Public Engagement with Visual Historical Resources: The 2012 “Temperance and the Working Class” Project

Abstract

This piece offers a brief account of strategies used to bring archival resources to a wider audience to stimulate public engagement. It demonstrates possible links and synergies for traditional visual arts scholarship with other fields and institutions, such as oral history, museums and galleries, and commerce. Such an enterprise not only demonstrates the possibilities for outreach and community involvement, but also the rich rewards gained in terms of fresh approaches to material and revivified scholarship.

Keywords:

• Exhibition Design
• Audience Engagement
• Temperance History
• Band of Hope Queens
• Lantern Slides
• Cruikshank, George (1792–1878)

Notes

Aidan Turner Bishop, “Livesey Collection, University of Central Lancashire, Preston,” Manchester Region History Review 17, no. 2 (2006): 93–102; Jack S. Blocker, David M. Fahey, and Ian R. Tyrrell, Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History: An International Encyclopedia (Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2003).

Brian Harrison, “Press and Pressure Group in Modern Britain,” in The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, ed. Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 282.

http://library.brown.edu/cds/temperance/about.html (accessed August 14, 2012).