Back to Narrative at the History Today Awards

Simon Thurley, Chief Executive of English Heritage, called for a return to narrative history in our schools and heritage sites in his keynote speech at the Longman-History Today Awards, given at the Hilton Paddington (formerly the Great Western Royal Hotel built by Brunel in 1854) on Monday, January 6th.

Dr Thurley talked of the importance of our physical heritage in creating an appreciation of our past among the whole population: claiming that there were 60 million visits to heritage sites in Britain in the course of last year. He stressed the ‘virtuous circle’ of ‘understanding which leads to valuing and in turn to caring and enjoying’ our physical heritage. He lamented the fact that at a time when we buy more books on history, see more television programmes on history and visit more historical sites  we are teaching narrative history less in our schools, and that this makes it hard to enable people to understand the sites they visit. As a result, English Heritage properties would be developing site interpretation to enable youngsters to enter the virtuous circle, to understand and thus enjoy their historical environment. In the first instance this would be done by clearly placing the sites within the broad narrative of English history: as he said, how much more people would enjoy a visit to Kenilworth House, for example, if they knew who John of Gaunt was. To enhance that enjoyment, he believed it was important to ensure our children have a grounding in monarchs, dates and battles, the iconography of religion, a little of the history of art and ‘know their Hercules from their Jupiter’.  

The current drive towards narrative history was reflected in the awards themselves. For the first time Longman-History Today Trustees presented its Award for History to reward an outstanding contribution to the promotion, awareness and enjoyment of history.  The inaugural award was presented to the man who has probably done more than any other to create the fashion for riveting narrative, Antony Beevor, in the best-selling Stalingrad, and more recently in Berlin, the Final Outcome 1945, which in 2002 sold more than twice as many copies as any other history hardback by its remarkable combination of traditional military history and study of the impact of individuals being caught up in the devastating clash of rival totalitarianisms.

The Longman-History Today Book of the Year, awarded to a first or second book by the author, this year went to joint winners, both female academics working in North America. First was Margo Todd of Vanderbilt University, whose The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland, is a remarkable account of how the Calvinist revolution  was achieved in the sixteenth century, through a detailed survey of the local church  courts of kirk sessions. Todd uses anthropological perspectives to enhance  her historically rich and nuanced account of this important aspect of  British cultural history, and shows how much the Scottish reformation owed  to the laity, as well as the clergy.

The second joint winner – and returning to the theme of compelling narrative history – is Elizabeth A. Fenn, of Duke University, for her Pox Americana, the Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (Hill and Wang US $25; no UK publisher as yet). Fenn shows that, throughout their War of  Independence, the Americans in particular were fighting a war on two fronts: against the British and against the variola virus, to which they tended to be far more suspectible than men who had recently arrived from Europe. In vivid and highly accessible prose she describes not just the drastic effects of the virus, but the ways in which people learned to accommodate to its  presence in their midst; and she shows not just the military decisions taken by Washington to minimise the threat of an  epidemic sweeping through their ranks, but also how the opposing  forces were prepared, or at least were said to have been prepared, to use the dispersal of men infected with smallpox as a means of striking at their enemies. She takes the story well beyond the war, tracing the drastic impact of the virus in that decade  throughout Mexico, and through Native American communities up to the Northwestern coast.

The History Today Trust Historical Film of the Year Award went to Adam Curtis who wrote and produced The Century of the Self  on the history of the influence of the Freud family. Episode 1 – another fine example of narrative history – focused on Edward  Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud who arranged for his books to be published in the United States, and applied the concepts of psycho-analysis to invent the profession of public relations, develop modern consumer  marketing, and ultimately to sell political ideas, erecting an idea of  democracy dominated by the manipulation of consumerist desires. 

The Royal Historical Society/History Today Undergraduate Dissertation Of The Year Award went to Paul Shirley, of University College, London, for a masterly thesis on slave revolts in the Bahamas in the 1780s, when the islands’ population had been swollen by many blacks who had left the mainland following the War of Independence. A version of this thesis, and of the two others highly commended, will be published in the magazine during the year.

The Longman-History Today Historical Picture Researcher of the Year was Georgina Bruckner for her work on Medieval Panorama, edited by Robert Bartlett (Thames & Hudson). The Longman-History Today New Generation Book of the Year award, for a book that inspires enthusiasm for and involvement with history among people of secondary school age, was presented to the ‘endlessly questioning and inventive, compelling’ GCSE text book Essential Modern World History, by Ben Walsh (John Murray).

LONGMAN-HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEAR  2003

Joint winners:

The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland Margo Todd (Yale UP)

Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 Elizabeth A. Fenn (Hill and Wang)

Highly commended:

Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England Peter Marshall (Oxford UP)

The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey that Transformed the World Ken Alder (TimeWarner Books).

The Fall of The French Monarchy: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the baron de Breteuil Munro Price (Macmillan)

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America Louis Menand, (Flamingo/HarperCollins)

HISTORY TODAY TELEVISION FILM OF THE YEAR

Winner:

Century of the Self Part I:
Producer Adam Curtis. RDF Television for BBC Two

Highly commended:

British Empire in Colour
Producers Adrian Wood, Stewart Binns, Lucy Carter. TWI with Carlton for ITV1

IMet Adolf Eichmann
Producer Peter Kessler. Brook Lapping for BBC.

ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY-HISTORY TODAY PRIZE FOR THE UNDERGRADUATE DISSERTATION OF THE YEAR

Winner:

Paul Shirley (University College, London) 'Tek Force wid Force!' Marronage, Resistance and Freedom Struggles in the Experience of North American Emigré Blacks in the Bahamas, 1783-1789.

Highly commended:

Anna Chapman  (University of East Anglia) Piety, Patronage and Politics: An Exploration of Fact and Fiction in the Early Legend of St. Edmund.

Antony Craig Lockley (University of Manchester) Propaganda and Intervention at Archangel, 1918-1919.

HISTORICAL PICTURE RESEARCHER OF THE YEAR  2003

Winner:

Georgina Bruckner: Medieval Panorama , edited by Robert Bartlett (Thames and Hudson)

Highly commended:

Vanessa Fletcher and Lynda Marshall: A History of Britain: Volume 3 - The Fate of Empire 1776 - 2000 Simon Schama (BBC Worldwide)

Sophie Spencer-Wood: Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle Manning Marable and Leith Mullings (Phaidon Press)

NEW GENERATION BOOK OF THE YEAR  2003

Winner:

History in Focus: Essential Modern World History Ben Walsh, (John Murray)

Highly commended:

Events & Outcomes: The Reformation Fiona Macdonald (Evans Brothers)

The Ship: Retracing Cook's Endeavour Voyage Simon Baker (BBC Worldwide)