Category: Scholarship

On Fandom

~ Amy Lauters ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been mulling over an epiphany I had a couple of weeks ago, about fandom and my place in it.

It will come as no surprise to some that I am, apparently, a professional fan. However, it was a surprise to me when I realized it.

First, it’s no surprise to many to find that I am a lifelong fan of the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder. My first book, in fact, is an edited collection of the literary journalism of Rose Wilder Lane. I subscribed to Little House newsletters from the home sites in Laura’s world when I was old enough to use my babysitting money to do so, and my first independent road trip, the week I turned 18, was to see the Pepin and Walnut Grove sites firsthand.

Like many “bonnetheads,” I made an effort to learn how to do everything Laura did in her books. I learned to sew, to cook over an open fire, to churn butter, and to make bread from ground wheat and sourdough starter. I played “Little House” for endless hours with my cousins and friends, almost always as Mary, the oldest, because I had blond hair. As an adult, I bought each new book that came out about her life, and as a graduate student, I used her life experiences and writings to frame my own historic research.

I’ve even cosplayed as Laura or Rose, on occasion.

But somehow, that didn’t translate into fandom for me. It simply was. The work I’ve done with Laura and Rose has become what I’m best known for as a scholar, and it’s led to a degree of me being recognizable in public. The BBC interview I gave when Pioneer Girl, the annotated edition, came out, contributed some name recognition internationally that was cool and weird at the same time. And yet, I still hadn’t connected the dots.

It’s ironic, because I have actually researched fan culture. For my master’s thesis, I explored fan culture and the emerging communities online that supported various subgroups of it. I was fascinated by the collectives that had decided to take ownership of varied media, particularly Lois and Clark, and “correct” the deficiencies fans had identified in the original work’s plots. I finished and defended my thesis in 2001, just a few years after the World Wide Web had entered homes and before social media became a dominating force.

I spent a long time trying to see the thread that binds that research to the work I’ve done in history, and I realized, finally, and with help from the Michael Sheen fandom, of all things, that what ties everything I’ve ever done as a scholar together is fan culture.

So, there lies the epiphany. I’m still exploring fandom and my place in it. There’s something teasing me with notions of celebrity, familiarity, and cognitive dissonance that I’ve yet to articulate. When I’ve figured it out, I’ll write more about it.

(And yes, I’ve become a big fan of Michael Sheen’s work. Especially in Good Omens. It’s brilliant. You should go check it out.)

(And yes, I really am that clueless about my own significance in some ways, and require metaphorical big slaps in the face to “get it.”)

A Letter to My Graduate Students

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

I’ve read this letter out as part of the @letterslive project. It was a letter I wrote to my graduate students this morning as part of our weekly check-in. It reflects this moment in time, and the particular challenges of teaching about media. The parameters of the request from Letters Live, outlined by Benedict Cumberbatch in this YouTube video, ask that we read our letters out loud on video. Readers are not required to use their faces, hence, my voiceover with my favorite fabric background.

The text of the letter, which is read out loud and posted on Twitter, is here:

Good morning from Minnesota!

As someone who works hard to manage chronic clinical depression, I’m finding this week’s material, which focuses on health communication, doubly challenging to talk about within the framework of COVID-19. Some of your posts and reflections have struck deep chords with me, and I’m struggling to contextualize what I know about media as a social institution with what I’m seeing across our news and other media platforms.

We in journalism often are careful to make a distinction between news and “other media.” It’s a necessary line we draw in order to help us focus on what society needs from news sources and what society wants from media. However, it’s clear to me that the average media consumer makes no such distinction. The image of a woman’s screaming face protesting a state lock down by shouting the “Media is the cancer!” hurts my heart. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that without media, more people would be dead at this point of the pandemic. And yet. And yet.

So, I’m personally balancing my rage and hurt with, ironically, some entertainment media. I’ve been watching John Krasinski’s “Some Good News” program on YouTube, and it’s made me cry every week. I watched the Disney Sing-Along last week with my little girls, and cried some more. I managed to watch two back-to-back episodes of Dr Who  in a worldwide simulcast on Sunday, and followed several of the original cast as they tweeted along. It helped, a lot, to feel connected to people who want to share something happy.

