{"id":5876,"date":"2016-02-23T20:32:51","date_gmt":"2016-02-23T09:32:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/?p=5876"},"modified":"2022-08-04T00:33:48","modified_gmt":"2022-08-04T00:33:48","slug":"200-posts-and-5-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/2016\/02\/23\/200-posts-and-5-years\/","title":{"rendered":"200 Posts and Five Years of Blogging!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DSC_6271\"My last post was my 200th<\/sup> post on this blog. Wow! This milestone crept up on me, as did the fifth anniversary of this blog last August but now it is definitely time to reflect on these milestones.<\/p>\n

Some posts have stood out for me. Sometimes I finish a post knowing that the writing is particularly strong. Generally this is when I have been particularly moved by the subject matter, whether it was a well-written book or an episode of history which has stuck an emotional chord within me.<\/p>\n

It is the humble archive that has been the source of much of many of my posts.\u00a0Archives are a crucial bulwark of human rights. The<\/em> story over the last five years which demonstrated this with crystal clarity was the case of four elderly Kenyans who sued the British government for human rights abuses during the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s. For years the British government had denied their complaints and told historians and lawyers that no relevant documents existed about\u00a0this issue. But the Kenyan\u2019s legal team pushed and as I explained in \u2018Archives are important, very important<\/a>\u2019, millions of colonial documents were found to have been illegally hidden from public view.<\/p>\n

\u2018If\u2026 we are going to sin, we must sin quietly\u2019<\/a>, wrote the British Attorney-General to the Kenyan colonial authorities. This was the title of my second\u00a0post about the issue in which I explored the troubling question of how such horrific crimes could have been ignored for so long. If you only have limited time to read this blog this is the one post I would like you to read. It demonstrates why historians and archivists are vital professions for any society professing to uphold human rights and democratic values, but it also shows how flawed archives can be and how historians sometimes fall short in their over-reliance on government archives. This post\u00a0also seeks to understand why so many people do nothing when people in authority commit crime as part of their job.<\/p>\n

Stumbling Through the Past<\/em> is an opportunity to share how historians work and how western history is practiced. Over the last few years I have been writing about the subjectivity of the archives and how significant groups of people are not well represented in them. In \u2018Women and Archival Silences<\/a>\u2019, as well as the Mau Mau posts, I demonstrate how even with the paucity of the records a skilled researcher can painstakingly stitch together a hidden history. In all these posts I challenge the attitude that says \u2018if the document doesn\u2019t exist then it didn\u2019t happen\u2019.<\/p>\n

Some of my posts are inspired by current events. Early on in the life of this blog southern Queensland was hit by severe flooding. The home in which I had stayed while researching for my honours thesis was badly hit and the State Library of Queensland where I had spent many intense, but enjoyable days working through historic material was also under water. I wrote about the long history of flooding in this area in my post \u2018Southern Queensland Floods \u2013 Again<\/a>\u2019. I was approached by the editor of Online Opinion and an updated version of it was posted<\/a> on that site a few days later.<\/p>\n

Another popular post was my coverage of the protests at the University of Sydney library<\/a> over plans to cull over one million books from the collection as part of a massive renovation project for its Fisher Library. Recently I have been contacted by researchers seeking permission to use some of the photos accompanying the post for articles they are writing.<\/p>\n

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One of my favourite photos on this blog – the stunning La Trobe Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From the very beginning I decided that I wanted to have at least one image in each post and that I would abide by copyright laws. Photographers are one of the most ripped off artists online and I did not want to perpetuate the injustice. However, five years ago cultural institutions were asking people to fill in a form and wait two weeks while they decided if they would allow the use of the images on a non-commercial blog. This time delay would be an impediment to my blogging so I decided that I would take most of the photos myself. Now I carry a camera in my handbag and have amassed a good photo bank. To my surprise I have had several requests from researchers to re-use my images online. It shows that the story behind an image is often more important than the quality of the image.<\/p>\n

Archives, libraries and protests are big, but I am also passionate about the very little but important aspects of history and one of these is footnotes or endnotes. Footnotes and endnotes are not only a service to future researchers, they are a commitment to the reader that the writer has taken a great deal of care to get it right and is willing to be held accountable to the reader. I am pleased that \u2018Footnotes: \u201cSneakily important\u201d<\/a> is the second most accessed post on this blog. Publishers take note!<\/p>\n

I balance this blog with the occasional light post, often with a quirky bit of trivia to lighten our world. These are fun to write and readers also seem to enjoy them. Here are a sample:<\/p>\n