worked range of attitudes and policies. Sandbrook so hard to produce it. for example used the example of Britain in the 1930s to promote policies of Austerity following the financial crisis of 2008. 3 John Stuart Mill: A Philosopher for our Time? BY NORMA HIEBERT-DUFFY A recently published article the world changed around in The Economist him. He was a product of (04/08/2018) featured his time in that the John Stuart Mill in the first nineteenth century of a series entitled provided a frame for his ‘Philosophers Brief’. Mill, arguments, but he knew who is widely considered the importance of stepping to be one of the outside that framework nineteenth century’s when driven to by the seminal thinkers, is of dictates of logic and interest at any time. morality. And so it is Today, however, as we unsurprising that, although wrestle with the results of in his early years he the referendum on Brexit espoused the utilitarian and with Donald Trump’s doctrine that the criterion solipsistic worldview, some of Mill’s ideas of public action should be ‘the greatest hold more resonance than they have for happiness of the greatest number’, he some time. In the years leading up to the later exchanged this for a more nuanced financial crisis of 2008 it may have application, one which considered the less appeared that the capitalist universe was significant number, on whose backs the unfolding as it should. A broad acceptance happiness of that more fortunate number of liberal principles was resulting not only rested. in global economic progress but in further Mill’s concern was to cut both equality, as well as rising standards of ways. He espoused the concept of a living, health and education. The thinking universal franchise but he also wrote on was that we were, at least, moving in the the ‘tyranny of the majority’, and right direction. Now, worryingly, the world expressed concern that the will of the seems to have been turned upside down. majority could stifle individual creativity As the article points out, Mill’s and thinking.