of a social historian
Since I was young, probably before I even knew there was such a thing as An Historian, I wanted to be a writer. Novels, film scripts and songs were all more obvious fantasies than scholarly tomes, but it’s the same impulse to carve thoughts into words that drives me in my academic writing today.
I still feel I’m finding my feet as a writer, so my blogging makes no attempt to offer writing advice beyond the undergraduate essay. If you do want academic writing advice there’s plenty out there – including one of my personal favourite blogs, Education Professor Pat Thomson’s patter. What you’ll find here are personal reflections and musings on topics ranging from blogging to writing academic articles and books, to publishing as well as history as drama or documentary.
There's a lot of advice out there on what to do and not do when writing a monograph. The main sub-genre is thesis-to-book advice, but there's plenty more besides on finding an authorial voice appropriate for the format, how to go about revising such a long piece of text, etc. Yet there's nothing out there (that …
Continue reading "History Monograph Introductions"
I was born at the height of the Miners' Strike in the summer of 1984. I've often wondered what my parents were thinking of - bringing a child into a world at a time of such strife and division, with the fear of nuclear apocalypse looming so large. As I slowly realised the pictures on …
As we eagerly await the third series of Peaky Blinders, returning to BBC2 in May, it's a good time to take a look back over what historians who study its period and its themes have made of the hit drama series. Questions of authenticity are bound to come up when thinking about any historical drama, with names, dates and places …
