The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Twentieth-Century Britain

This paper gives an overview of a large project funded by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council. Across Britain for much of the twentieth century, the historical pageant was a significant form of popular engagement with the past. Communities came together to perform and re-enact successive scenes from their history, often with casts of thousands and audiences in the tens of thousands. An important aspect of popular education, pageants declined in the 1950s, but never quite died out, and remnants of the tradition survive today. This paper examines some of the key features of historical pageants and introduces some of the main themes of the ‘Redress of the Past’ project.

The project website can be seen at www.historicalpageants.ac.uk

Date:   23 May 2017 (Tuesday)

Time:   15:30-17:00

Venue: B4-1/F-37

Dr. Mark Freeman (UCL Institute of Education, University College London)

Mark Freeman is a Reader in Education and Social History at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London. He has published widely on various aspects of the history of education, and the social and economic history of modern Britain. His most recent edited book, with Robert Anderson and Lindsay Paterson, is The Edinburgh History of Education in Scotland (2015).

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