Other Peoples Lives: The History of a London Lot

Children should then be given 'Facts' and taught to avoid 'Fancy' — or any form of independent thought and imagination. In the Dickens novel, the Gradgrindian system comes to grief, and so it does in real life, if attempts are ever made to found education upon this theory. People need mental frameworks that are primed to understand and to assess the available data and — as often happens — to challenge and update both the frameworks and the details too.

Why History matters - Articles - Making History

So the task of educationalists is to help their students to develop adaptable and critical minds, as well as to gain specific expertise in specific subjects. Returning to the case of someone first trying to understand 20th-century world history, the notional list of key dates and facts would need to be framed by reading say Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes: Or, better again, students can examine critically the views and sources that underpin these historians' big arguments, as well as debate all of this material facts and ideas with others.

Above all, History students expect to study for themselves some of the original sources from the past; and, for their own independent projects, they are asked to find new sources and new arguments or to think of new ways of re-evaluating known sources to generate new arguments. Such educational processes are a long, long way from memorising lists of facts. Such exercises are memory tests but not ways of evaluating an understanding of History.

Some arguments in favour of studying History also turn out, on close inspection, to be disappointingly weak. These do not need lengthy discussion but may be noted in passing. For example, some people semi-concede the critics' case by saying things like: But that says absolutely nothing about the content of the subject. Of course, the ability to analyse a diverse array of often discrepant data, to provide a reasoned interpretation of the said data, and to give a reasoned critique of one's own and other people's interpretations are invaluable life- and work-skills.

These are abilities that History as a field of study is particularly good at inculcating. Nevertheless, the possession of analytical and interpretative skills is not a quality that is exclusive to historians. The chief point about studying History is to study the subject for the invaluable in-depth analysis and the long-term perspective it confers upon the entire human experience — the component skills being an essential ingredient of the process but not the prime justification. Meanwhile, another variant reply to 'What is the use of History?

That response says something but the first phrase is wrong and the conclusion is far too weak. It implies that understanding the past and the legacies of the past is an optional extra within the educational system, with cultural value for those who are interested but without any general relevance. Such reasoning was behind the recent and highly controversial decision in Britain to remove History from the required curriculum for schoolchildren aged 14— Yet, viewing the subject as an optional extra, to add cultural gloss, seriously underrates the foundational role for human awareness that is derived from understanding the past and its legacies.

Dropping History as a universal subject will only increase rootlessness among young people. The decision points entirely in the wrong direction. Instead, educationalists should be planning for more interesting and powerful ways of teaching the subject.

Accessibility links

Otherwise it risks becoming too fragmented, including too many miscellaneous skills sessions, thereby obscuring the big 'human story' and depriving children of a vital collective resource. Much more can be said — not just in defence of History but in terms of its positive advocacy. The best response is the simplest, as noted right at the start of this conversation. When asked 'Why History? Here it should be reiterated that the subject is being defined broadly. The word 'History' in English usage has many applications.

In this discussion, History with a capital H means the academic field of study; and the subject of such study, the past, is huge. In practice, of course, people specialise. Indeed, the boundaries between the specialist academic subjects are never rigid. So from a historian's point of view, much of what is studied under the rubric of for example Anthropology or Politics or Sociology or Law can be regarded as specialist sub-sets of History, which takes as its remit the whole of the human experience, or any section of that experience.

Legacies from the past are preserved but also adapted, as each generation transmits them to the following one. Sometimes, too, there are mighty upheavals, which also need to be navigated and comprehended. And there is loss.

Not every tradition continues unbroken. But humans can and do learn also from information about vanished cultures — and from pathways that were not followed.

The evolution of London: the city's near-2,000 year history mapped

Understanding all this helps people to establish a secure footing or 'location' within the unfolding saga of time, which by definition includes both duration and change. The metaphor is not one of fixation, like dropping an anchor or trying to halt the flow of time. Instead, it is the ability to keep a firm footing within history's rollercoaster that is so important.

Another way of putting it is to have secure roots that will allow for continuity but also for growth and change. Nothing, indeed, can be more relevant to successful functioning in the here-and-now.

