This is my first editorial for some time and I am glad to be back! For those interested in the academic world, chaos reigns. Politicians of all persuasions have continued their obsession with students going into Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (STEM) and with their assault on ‘worthless’ degrees that do not end up in large salaries. The latter sometimes includes History and sometimes not, depending on which politicians we listen to. The evidence for either obsession is of course tenuous. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has undertaken an excellent study in which we see salaries for History graduates well above some others in Science and Social Science. More importantly, their study asks: ‘what is the best degree to do in terms of future careers if you are working class?’ It is remarkable to find that middle-class people make a success of science because they were already privileged and that working-class people should avoid subjects like Physics and Astronomy at all costs. As politicians of all hues struggle to find a solution to the fact that static fees and rising inflation have put huge burdens on University finances, the future of History Departments looks bleak. For some time this did not hit the headlines because it was small (often post-1992) places that were getting clobbered. Now with crisis at Kent and UEA, we should be under no illusion that our entire discipline is under threat. Where English and Languages ended up, so Archaeology and History are now following. This is a reflection of the free market because politicians have been determined to engineer out the humanities from the School curriculum – witness the idea that all students should study maths to age 18 – and conversations with parents and their children increasingly focus on ‘good jobs’ and ‘mickey mouse degrees’. The many politicians who have benefited from a strong humanities education are now determined to burn the bridges behind them.
Against this gloomy backdrop, our Journal continues to prosper. We remain very receptive to proposals for special issues (broadly 4–5 papers plus an Introduction, so around 40–45,000 words) on British or comparative British family and community history. The editorial team are also very happy to talk to individual authors about potential articles prior to submission and refereeing. And Dick Hunter, our reviews editor, is always on the look out for people who want to review the latest books, as you will be able to see from the outstanding list of reviews included in the current volume. We are particularly interested in chronological areas that have often escaped the journal, pre-1600 or post 1945, for instance. Please do not hesitate to contact us to talk about ideas and we will give you timely and comprehensive feedback.
This issue of Family and Community History includes three excellent articles which (and perhaps highlighting my prior point about the need for more early and late articles in a chronological sense) run from the late fourteenth century to right now. Toby Purser considers the knights and esquires of the late-fourteenth to mid-fifteenth century Hampshire area. Using sources that we have rarely seen in this Journal, he shows how networks of lands and people created a gentry class which had distinctive cross-cutting ties of duty, contract and blood. His detailed focus on one particular family – Brocas of Beaurepaire – reveals circles of influence that were primarily local and engaged knightly families who were otherwise silent in the political affairs at county level. Christopher Day takes us forward to the nineteenth century and public health in small town England and Wales 1848–1875. Turning away from a focus on traditional themes in this area – sewers, water, disease – he suggests that public health pressures were important because they facilitated a uniform rhetorical register and administrative process which gave ordinary citizens a platform through which to constrain and shape local government through claims to a right to health. Finally, Alexander Angus carries the Journal forward to the very recent past. His article asks the teasing question of how effectively Hull 2017 UK City of Culture incorporated public history into its programme? This focus on the uses and misuses of history, or indeed complete ignorance of the way that a history of place matters for the present, will be welcome to readers, many of whom confront the issue in their everyday. Angus concludes that Hull 2017 failed not only in effectively incorporating civic pride-inducing, and social memory-changing, public history, but, also, consistently ‘good’ public history that was in line with the ideals of the historiography. How familiar is this from wider television and radio programmes, films, and local authority cultural initiatives? The issue closes with twelve book reviews, and we are grateful to Dick Hunter for his continuing work on the reviews section.
Nottingham Trent University
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Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).