European Perspectives

In the cities of late medieval Europe, practices of censoring, defacing, and erasing visual matters served both townspeople and their noble antagonists as powerful means of communication. In the socio-political conflicts that affected and divided urban societies, these practices supported and challenged powerful individuals, political institutions, social hierarchies, and urban spaces alike.

Pauper letters and applications for relief contain sometimes rudimentary but often extensive information on the applicants’ material situation, their family circumstances, and their relationships with their home parish, or specific officials or friends from whom they expect support. This project proposes to collect and edit a substantial online corpus of these narratives.

What is considered 'normal' and why? How are notions of normality communicated, reproduced and negotiated? What are the differences between academic and individual understandings of normality? In my project I examine how social scientists, historians and those being researched in Germany and Britain produced knowledge about normality in the 20th century.

To what extent did old people, especially ageing women, play an active part in the processes of value change that transformed West Germany and Britain from the 1960s to the 1980s? Contemporary historians have often pointed to student protests and generational conflict between fathers and sons to explain cultural change. In contrast, this project explores the gendered subtext of value conflicts and the agency of women and the elderly.

Historians working on the second half of the 20th century are confronted with new types of sources: so-called social data. These are the remains of state-sponsored data collection or social science research projects, and include tax data, polls, psychological interviews, and participant observations. Such data can appear in obsolete formats such as punchcards or magnetic tapes, and may be found in retired researchers’ attics rather than in archives. The GHIL has teamed up with external partners to tackle the challenges tied to the re-use of social data by historians.