As we look ahead to our last week of classes, next week, I’m trudging through what needs to be done. I do want you all to know how much I appreciate your discussions and contributions to class. You all have made this experience incredibly rewarding.

Think, next, about how you would put your newly acquired understanding of media theory and practice to work in teaching an intro class. I know that some of you have already had this experience; others are looking forward to trying it for the first time. Every classroom is different, and will face interesting challenges. The key to making it work, I’ve always thought, is flexibility. Provide the framework and the materials to learn the material, but be flexible in how that it shaped. Take advantage of teachable moments. Media examples, past and present, will be your friends as you strive to help your students understand and evaluate materials.

Please know that I am thinking about all of you as we finish out the term. Stay well.

Dr L

To tell a story: Ways of approaching history

~ Amy Lauters ~ 1 Comment

Thinking about “What’s in the Box?” has helped me focus a little on my other historical research.

When I first got the box, I was working on a large-scale history project. In fact, it might have been too large to do justice to the topic. It came from a place of wanting to learn about and share a story about how farm women in the United States lived and worked on their farms in the early to mid-twentieth century, rooted in my grief over the loss of my own grandmother just before I started my doctoral program and a parallel life-long interest in Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was writing for and about farm women at the time.

As with many questions that tackle aspects of women’s history, the first step had to be looking for their voices and stories. Several options could be employed. The first, which I used, is asking people for their own stories, informally networking to see if there was some written record that could be used to uncover the past. The biggest challenge in uncovering stories of the largely voiceless is that lack of voice; once many people have passed on, there’s no record they’ve even been a part of the past.

As a journalist, I loved to tell people’s stories. I learned in my teens that everyday stories had just as much impact and interest as the big news of the day, through work in state journalism workshops and camps. One of my first features that got significant attention told the story of a cleaning woman, Lorraine, in the dorm in which I was staying for camp. It ignited for me a passion to tell the stories that remained untold. And as a journalist before I became a historian-in-training, I thought to look first toward newspaper stories to see if I could find farm women’s voices from the period I was interested in, which started in 1911.

So my first project, in a classroom under the direction of Dr. Hazel Dicken-Garcia, was a paper that examined discourse about farm women in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. As a starting point, I used the first known publication date of Wilder’s column in the Missouri Ruralist, so that I had a known date when at least one farm woman was actively writing and engaged in the farming community. As an end point, I used the last known publication date for Wilder’s column, in 1926. That left fifteen years of Press coverage to comb through, so I decided to be methodical about it. I reviewed papers from harvest and planting seasons over that fifteen years, looking for farm women’s voices. I went through everything for that fifteen years.

And found exactly one item that directly mentioned farm women.

One.

In fifteen years.

I learned several things: One, that farm women truly were going voiceless in the mainstream media during this period. For some reason, this surprised me then, but with time, experience, and further research, I’m no longer surprised by this result. Two, that the Minnesota State Fair then, as now, recognized the role of farm women in the rural communities as being significant; the item that was reported came from its grounds, where new “rest room” facilities had been built on Machinery Hill for women to use. And three, that the lack of coverage in mainstream media didn’t mean farm women were totally voiceless; the item also interviewed the female editor of a magazine called The Farmer’s Wife.

In the absence of mainstream coverage, alternate and dissident press will appear, as this one did.

The Farmer’s Wife, I discovered, was a magazine published for many years in St. Paul. It is archived at the Magrath Library on the St. Paul Campus of the University of Minnesota.

The seeds of my dissertation are planted there.

Because of the lack of coverage, I realized I needed to discover the larger story of American farm women first. While some research had been conducted at this point, no one had looked at farming magazines at the scale I decided to try. I ended up looking at six different magazines–three farming, three national mainstream press–over fifty years that marked the shift in the United States from being mostly rural to being mostly urban: 1910 to 1960. Later, I sought out other means of finding these voices, including interviews and correspondence with women who lived and worked on farms during this period. It’s during this phase of the research, which was conducted to add to the dissertation for the book that was published in 2009, that I encountered the box.

