This week we welcome back guest author, retired librarian Lucy M. Evans, who enjoys delving into the obscure Victorian world of northern librarians and learned societies. She has previously written about the longevity guru Maurice Ernest, Andrea Crestadoro, a Chief Librarian in Manchester (copy available at LCL), and is currently finishing a biography of his…
Category: Guest Post
Black History Month: Leeds United’s first Black footballer
This week we welcome guest author Pete Slater. Pete is one of a small team of volunteers working on a project based on football fandom. He traced the following story during his research using our local newspaper archive, as part of that project work. We publish this piece as part of Black History Month. For…
350 years of worship and rebellion: A timeline of the history of Mill Hill
This week we welcome Leeds Beckett University student Emma Hays, who reports on a recent local history project based on resources in our Local and Family History department…The launch of the accompanying resource is at 1.30pm on October 31 at the Mill Hill Chapel (next to City Square). Mill Hill Chapel was founded in 1674…
John Searle Ragland Phillips (1850-1919) and the Growth of Journalism – Part 1
This week we welcome guest author, retired librarian Lucy M. Evans, who enjoys delving into the obscure Victorian world of northern librarians and learned societies. She has previously written about the longevity guru Maurice Ernest, Andrea Crestadoro, a Chief Librarian in Manchester (copy available at LCL), and is currently finishing a biography of his friend…
Searching for Black History in the Leodis Archive
We mark Black History Month 2024 by welcoming back regular guest author Danny Friar, who has unearthed some fascinating examples of Black History in Leeds in a important piece of research… Searching for local Black history can often be challenging. There’s no easy way to do it. I find a snippet here and a snippet…
Housing the city: Leeds City Council papers
This week on the Secret Library we are delighted to hear once again from Andy Armstrong, one of our heritage volunteers, on a significant piece of cataloguing work we’ve asked them to help us with. You can find more articles about housing in Leeds elsewhere on the blog… Hi. My name’s Andy Armstrong and I…
Poor Laws, Workhouses to ‘Food Bank Britain’: a brief overview of how poverty has been understood and addressed from Pre-Modern to contemporary Britain
This week we welcome University of Leeds student Emily O’Riley. Having completed a yearlong research project alongside the Thackray Museum of Medicine, who provided 360 biographies of Workhouse inmates based on 1881 census data, Emily reflects on the Victorian Workhouse and what it can tell us about British society. The first thing we learnt about…
190 Years Celebrating Emancipation
We welcome back researcher Danny Friar this week, to mark a very important anniversary: 190 years since the emancipation of enslaved people in the British Caribbean colonies. After reading Danny’s article, be sure to catch the Beyond the Bassline: 500 years of Black British Music exhibition currently on display at the Reginald Centre. On the…
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