Much of my time over the last couple of months has been taken up by organising the Social History Society Online Conference and by the time you read this, it will just have finished. My role has been to co-ordinate more than 100 speakers and host most of the panels (quietly in the background – most of the time the audience wouldn’t have known I was there). With days that started by sending out zoom links before 7am, it’s been a tough couple of weeks, but I’ve heard a really, really wide range of research papers on things that I wouldn’t normally have come into contact with, which has, at times, been absolutely fascinating. Without copious amounts of tea, though, the whole thing would have gone belly up!

My personal highlights from the conference including hearing Professor Matthew Kelly talk about Beatrix Potter and her very important later years as a landscape preservationist in the Lake District, where she was an active land manager as well as a significant benefactor to the National Trust; and Dr Barbara Crosbie’s paper on her experience of carrying out a public history project during a global pandemic, and how it affected the progress of the research. As an early modernist myself, I found Alice Blackwood’s paper on ‘Defining Local Politics for Men and for Women in Early Modern England’ really interesting and useful in challenging our assumptions about participation in local politics.

I also really enjoyed Ian d’Alton’s paper on Protestant citizenship in post-independence Ireland. If I hadn’t been an early modernist, I would almost certainly have ended up working on 20th-century Ireland, so this was an area that really interested me. Ian highlighted the difference between public and private feelings about being Protestant in a Catholic state, and he outlined the many different ways in which Protestants could figure their belonging to the new state, despite being an internal ‘other’. He described how prosperous Protestants retreated into an imagined community which was muted in public, and this suited both sides.

I was also very interested in Rona Wilkie’s paper on Song as Active Resistance in Nineteenth-century Gaelic Scotland. She described the ways in which Gaelic song has been left out of research into the Highland Clearances, and convincingly set out three reasons why it should be central to future work on the subject. She demonstrated that song is crucial to Gaelic culture and creates a sense of community, and its exclusion skews our understanding of the transformation of Highland experience in the nineteenth century.

It was lovely to hear my PhD student Amy-Louise Smith talk about how libel seems to demonstrate the power of the community to enforce inherently conservative views on those who transgress social norms. She was on a mini-panel with Brodie Waddell, who described some early results from his AHRC-funded Power of Petitioning project. In the pre-civil war period, the largest proportion of petitions are regarding poor-relief and paternity, followed closely by those related to local rates. This shows that the majority of petitions are to do with local fiscal issues.

A small but enthusiastic audience heard three researchers from Nijmegen talk about Commerce and Cultural Transfer in 19th-Century Dutch Music Markets. Floris Meens described how 19th century Dutch music journals talked about Dutch music publishers. Authors of articles in these journals were critics, consumers and performers who were encouraged to reflect on Dutch musical culture, although they were heavily influenced by the German canon. The musical journals reported that there was a marked improvement in the quality of music printing, and that this change seems to have been quite radical. One of its major concerns was the lack of an effective copyright oversight system. Although the cheap music sheets that were produced as a result meant that more people could now afford to buy music, the journal Caecilia feared that this would lead to sloppy musicianship and it lamented that the audience had a clear preference for foreign music over Dutch compositions. Veerle Driessen explored the popularity and profitability of French operetta in Dutch theatres in the 1860s, 70s and 80s. She looked at the ways critics praised and criticised the performances of 3 French operettas to see what aspects were appreciated by Dutch audiences. For example, she pointed out that the political satire in La Belle Helene did not really translate for Dutch audiences, so the focus was on pleasure and sexuality, and it was criticised for its vulgarity. By the 1870s, reviews criticised operettas’ simplicity. Finally, Thomas Delpeut described recommendations for Dutch concert programming and Kist’s ideas about the position of the symphony, which he advised be moved from the beginning of a concert programme to the end where it provided a climax and ensured the audience’s sustained engagement with the programme. Moreover, the symphony would resonate and be the piece that the audience returned home remembering.

It has to be said that two weeks, wall to wall, of zoom, was quite hard going, but hearing about everybody’s exciting research kept me going. Well, that and the tea, of course!