On its face, I couldn’t use the materials within it for the research I was conducting at that time. The notebooks, at a glance, were fascinating, but ultimately beyond the period I was researching. I set it aside.

Now, looking at it again, I realize the box calls for a different style of storytelling. It’s not material that would lend itself to a large-scale project. It’s more in line with a biography–a piece of history that illuminates one person’s life that in some way tells a larger story about that person’s role in history. It calls to mind Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s book, A Midwife’s Tale, which started with a similar diary chronicle to tease out a rich biography of Martha Ballard, a colonial midwife who lived in Maine and kept her diary from 1785 to 1812. (It won a Pulitzer Prize; it’s a brilliant book that I highly recommend.)

I don’t know what I’m going to do with those diaries yet. It’s a different sort of story, a different era from what I’m used to working in. And yet it’s very, very familiar.

The Ephemera of History: The box yields some secrets

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

I love handling the artifacts of history. There is something about laying hands on something people ages ago owned, or held, or wrote, that inspires awe. I feel connected with these people whom I will never meet, in a way that helps me to “see” their stories.

Opening the box the first time, more than a decade ago, felt like that. At the time, I didn’t have a place for these things, so I kept them carefully sealed in the box to preserve them for the future. And now, I’m opening it back up.

The letter on top originally came from my desk. A query had been sent to me about whether I’d like the materials, and I’d responded with a note that I’d love them. That I would make copies and return them. Unfortunately, when they came, there was no return address and the original letter had been lost. (If this was you, I’m still ready to keep my promise.)

Handwritten on the bottom of the letter: “Here they are–nothing special yet they show the hard work Grandma Elsie [middle name, last name] did even in her 50s.”

I can’t quite make out the middle and last names–they’re long, and I could make a good guess, but I’m not ready to name the person who created these materials yet. The next set of pictures, though, have legible names: Henry and Selma Kolb, next to a booklet titled “THE STORY of an EPOCH in the LIFE HISTORY of a SEGMENT of the KOLB FAMILY.”

Then came a general genealogy of the Ernst Kolb family that begins in 1761 and ends in 1961. I immediately am reminded that I want to get these materials back to their family, if someone in the family wants them. The historian in me can’t imagine they wouldn’t.

Next, I found an album bound in cardboard, labeled “Memorial Day, 1899” for Dist. V, Meeme, by Fred. K. Kolb, Teacher, with a clue–two large class photos printed by H.C. Benke in Wells, Wis. Then, a newspaper clipping from 1974 about the farm on which my sender’s grandmother lived and worked from 1892-1983.

Then, I find the notebooks.

notebooks

Ledgers, “theme” books, and familiar spiral bound notebooks filled with observations that began in 1955 and ended in 1978. The first entry reads,  “Jan. 1955. New year went to church. In P.M. went to Karls and in eve called on Ewald  O—. Sun to arrive for dinner. Mon Jan 3, 42 [degrees], scrubbed chicken coops.”

There’s a note every few days, written, I think, by the “Grandma Elsie” referred to by my sender, whose name can only be read as “Judy.” I glanced through several entries, then forced myself to stop. I can easily be lost in archives, and this one seems rich. A baby born in July 1956. A cutting of grain. Checks received for crops. All recorded here by someone who thought keeping such records was important.

I do wonder if she wrote anything before 1955, and what happened to those diaries. If Elsie did live and work on that farm for more than a hundred years, retiring in 1974, then I have to wonder why I only have twenty years of diaries in the box. Maybe the rest were thrown out? Maybe these notebooks were only hastily rescued by a granddaughter who hoped someone might use them? Maybe there are more.

