This blog is a place for stories about people from the past. These will not be biographies as such, but interesting vignettes or reflections about moments and relationships in people’s lives – dramatic, romantic, or mysterious. They are also (mostly) not well-known stories. There will be no spotlight on Churchill or Gandhi here. Instead, I want to look at people who may have been famous locally or at the time, but who have been largely forgotten by all but a few specialists or family members. They have left traces in archives, and maybe have had some specialist historians write about them in specific contexts. In some cases, the people whose stories I will tell are unremembered anywhere else on the internet. These are people who are worth knowing about, but who have been forgotten, or have never emerged into our historical consciousness.
So this isn’t really about grand historical problems. It’s about the human struggles of individuals in the past. At their best these stories hopefully will help me, and anyone who might read them, empathize and understand how people thought, acted and felt in the past, and to give depth to historical cultures and people.
About me: My name is Toby Harper and I’m a Phd student in modern British history.