Innholdsfortegnelse for September-October 2020 i History Scotland

Welcome to September/October History Scotland. A glance at the contents page overleaf shows that despite the challenges posed by the Covid-19 restrictions, Scottish history and archaeology continue to thrive. We're pleased to present in this issue an exclusive opinion piece by historiographer royal Professor Christopher Smout, who talks about Scotland's slavery links in light of the Black Lives Matter campaign. As history enthusiasts, we know only too well that it is only by educating ourselves about our history, no matter how uncomfortable parts of it may seem, that we can take part in current debates and help to build a better future. We look forward to presenting you with a themed Jacobite special edition of History Scotland next time. You can pre-order a copy from our website, or subscribe to…

The winner is Dr Coreen McGuire. She spoke to History Scotland about her plans for the £500 research grant, which is part of the prize: ‘I was absolutely delighted to receive this news, and it was especially cheering to receive such a nice missive amidst the stricter stages of the lockdown. ‘I will visit 4-5 archives across Scotland which hold records of the schools for the deaf from the 19th century. I will interpret these archival collections through an epistemic injustice framework, arguing that 19th-century oralism was a paradigmatic case of epistemic injustice, and exploring the ways in which different areas of Scotland resisted this injustice. ‘Many scholars have explored the extent to which oralism was motivated by Christian ideology or have emphasised the crucial role of the Scottish-American telephone…

I was born, quite a long time ago, in Bowling, a village on the banks of the Clyde, twelve miles from Glasgow and three miles from Dumbarton. Throughout my childhood the village seemed to be unchanging. Most of my friends had parents, and even grandparents, who knew each other as children and had gone to school together. The village is stretched along a narrow corridor of land between the river and the steeply-wooded hills behind. At the eastern side of the village is the road which takes you down to the harbour and it is here that the Forth and Clyde canal starts. At the western edge of the village lies Littlemill, which in my childhood, had some old houses, the Littlemill distillery and a pub, the Horseshoe Bar, known…

David Cousin (1809-1878) was an immensely versatile Victorian architect and town planner. As Edinburgh’s city architect he was responsible with his colleague John Lessels for redeveloping areas around the High Street. He created several large garden cemeteries, and built domestic and public buildings all over Scotland from the highlands to the borders. Arguably under-appreciated outside the world of architecture, he had a wide-ranging influence on the Scottish built environment, especially in Edinburgh. There, the impact of his buildings is sometimes only subconsciously perceptible to the casual observer. Yet his buildings, blending in with ancient streets, have helped to create the distinctive cityscape of Edinburgh, admired all over the world. Family and early life David Cousin’s parents, John (1781-1862) and Isabella, née Paterson (1813-1861), initially lived in Trinity, Edinburgh. Previous Cousin…

Vol 20.6 Nov/Dec 2020 On sale: 10 October Jacobite special Join us for a wide-ranging exploration of the Jacobite period in a special issue to mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of Prince Charles Edward Stuart. Our expert features include: Jacobite women Jacobite intelligence operations Episcopalianism and Jacobitism Dunfermline Abbey radar survey, part 2 The results of a recent radar survey around the supposed site of the Robert the Bruce grave and the ‘lost’ medieval choir. Eastern Encounters Curator preview of Eastern Encounters, a new exhibition at Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, that explores 400 years of British-Indian royal relations and South Asian artistic production. PLUS… 10 minutes on the Davidian revolution, the remarkable story of Hamilton & Inches: Edinburgh jeweller, early Scottish textiles and lots more… GUARANTEE YOUR COPY…

Explore a selection of digital history guides in the History Scotland store: https://scot.sh/hsdownload reviews@historyscotland.com Queenship at the Renaissance Courts of Britain: Catherine of Aragon and Margaret Tudor, 1503-1533 Michelle L. Beer Boydell & Brewer, 2018 201 pages Hardback, £50.00 ISBN: 9780861933488 Focusing on an increasingly popular field, Queenship at the Renaissance Courts of Britain comprises the in-depth study of otherwise under-represented queens, including both queens consort and queens regnant. It seeks to understand how these women were able to establish themselves, their identities and their power in a time when they were meant to have none. In this study, Michelle L. Beer analyses Catherine of Aragon’s and Margaret Tudor’s places within the English and Scottish courts of the 16th century. The book is structured thematically, with the five chapters collectively…

