This week we hear from Dr Kara McKechnie, lecturer in Dramaturgy at the University of Leeds who writes for us on Alan Bennett and Yorkshire. Alan Bennett’s Yorkshire is not one of beautiful countryside, proud civic architecture and quaint rows of red brick houses. In his memories, it is a landscape with very little colour…
Category: Social History
My week in the Local and Family History Department
This week we hear from Thomas Wootton, from Leeds Trinity University, who as part of his work experience spent a week in the Local and Family History Department. As part of my degree in History and Politics from Leeds Trinity University, I was required to undertake a work placement and I decided to undertake part…
FAKE NEWS!
Fake News is a new project, by Tim Knight, which uses Local and Family History’s newspaper archive to publish a fictional front page every month. Curated from cuttings of The Yorkshire Post and The Yorkshire Evening Post—Leeds’ oldest continuous newspaper—Fake News will explore the goings-on, mishaps and miscellany of Yorkshire through the ages. Today’s edition,…
Leeds and the Spanish Civil War
This week Local and Family History’s Josh Flint and Scott Ramsey – PHD Researcher, School of History, The University of Leeds – tell us about the exciting Exhibitions from the International Brigade Memorial Trust and the Basque Children of ’37 Association coming to the Leeds Central Library from the 19 March – 5 April. This…
The Sheepscar Triangle – the Irish community in Leeds
This week, as part of Irish History Month, Librarian Helen Skilbeck looks back at some of the local haunts of the Irish community in Leeds and the specific importance of the Sheepscar triangle. 1968, bottom of Roundhay road. Sheepscar Library is in the back centre of the photo and the Pointer Inn is to the…
Jewish Leeds in the Central Library Collections: Jacob Kramer
A brief overview of an important Central Library collection relating to the history of the Jewish community in Leeds. The Jacob Kramer Collection This is a small selection of personal material belonging to Jacob Kramer, the influential Leeds-based artist. The box contains, among other items, a framed photograph of Kramer, taken by Hatley Bacon in…
Cross-dressing in Yorkshire
This week we welcome guest writer Lauren Wells, Post-Graduate Researcher at the University of Leeds, who explores the history and meaning(s) of cross-dressing in Yorkshire… My research examines men who cross-dressed in Yorkshire from the end of the nineteenth century until the eve of the Second World War. When I first conceptualised this project, I…
“Who was David and why should we remember him?”
This week’s article is written by Nina Whitfield, a BA History student at Leeds Beckett University. Nina was one of a student group who visited the Central Library in late 2018 for a workshop utilising books and other resources in the Local and Family History department to research the life and times of David Oluwale……
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