Paul Craddock

You're right, of course. I apologise to the nacho-munching community!

I didn't think my first post in weeks would be about nachos ... I'll now have to temper this was something deep and meaningful!

🤣

I don't charge her, Margaret! 😉

Filmic Humanities and Film-Making-As-Research

One for academic historians at Oxford!

Medical Humanities and HSMTE have invited me and Cal to give a talk about film production as a research methodology for historians.

Should have mentioned this earlier, but it didn't occur to me to share on here!

Less than a week to go now. All preorders greatly appreciated! Numerous options via

geni.us/RingOfFire

Thanking James, @thehistoryguy.bsky.social @iaindale.bsky.social @charliehigson.bsky.social and James for their kind words 🙏🏼

@iainmacgregor1.bsky.social @headofzeus.bsky.social

YouTube video by patriciahammondsongs All On Account of the Tariff - 1890 song

Patricia Hammond (mezzo-soprano, historical music specialist, and my wife!) found and performed this 1890s piece of American sheet music with a contemporary resonance ...

@patriciahammond.bsky.social

An old tombstone that reads: DEWEY 1898 - 1910. "He was only a cat" but he was human enough to be a great comfort in hours of loneliness and pain.

For #Caturday: a poignant photo by my friend Paul Koudounaris of a beloved pet's tombstone. "'He was only a cat,' but he was human enough to be a great comfort in hours of loneliness and pain."

Check out Paul's book on pet cemeteries, FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: bookshop.org/p/books/fait...

Thanks so much! Are you the Stuart Semmel who wrote Napoleon and the British? (If so, I read you back in my PhD days!)

The girl with no name When a now anonymous teenager sold her tooth for transplant, she couldn’t have predicted that she’d end up at the heart of a troubling story about 18th-century beauty ideals.

Surely there's a lesson here: we should think twice before letting the rich run our societies. Even the best of them have blind spots. If a man as famously ethical as Boulton can deny humanity to a child, what can we expect of the even more individualistic rich today?

Anyway, here's the story!

4/4

What I can't quite wrap my head around is that Matthew Boulton is celebrated for his stance against slavery and famously looked after his own workers into their old age. You get the sense, reading his letters, he has a tender heart. So, why did he think it okay to see a child's body as property? 3/4

Cover of the Hardware Man's Daughter: Matthew Boulton and his "Dear Girl", by Shena Mason

Cover of Matthew Boulton: Selling what all the world desires by Shena Mason

We sometimes celebrate the eighteenth century as a time of individualism (big issue today too!). And the stories of Matthew and Anne Boulton are both stories of strong individuals. But when it came to the girl who sold her tooth for a guinea, they don't even bother to find out her name 2/4

Images from from The Costume of Great Britain by W.H Pyne

I tried to write about a girl with no known name, no description. Bloody hard to do! Nothing to go on but the fact that in 1787 she sold one of her teeth to the industrialist Matthew Boulton. He paid a dentist to prise it from her mouth and transplant it into his own daughter, Anne ... 1/4

Diary entry reading 'I wonder where he is'

Diary entry reading 'Zoo with Daddy'

Diary entry 'Mummy had a blackout'

Diary entry reading 'rain'

I can oblige! We've finished the rough cut of the film and I'll be sure to share when it's done (though it's really rather more upsetting than I thought it'd be)

Diary entry from Friday 24th July, 1942, reading 'Air Raid in the Night'

Diary entry from Sunday 26th (month unknown) reading 'Uncle Walter came. We picked our first tomato'

Diary entry reading 'in case of accident please inform WIFE'

Diary entry reading '1st wedding anniversary'

We're making a film about a man who started collecting other people's pocket diaries after discovering something dark in his own childhood diary – something he'd repressed. More about that later. For now, I wanted to share a few of my favourite tender, funny or laconic close-ups!

Grappling With History By Sarah Elizabeth Cox | Rediscovering the wrestlers and boxers of late-Victorian London

If you like stories about bad men doing bad but also sometimes v. funny things in the 1880s, I have new blogs!