BBC News Navigation

The immediate moment, known as the synchronic, is always located within the long-term unfolding of time: And the converse is also true. The long term of history always contributes to the immediate moment. Hence my twin maxims, the synchronic is always in the diachronic. The present moment is always part of an unfolding long term, which needs to be understood. The diachronic is always in the synchronic: As living creatures, humans have an instinctive synchro-mesh , that gears people into the present moment. But, in addition to that, having a perspective upon longitudinal time, and history within that, is one of the strengths of the alert human consciousness.

It may be defined as a parallel process of diachro-mesh , to coin a new term. On the strength of that experience, societies and individuals assess the long-term passage of events from past to present — and, in many cases, manage to measure time not just in terms of nanoseconds but also in terms of millennia. Humans are exceptional animals for their ability to think 'long' as well as 'immediate'; and those abilities need to be cultivated.

• rurisou ge (Japanese Edition)?
• Navigation menu.
• Giulio Coniglio fa merenda (Piccole storie) (Italian Edition)?
• Training ohne Geräte: Fit mit dem 3D-System (Trainieren mit dem eigenen Körpergewicht) [E-Book inkl. Code für HD-Videotraining] (German Edition).
• History of African immigrants in London - Wikipedia.

The visualisation, originally created for the Almost Lost exhibition by the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis Casa , explores the development of the city through the evolution of the road network and preserved buildings. Unlike other historical cities such as Athens or Rome, where there is an obvious patchwork of areas from different periods, London's scheduled sites and listed buildings are individual structures, in many cases assembled gradually by parts from many different periods.

Those who try to locate different historic structures will know that these features appear as pieces of different jigsaw puzzles, scattered across the contemporary city. The animation took nine months to make, using a variety of methods and data from several sources. The Museum of London Archaeology provided datasets for the Roman and Medieval periods as well as the 17th and early 18th centuries. In the visualisation, new road segments appear gradually over an image of faded contemporary London.

For each period, gradually enlarging yellow points highlight statutorily protected buildings and structures. We are currently working on a 3D version. The greatest preserved feature of the city is its own urban fabric. London started its evolution with the Roman creation of Londinium and some of the main axes of the contemporary city, such as Oxford Street, are still with us. That actually worked quite well for a little while, but then people got very interested in this new invention — the water closet. And it's often ignored that the water closets were initially connected to these cesspools, not the sewer system that existed in the start of the century — that was just for rainwater.

So you get water closets coming in and they're connected to cesspools and they don't really fit because of the extra large volume of flushing water. You get these surges of waste and dump and smell, and people start getting very concerned about what's in their cesspools because of the stink that's rising from them.

The idea that this sort of stench is coming into the house, seeping through the house and possibly bringing in diseases like cholera or typhoid Cesspools were built to be porous so the liquid part of the waste was meant to seep away into the ground. There was no knowledge of bacteriological contamination, although there was plenty of it happening. Nevertheless, you had this residue of solid matter left and it was removed by so-called "night soil men. And it was by law in the night because the stench of venting a cesspool was considered too disturbing during the day. And they would unfortunately have to [climb] down into the pit, shovel out the muck and get it into a wicker basket, get it into a cart.

And at the start of the century, that was actually reasonably productive labor because the cart could then be taken out to the countryside and the manure could be sold to farmers. It's often said that the first public toilets were at the Great Exhibition, which was the first world expo held in Hyde Park [in ]. It had 6 million visitors in a matter of months and there were indeed public toilets set up in the exhibition.

• Ethnic groups in London - Wikipedia.
• BBC - KS3 Bitesize History - Everyday life in the industrial era : Revision, Page 2.
• Marque and Reprisal.

But there was a great debate after that closed as to whether London needed such facilities actually on the street. It was tied up with notions of shame and respectability and it was particularly said that women would be just too embarrassed to enter a public toilet on the public street. There were a few parish pumps that you could freely use if you could get to them, but you have people cramped in tenement accommodations If you were poor, your basic water supply — which would do for washing, for cooking, for cleaning, for laundry — often it was from a standpipe provided by your landlord.

And that water supply would be turned on for something like two to three hours per week. There were literally crowds of people queuing and fighting at these standpipes in the slums of London.