Heather, my partner at Documentary Site, couldn’t read any of the handwriting. But it’s mostly legible to me, classic Palmer Method-style handwriting familiar because it’s my grandmother’s, too. It’s the style of handwriting taught in the one-room schools in Wisconsin, the style first taught to me in third grade in Mrs. Weinzerl’s room in Luck, Wis. Already, in 1980, it was going out of style; my cousins in Madison, Wis. during the same period learned the kind of upright cursive that starts with forming print letters with small hooks.

So, as I said, I can make a guess as to the last two names, but my next step is to try the permutations of those names in Google to see if I can triangulate my search for the rightful owners of this box. I know the farm was in Wisconsin. But at the time of my research, I lived in Kansas, and I was under the impression that the owner of the box lived fairly locally.

It’s a bit of a mystery, but now I have a place to start.

What’s in the box? Investigating an impulse to preserve

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

The first Thanksgiving after my grandmother Elsie passed away, I looked through her cookbooks to see if I could find the recipe she used to make the chocolate cake with date filling she made every year for my father’s birthday.

I pulled out The Farmer’s Wife Cookbook, and it flopped open to the exact page, with notes in her own handwriting.

At the time, I cried a little. The memory of my grandmother, the tradition of the family, and the legacy of food, farm, and life all sort of coalesced into this moment of love. It was not the only moment that led me to start researching American farm women’s lives in the early to mid-twentieth century, but it is one that gets repeated every year, as another food tradition, family tradition, or farm tradition sneaks up on me.

I’m not alone in this. When I was actively conducting research for my book More than a Farmer’s Wife, based on my dissertation, I met with dozens of women who had been raised on American farms between 1910 and 1960. A note in Taste of Home‘s request column also yielded dozens of letters from women who had that farm connection. In the end, I collected more than 200 individual stories from women with first-hand experience of that period on the farm to add to my impressions of their stories from the farming magazines of the same time.

Among what I was sent was a box.

Inside the box were genealogies, pictures, scrapbooks, and a journal, tucked in with a note on the top about how I might be able to find them useful. I did not, however, have a return address. I could not use them for the project that I was working on at that time, but I could not bear to throw the box away. These are someone’s memories; someone’s family history; someone’s traditions.

My colleague Heather McIntosh and I decided now is a good time to investigate the box.

Heather is the genius behind Documentary Site, and together, we’re going to blog about a project that will open up and archive the contents of the box for an interactive documentary. Today, we start with her blog about the process we plan to take, and my blog about the story behind the box as I currently know it.

I was also sent scrapbooks, photos, and other bits of material culture as part of that project, and I ended up with far more material than I actually could use. At some point, I’d like to do more with it.

But for now, we want to know: What’s in the box?

 

Reflections on Research, and the Culture War being played out in Media

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been updating the web site today, organizing pages (there’s now a page for Research in the UK and another for Laura Ingalls Wilder posts), and it made me consider the trajectory of my research thus far.

One of my particular early challenges was what appeared to be an inability to settle on a research area. It’s fairly clear by the volume and variety of subjects that I’ve written about that I enjoy a wide variety of interests. It took some time for me to settle on what has become the through-line, however, and that is actually fairly simple:

How do people underserved by traditional media platforms use media to build their own communities, bolster their own political power, and effect change?

“Underserved” is an interesting word. To use it means acknowledging that traditional mainstream media do not serve the same function for particular classes and groups of people that they do for those who are in control of the messages spread by it. It implies that mainstream media reinforce a status quo when it comes to power and control. Thus, people who recognize that they are not served by traditional media turn to other means by which they can get messages into the morass of mediated communication.

Today, this can be achieved through the construction of a relatively cheap web site, the networking of varied social media platforms, and the ability of those who want to get a non-mainstream message out to find like-minded people to help with those networks.

Such sites still face a credibility problem, because, of course, one way to maintain the status quo is to immediately downplay, discredit, and label messages that contradict the status quo as “not credible.” (Or, perhaps, “fake.”)

Originally, I was interested in how new media platforms (when they were new, in the late 1990s) would work alongside their traditional counterparts (newspapers, magazines.)