Dr Miles Kerr-Peterson is an affiliate of the Universities of Glasgow and Dundee. In new research starting on page 28, he explores the hidden history of Keith Marischal House, a lost renaissance palace buried within a much more modern stately home. Morven Leese is an independent researcher whose study of George Meikle Kemp in her book George Meikle Kemp: Architect of the Scott Monument prompted her to investigate the life of Kemp’s best friend David Cousin. Morven shares her findings in an article starting on page 12, where she explores the life of the prolific and versatile architect David Cousin who, despite being largely forgotten today, did much shape Scotland’s modern built environment, particularly in Edinburgh. Christopher Reekie is a retired journalist. He worked as a general reporter for 43…

SCOTTISH LOCAL HISTORY FORUM TOP TIP Paul Bishop, Chair of the Scottish Local History Forum, shares his top tip on exploring your street’s story My top tip for street history is to use the National Library of Scotland (NLS) maps website https://maps.nls.uk/). The site has many old maps, dating right back to the earliest mapping of Scotland, but these early maps won’t be useful for individual streets. The best bets for this are (i) estate maps (the NLS might have scanned an estate map that includes your house – mine is on a farm plan from an 1805 set of estate plans), and (ii) the Ordnance Survey (OS) maps dating from the mid 19th century. With the OS maps, and using the ‘explore georeferenced maps’ feature on the NLS maps…

This is a moment of national remorse, when the Black Lives Matter movement brings down the statues of slave-traders and we all reflect on the sins of our imperial past. It should also be a moment when historians reflect on the facts and context of slavery. Scotland was indeed deeply involved in every aspect of the exploitation of black slaves in the Americas, as described in Douglas Hamilton Scotland, The Caribbean and the Atlantic World, and in Tom Devine (ed.) Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past. When slavery was eventually abolished in the British Empire in 1833, there were 426 Scottish slave owners who were awarded compensation, the biggest number per head of population of anywhere in Britain. The payment, which was exactly comparable to the payment to coal owners for loss…

Introduction The Declaration of Arbroath Family History Project, run by the Genealogical Studies postgraduate programme within the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Strathclyde, and funded by the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy, is now compiling its findings, based on research by students and staff. Here we present the stories of some of the individuals involved, in the 14th century, links that have been found with descendants of their families today and some thoughts on the future use of research methods utilised in the genetic genealogy research which has been carried out. STORIES OF THE SIGNATORIES Alexander Seton (b. bef 1296, d. aft 1348) The Seton family were based in the Lothians and it is thought that the Alexander Seton named in the Declaration may have been the son…

Self-Love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis: Key Debates from Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophy Christian Maurer Edinburgh University Press, 2019 240 pages Hardback, £75.00 (paperback edition forthcoming) ISBN: 9781474413374 The concept of ‘self-love’ is sometimes touted as radical today. It was much more so in 18th-century Scotland, where innate human benevolence was a heretical idea. The Westminster Confession of Faith outlined the orthodox calvinist view: the sin of Adam and Eve had left humans ‘utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all Good, and wholly inclined to all Evil’. But Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, spearheaded by Glasgow university professor Francis Hutcheson, took bold steps towards rehabilitating human nature. In Self-Love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis, Christian Maurer explores the British moral philosophical debate about self-love and selfishness, which emerged against this backdrop…

