Cultural_History

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, unprecedented numbers of Britons travelled to the sub-Arctic, foreshadowing the fever for polar exploration that would emerge in the mid-nineteenth century. At the same time, literary and scientific developments contributed to the movement now known as Romanticism. How did the sciences, antiquarianism, and ethnology interact to produce visions of the North? And what happened when British 'men of science' and Northern indigenous peoples encountered each other's ways of knowing the world? This study presents a new approach to understanding British engagements with the North, revealing its heretofore unheralded significance for the development of British identities, the Romantic imagination, and the advancement of the sciences.

"Taking a field collecting tour by Margot Nilson in Västergötland in 1928 as its starting point, this article discusses the collecting of folk traditions as an idea and a practice. The aim is to bring to light the links between the collectors’ work and contemporary complexes of ideas about ‘the people’ and their memories, and to show how the texts in our folklore archives can be seen as both a response to and a product of those ideas.
    Margot Nilson was employed by the Institute for Folklore Research at Gothenburg  University  College  (now  the Department  of  Dialectology,  Onomastics  and Folklore Research, Gothenburg). She was what was known as a scholarship holder,
i.e.  a  professional  recorder  engaged  for  a  limited  period  to  document  people’s memories  –  folk  traditions  –  in  a  given  geographical  area.  The  article  examines Nilson’s fieldwork as a process, describing the instructions she was given for her work and reproducing in its entirety the diary she kept during her collecting tour. A selection of the records arising from her fieldwork are also reproduced and analysed.
    These folklore records are to be understood as the result of a negotiation between Margot Nilson and her informants; like other texts in Sweden’s folklore archives, they reflect the history of both the recorder and the informants, while at the same time telling us about broader contemporary notions of the people and their memories. In short, one folklore record reflects several voices. Collections of folk traditions can thus be read and used in different ways, and serve as source material for studies of several different kinds and at different levels."

This paper evaluates the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games as an exercise in public history. Public events have been widely identified within the study of nationalism as festivals that attempt to reinforce national identity and belonging. Contemporary Olympic Games figure in this literature as a specific form of event where the nature and content of a host state's identity is displayed for the global gaze of other nations. While opening ceremonies perform a rich display of national identity in any case, London 2012 is particularly significant for taking place at a time of major political contestation in the UK and has frequently been interpreted as an expression of radical patriotism. Traces of such patriotic thought associated particularly with England can be found in the opening ceremony's historical pageant and overall concept, showing resonances with the work of Raphael Samuel, who argued for a radical patriotism grounded in a multiplicity of accounts of the national past from many social positions. Depicting the nation through a multiplicity of biographical narratives produces a ‘mosaic’ mode of representation which can be seen in other documentary and public history projects and in the political context of British public multiculturalism in the 2000s. This responds to the need for any national narrative to be composed through compressing the lives of millions of people into one coherent story, but complicates attempts to read a text such as the opening ceremony for what they ‘really’ mean. A model for understanding narratives of the past as being produced in interaction between their initial creator(s) and their reader(s) is necessary for understanding not only the London 2012 opening ceremony in particular but also public history and narratives of the national past in general.

This paper evaluates the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games as an exercise in public history. Public events have been widely identified within the study of nationalism as festivals that attempt to reinforce national identity and belonging. Contemporary Olympic Games figure in this literature as a specific form of event where the nature and content of a host state's identity is displayed for the global gaze of other nations. While opening ceremonies perform a rich display of national identity in any case, London 2012 is particularly significant for taking place at a time of major political contestation in the UK and has frequently been interpreted as an expression of radical patriotism. Traces of such patriotic thought associated particularly with England can be found in the opening ceremony's historical pageant and overall concept, showing resonances with the work of Raphael Samuel, who argued for a radical patriotism grounded in a multiplicity of accounts of the national past from many social positions. Depicting the nation through a multiplicity of biographical narratives produces a ‘mosaic’ mode of representation which can be seen in other documentary and public history projects and in the political context of British public multiculturalism in the 2000s. This responds to the need for any national narrative to be composed through compressing the lives of millions of people into one coherent story, but complicates attempts to read a text such as the opening ceremony for what they ‘really’ mean. A model for understanding narratives of the past as being produced in interaction between their initial creator(s) and their reader(s) is necessary for understanding not only the London 2012 opening ceremony in particular but also public history and narratives of the national past in general.

Vit kunnu síggja frímerki sum pappír við  klistri á baksíðuni, sum eitt slag av smáum  peningaseðlum, men vit kunnu eisini síggja  frímerki, og tað tey ímynda, sum idealiseraðar myndir, har hendingar í tjóðini, minnir,  hetjur og kend støð verða avmyndað. Á  hendan hátt miðla frímerki ein stoltleika  um tjóðina, har eitt úrvalslið av monnum og  kvinnum ofta verða mint. Soleiðis siga frímerki okkurt, um hvussu eitt land sær seg  sjálvt og samleikan í landinum.