But as I dug more deeply, I realized that how media platforms are used, and for what purpose, is as important, or more so, than the mere fact that they exist. Local newspapers, for example, exist to provide news and information of local interest to the community, to build communal structures for communication across the area, and to provide common ground for discussion in public spaces.

National and international news platforms are meant to do the same, in a larger sphere, reinforcing public status quo at that level.

But the splintering of media platforms has meant that media consumers can choose, to a greater or lesser degree, which platforms they want to listen to. This has lead to more and more media consumers choosing to “listen” or pay attention to only those platforms that agree with their particular views of what the status quo should be. That has led to general upheaval, because in a world where many voices can be heard, with many ideas about how things should be, people have stopped listening to any voices that might contradict their own.

Thus, a culture war being played out on the public stage.

I mentioned, once, that I view history as music, in a way. Each chord reflects the voices of thousands, at all levels of society in all forms, and each is utterly necessary to create the music that is culture and structure in society.

Suppression of voices will mean instability.

Well. I don’t know that I’ve made any sense in this bit of exploratory writing. It’s tough to boil some of these thoughts down. But what I’m generally thinking, given the work I have done and will continue to do in exploring how underserved populations have found their voices and expressed them, using media platforms to build community and effect change, is that real social and political change can only come when the voices of the underserved are made manifest–and one listens to the stories they can tell.

Last Day in Manchester: Museum Of Science And Industry and Castlefield

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

For my last full day in Manchester, I decided to head to the Museum of Science and Industry, a museum that grew around the oldest train station in the world.

The 1830 station is currently closed for refurbishment and exhibition installation, so that was a bit disappointing. However, to make up for that lack, the museum currently houses Stephenson’s Rocket, the engine that won the Rainhill trials to become the model for the train engines that would service the brand new Liverpool-Manchester trainline.

It’s the kind of item that has something of a folk status in Manchester, so the crowds around the engine for each of the six presentation talks given about it during the day were relatively thick. We learned that the engine, once yellow, had gone black with age, and we learned about the missing bits that had been repurposed into other train engines.

Beyond the Rocket, however, I found a lot more to appreciate about the museum. An entire section deals with the history of the textile industry in Manchester, and focuses on the process, equipment, and social issues surrounding the incredibly fast increase in population as workers flooded to Manchester for jobs at the turn of the 19th century. There’s also an area full of fun experiments and activities for children to try.

Other exhibits include the first programmable computer, built by two Manchester scientists, a Power Hall full of the machinery designed to create and get power to other machinery as part of the Industrial Revolution, and a look at the 1830 warehouse, across the tracks from the 1830 train station, that remains the oldest in Manchester.

The Air and Space Hall, across the street and affiliated with the Museum, also was closed for repair. But as I wandered away, I found a section of the city that I’d hoped to see and sort of forgotten: Castlefield.

The reconstructed North Gate of the old Roman fort faces a small square that includes a weathered foundation reconstruction of original Roman village. I wandered around those foundations, took pictures of blooming tulips and of the Gate, and continued my wandering.

Manchester will be a place I return. The warmth of the people, the rich history of the area, and the excellent access to city amenities make it an ideal destination. I look forward to bringing my own children some day.

Day 5 in Manchester: Chetham Library, Manchester Cathedral, and Pub Lunch

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

Saturday in Manchester brought tickets to a walking tour of the oldest public and free English-speaking library in the world: Chetham Library.

The original complex was built in 1420 to form a collegiate church in Manchester, and thus, it has been part of an institution of learning for that long. The facilities themselves are medieval–part of what drew me there–but the library itself made my happy little bibliophile heart hum. Rows and rows of books enclosed by glass covers, all under the medieval timbered room, beckon all “scholars and all others afflicted” to visit, read, and study.

That line, “scholars and all others afflicted,” spoken by our guide Jonathan Schofield (who sounded as though the phrase was in quotes for him, too) struck me as a phrase that characterizes scholarship as madness, which, fair enough. The stools in the library, adorned with a carved letter “S” in each seat, paid homage to the idea of “scholar” and were, Schofield assured us, original to the library. Also original? A collection of chained books so valuable at their donation in 1655 that scholars were required to read them in place.