Since the Covid-19 restrictions have made research more of a challenge recently, we’ve rounded up a selection of online activities for the coming weeks: • A history of royal fashion online course Presented by University of Glasgow and Historic Royal Palaces. Explore how British kings and queens have influenced fashion over five centuries, in this five-week course. Find out more at https://scot.sh/fashion • Sketching Scotland: learn how to draw historic landmarksTake part in VisitScotland’s new Sketching Scotland project, with 20 video tutorials on how to draw sites including the Scottish Crannog Centre and the Forth Bridge, at https://scot.sh/sketching • Online exhibitions at Glasgow Women’s Library Enjoy six online exhibitions at Google Arts & Culture, inspired by the collections of Glasgow Women’s Library. Visit https://scot.sh/glasgoww…

In this edition of History Scotland, we’ve been treated to ten minutes with the killing time of the 1680s (page 59). As described in that article, this was a turbulent period, striking for the level of political and religious violence and persecution. It was also a period which would become the subject of enduring fascination for historians of Scotland from the 18th century to the present, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the high drama, high stakes and great loss of life. The first Scottish historian to tackle the subject was Robert Wodrow (1679-1734) in his The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution, published in 1721-22: in fact, the term ‘killing times’ was coined by him to describe the period. Wodrow makes a fascinating…

What have been the main changes at UHI’s Centre for History since you started there in 2008? The big change is that we’ve grown. When I joined the Centre for History I think there were two to three staff and we currently have eighteen, a mix of full- and part-time staff. That number’s grown because our student numbers have gone up, quite slowly but steadily. We started teaching in 2007 and had an undergraduate degree in ‘Scottish History’ which expanded into ‘History’. We created joint honours degrees and then we created our first postgraduate awards in 2011. I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved. In 2005 we were a purely research centre but it was quickly realised that we would have to have teaching underpinning that. One of the challenges…

Our new #StoryOfOurStreet project, in partnership with Family Tree has inspired people around the world to explore the history of their street and local area. Children in the US and Scotland have explored street stories as a class, and individual researchers have been reporting successes, as you can see in our feature opposite. If you’d like to take part, the new #StoryOfOurStree bingo is available to download from our website for just £1.99 at https://scot.sh/hsdownload…

The isle of Lismore (inner Hebrides) was a place of political and religious importance throughout medieval times but this has been largely forgotten, and the surviving monuments have suffered neglect in subsequent centuries. For the last five years a partnership of the Lismore Historical Society (Comann Eachdraidh Lios Mòr) and Lismore parish church has been committed to remedying this neglect, embarking upon a long-term project to explore, conserve, display, publicise and interpret the rich medieval heritage of the island. With progress stalled by the coronavirus pandemic, this is a good time to take stock of progress. Visitors today find it difficult to understand why the original cathedral of the diocese of Argyll, and two medieval stone castles, would be built in such an out-of-the-way place. This is very much a…

Noctes Ambrosianae. ‘Nights at Ambrose’s’ or ‘Ambrosian Nights’. Expressive words that exercise a double function. They pinpoint a place, and name the individual who presided over it. He was William Ambrose, the host of Ambrose’s Tavern, the venue of the famous dialogues in the pages of Blackwood’s Magazine. As such, he was immersed in the action, leading and directing his tail of waiters in serving gargantuan quantities of food and drink to Christopher North and his friends as they debated numerous weighty matters. He comes to us as a caricature in the Noctes, a supporting player in the comedy, but the occupant of a vital role. Parallel with his fictitious persona, he was a real person. William Ambrose was a Yorkshireman who kept a tavern at 1 Gabriel’s Road in…

I became interested in McVey Napier for two reasons. First of all, I was drawn by the name. McVey is uncommon enough as a surname but almost unknown as a Christian name. Secondly, not only did I share a name with him, but he was born in my home town of Kirkintilloch. These are self-indulgent reasons for investigating someone’s life, not scholarly ones, but we always need a starting point, and that was mine. Napier is little-known today, perhaps because, despite mixing with many of the great figures of his day, he was a jack-of-all-trades, what I have described as a multitasker. He did many things well, but he wasn’t absolutely outstanding at anything; people with that kind of profile are rarely remembered. Yet there is also something rather modern…