👊🏻Denny Harrington, Irish, drunk, jumped on sailors
👊🏻Constantine Morris, Brummie, drunk, bad hitman
👊🏾Felix Scott, Barbadian, less drunk, bit a cop's ear off

www.grapplingwithhistory.com

Very proud of @oispooky.bsky.social, who is set to become a lot cooler than me soon with her own amazing projects on the horizon. She runs one of the best history blogs on the internet - all about the gritty world of Victorian bare-knuckle fighters. So vivid you can smell the sweat. Follow her!

A photo of Lincoln's gloves which have yellowed with age. Near the cuffs are visible blood stains.

Bloody gloves belonging to Abraham Lincoln. When the President was shot by John Wilkes Booth, some of the blood ran down his sleeve and pooled in the pocket which contained the gloves.

Photo: Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.

Photograph of a prescription log book, open to show two pages with handwritten text.

A donation recently on display in our new acquisitions case, this 1890s prescription log book of Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was examined during his trial in 1910 for the murder of his wife Cora Crippen (aka Belle Elmore). #SomethingNew #Archive30

John Williams, author of Stoner

In his novel Stoner, John Williams's eponymous character has a full-time, tenured position as an assistant professor at a the University of Missouri. And he's considered a failure. Today, that kind of stability would be an impossibility for many academics – a dream job. How things have changed!

Or maybe a new income stream for JanePlan

The proprietors of these incredibly popular 'shows' (the Mr Beasts of the '30s!) sold tickets. Vast queues formed of those hoping to gawp at the starving young couples. The clergy, politicians and many others denounced the shows, though, and they were outlawed in 1935 2/2

h/t David Hewitt

A newly wed woman in a glass 'coffin', starving for 30 days for £250 in the 1930s

1930s, Starving Bride sideshow, Blackpool's Golden Mile

In Summer 1931, there was a new sideshow in Blackpool, Lancashire. ‘Brides and bridegrooms straight from the altar starve for 30 days’. The deal: newlywed couples were challenged to stay in glass 'coffins' without food for a month. If they made it, they'd win £250 (about £18,000 today) 1/2

Seconded! Thirded! The fact that anyone could have the slightest problem with Lindsey or any aspect of Lindsey is baffling; she's honestly how you know that you can be a success and an uncomplicatedly good person. I want to be like her when I grow up!

This kind of thing is paralysing. As someone who's worked with you a bit, I promise you that you're worth far more than this awful system makes you feel. Doesn't help much, I know, but you're a gem and deserve better.

The article and film is a plea for historians (and other knowledge professionals!) to make more use of film to publish their research and for journals to encourage film publication. It's hard to study the body and things like performance, craft and art when writing is your only option 4/4

Tracing embodied knowledge in the history of science and medicine: expanding the role of film in historical research - Science Museum Group Journal Paul Craddock and Anna Harris trace embodied knowledge in the history of science and medicine, arguing that historians might develop filmmaking methods to engage with historical or re-enacted practice...

With Anna Harris, I wrote an article for the 10th Anniversary Edition of the Science Museum Group Journal. The film of Tony (with me doing the VO!) accompanies the writing. 3/4

journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/trac...

My creative partner, Cal, and I took him and his workbench to the studio and filmed him at work. He couldn't muster the strength to carve stone anymore, but despite having not picked up his tools for nearly 30 years, he could carve wood just as he could the the day he retired 2/4

Master stone and wood carver Tony Webb, at his workbench in a infinity cove studio

Master stone and wood carver Tony Webb and his wife Cecily seated amongst woodchips in an infinity cove studio

Close-up of Tony Webb, master stone and wood carver, with his chisel and mallet

This is Tony Webb and his wonderful wife Cecily. Tony is 90 and the only remaining master carver of stone AND wood left in the United Kingdom (to his knowledge) 1/4

Extra special post by an extra wonderful historian and friend. Read through to the end and listen to her on Best Medicine. You won't regret it!