Our tour of the medieval buildings culminated in the library’s reading room, which played host once to such notable minds as Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Disraeli, Fredrich Engels and Karl Marx, the latter two of whom spent most of their time in an alcove now marked as the site of their study. The reading room itself was likely the bedchamber of John Dee, who served as the Warden (or Headmaster or Director) Of Chetham from 1595 to 1605. Dee, of course, is well known for his occult scholarship and advice to Elizabeth I.

I thoroughly enjoyed the tour, and I took numerous pictures.

After the tour, Eddie and I went for pub lunch at Old Wellington, a nearby pub that claims the honor of oldest building in Manchester. It existed as early as 1552. We sat for lunch on the second floor, overlooking a courtyard packed with people enjoying a pint and sunshine.

They’re famous for pies, apparently, and so that’s what I got for lunch. Mine was a ham, chicken, and cheese pie in a short crust with puff pastry topper, served with mashed potatoes, gravy, and steamed veggies. Service was quick, food was delicious, and the ambience warm and social.

After lunch, we wandered over the courtyard to the Cathedral. We spotted actress Sophie Thompson in the courtyard, and she graciously held the door for us as we all went through. We left her to her business, but we did do some quiet fan-girling after the fact. Ms. Thompson currently stars on the British television program Coronation Street, filmed in Manchester.

The Cathedral was beautiful. It was bombed in World War II, and lovingly restored. Patrons over the years have donated funds to restore many of the stained glass windows, and a recent fundraising campaign also led to the installation of a lovely new organ, which was being played while we were there.

We wrapped up our day by wandering down Deansgate to the John Rylands Library again, this time to see the just-opened Peterloo Massacre exhibit therein. Staff did a marvelous job with the documents and other materials they displayed to tell that story, including original handwritten and printed accounts of the day and its aftermath. I highly recommend a visit.

Last day in Manchester, coming up.

Days 2 and 3 in Manchester: Archives, a Walking Tour, and Tapas for Dinner

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

My primary purpose for this trip, of course, was to gather materials for my ongoing research project, which focuses in general on the community-building function of media. In particular on this trip, I had intended to investigate the Manchester Guardian-turned-national newspaper, something that I still think a good idea.

But on my first day here, visiting the People’s History Museum, I stumbled across a working-class publication that was printed during four critical years in British history, and the archive maintained at PHM. Accordingly, I have spent the last two days acquainting myself with that period’s history, the struggles of the working-class, and the British press during that period.

I also digitized a significant chunk of the newspapers’ archive with which to continue my work.

So Day 2 in Manchester found me in St. Peter’s Square, looking for the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, at which I was to meet a walking tour group that promised a look at Manchester’s political roots and history.

Pankhurst, a pioneering suffragette, is said to have founded the militancy of the suffrage movement right there in Manchester. Her statue features the petite woman standing on a kitchen chair, arms outstretched as if to rally a crowd, and the half-circle of stone at her back reads, “Rise Up Women!”

(I’ve been unable to shake a tune from Mary Poppins from head, ever since. “We’re clearly soldiers in petticoats, and dauntless crusaders for women’s votes; though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid; …. Political equality and equal rights with men! Take heart, for Mrs. Pankhurst has been clapped in irons again!”)

The statue was a good place to start the tour, and the guide, Ed Glinert, was clearly knowledgeable about the political events in Manchester and the Peterloo Massacre, in particular. After a stop at town hall to see Pankhurst’s portrait in collage, and a look at the Peterloo memorial in a kind of walkway between it and the adjoining building, he headed us off to the site of the Peterloo Massacre itself. Manchester Central now rests on the site of the field that in August of 1819 saw peaceful protesters (agitating for universal suffrage) mercilessly struck down by an army of thugs hired for the purpose.

