My husband's from Belfast and his mum still talks about a dad in their little community taking bolt cutters down to the park to break through the chains because his kids couldn't play on Sundays. This would be the late 1970s and, yes, the people who chained up the gates took it very seriously.
Oh this looks really interesting! Iāll try to get there online
Do you know Benno Gammerlās work? He uses oral history and a history of the emotions lens to look at gay menās lives in West Germany.
Was just at the women impressionists exhibition at the National Gallery, Dublin, and thinking about how, among many other things, Berthe Morisot makes visible the work of childcare that enables her to be an artist, by painting her daughter with her nanny.
Not that the 1990s are the presentā¦ Iāve been thinking about connecting more recent times to the 1940s in a thing Iām writing. But the 1990s are certainly history!
Love this piece! Partly itās about thinking about history as a method, I think, rather than coming up with arbitrary time cut-offs. I love the idea of being a āhistorian of the presentā which maybe has a wider usage but I remember seeing in Italian academic discussions post-WW2
Great prizes up for grabs for non-fiction writing - details below. Please share.
And you can count yourself as a primary source!