Glinert brought us to the site, discussed its history, showed us the place where the stage (built of two wooden carts spliced together) had been, and then walked us through the Radisson Blu, which now stands on that corner and retains memorials to the site’s history as a gathering place for protest. The Free Trade Hall stood there before it was torn down to make way for the hotel.

We walked down the steps where Christabel Pankhurst (daughter of Emmeline) and Annie Kenney were kicked out of a liberal rally there in 1905 after shouting questions about whether the party would grant suffrage to women. The tour continued through town to St. Ann’s Square, site of the first public vote in Manchester in 1832, and by sites of Friedrich Engels’ offices, the Working Man’s Church, and Crown Court (where the last judicial decision to execute a criminal in Britain was handed down in 1864). We finished at the People’s History Museum, of course, and I spent more time with the exhibits there.

(All told, I’ve been at the PHM three days this week in Manchester, and plan to go again on Saturday to see the Peterloo exhibit that opens then. Truly a remarkable find; thanks to my friend Edwina Higgins for recommending I start there!)

Day 3 in Manchester put me back in the archives at PHM to complete the collection of data, and I had a good chat with the archivists about the press and Peterloo. While Peterloo isn’t my focus this round, it is relevant to the press struggles that followed it, and to the founding of the Manchester Guardian. To be here this week, when two different exhibitions are opening about Peterloo, feels serendipitous.

I finished Day 3 with tapas for dinner at Tapeo & Wine with friend Eddie. I love tapas, and it’s tough to find in my home state, so I expected to enjoy the meal. I wasn’t disappointed at all.

Fresh assorted breads, including olive bread, a Manchego cheese board, roasted eggplant with feta, meat cannoli in bechamel, Spanish omelet with potato, olives, and a multi-textured chocolate desert with Irish Cream foam rounded out the meal. I’d forgotten how lovely it is to simply relax, and take my time eating, chatting, and enjoying the food. The Spanish music playing in the background gave way to a live guitarist somewhere during the course of the three hours we spent there, and the laid-back but friendly ambience made the experience a joy. I’d head here again in a heart beat.

Day 4 in Manchester is a writing day, so there won’t be much to share. But I’m heading out with Eddie again on day five to tour some other memorable spots in Manchester, and looking forward to it.

Day 1 in Manchester: The People’s History Museum, the Poor Man’s Guardian, and the John Rylands Library

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

I’m in Manchester to continue my research into how varied media can be used to facilitate and build community. My original thought, to work with The Guardian, which was founded in Manchester in 1821, still seems like a viable avenue for study.

But today, at the suggestion of a friend, I visited the People’s History Museum, and found a story that needs telling.

The People’s History Museum focuses on the history of protest, the growth of socialism, and the movements toward equal rights that have deep roots and history here in Manchester. The exhibits feature banners and other protest materials, an overview of protest movements in Manchester within national and global contexts, and a special focus on the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, an event during which peaceful protest was broken up in bloody fashion.

The 200th anniversary of Peterloo is this year, and numerous sites around Manchester are preparing exhibits surrounding the events. As I’m here to look at media history here, I’m excited that I’ve apparently–and accidentally–chosen an excellent time to come to Manchester.

As I went through the Museum, one thing stood out to me–a coffin stuffed with copies of a workers’ newspaper called the Poor Man’s Guardian. My interest piqued, I took myself down to the front information desk to discover the museum has a complete archive of the publication, which ran from 1831-1836 and directly engaged with protest against the law that restricted press content–passed in response to the Peterloo Massacre.

I spent hours digging through that archive, before fatigue sent in and I left for the day. This is the story I’ve found that needs telling to a broader audience, and I’m already crafting the first draft. I’m really excited.

Next, I stopped at the nearby John Rylands library to see its printing press, Gutenberg publications, and the oldest known shred of the New Testament (in Greek on papyrus). It’s well worth the trip for the bibliophile, and I found some great examples of type for use in my visual principles of mass media course.

It was a busy day, but I look forward to heading back this week to continue gathering my research data.

Tomorrow, though, I’m taking a bit of a break and heading to Liverpool. It’s time to see about the Beatles experience.