How can people without official political power push the authorities to act? Historically, one of the most common tactics was to create a petition or supplication. Even today, every year hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens sign e-petitions addressed to parliament which can lead directly to high-profile debates in the House of Commons. In seventeenth-century England, petitioning was ubiquitous. It was one of the only acceptable ways to address the authorities when seeking redress, mercy or advancement. As a result, it was a crucial mode of communication between the 'rulers' and the 'ruled'. People at all levels of society - from noblemen to paupers - used petitions to make their voices heard. Some were mere begging letters scrawled on scraps of paper; others were carefully crafted radical demands signed by thousands and sent to the highest powers in the land. Whatever form they took, they provide a vital source for illuminating the concerns of supposedly 'powerless' people and also offer a unique means to map the structures of authority that framed early modern society. This study will be the first to examine petitioning systematically at all levels of English government over the whole century. The project will create a valuable new resource by digitising and transcribing a corpus drawn from nine key collections of petitions held at national and local archives, totalling about 2,500 documents. This corpus, when combined with careful contextualisation, will allow the investigators to offer new answers to crucial questions about the major social and political changes that unfolded in this formative period. We will be able to examine the role of petitioning in specific moments such as the outbreak of civil war in 1642, the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Exclusion Crisis in 1679-81 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. We will also be able to track how petitionary practices shaped - and were shaped by - long-term developments, such as the emergence of a politicised 'public sphere' and the vast expansion in the English state, by assessing how much petitioners' attention shifted from local to national authorities, and from individual to mass subscriptions. Such questions are central to understanding government and politics in this period, but they can only be addressed through methodical analysis of a substantial corpus of petitions. This resource will make it possible to go beyond questions specific to petitioning by offering a new perspective on the nature of state authority itself. Current understandings of formal power structures in seventeenth-century England have been drawn primarily from the writings of theorists or officeholders. In contrast, petitions provide a view of authority 'from below'. They will allow us to reconstruct the outlook of people who lacked any official authority of their own. What concerns did they believe should be addressed by their superiors? To whom did they direct their complaints or requests? How did they adapt their rhetoric to fit with the changing political and ideological complexion of the state? The transcribed petitions will be made freely available through a bespoke Institute of Historical Research website, augmented with contextual essays, and searchable by year, locality, sender, recipient, topic and response. So, while publications by the investigators will address the research questions above, other scholars will use this resource to pursuing further lines of inquiry. Moreover, this resource will also serve the needs of stakeholders beyond professional researchers. We will partner with two archives (Cheshire and London Metropolitan) and a large volunteer organisation (The University of the Third Age) to support lay researchers - such as local and family historians - working on this wealth of newly accessible material tagged by place and name. This project will therefore open up a new perspective on the seventeenth century for both scholars and the wider public.

The Royal Historical Society's Report on Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History (2018) challenges institutional reluctance to face legacies of racial and ethnic injustice, and the lack of diversity within the historical discipline. New directions in research have not penetrated the history curriculum in many schools and universities. A 2018 survey of teachers by the Runnymede Trust found that over 70% of respondents wanted further training in both the history of migration and empire. The under-representation of diverse histories and BME scholars in history speaks to a deeper problem in the structures of our educational processes and institutions. Decades of advocacy by historians, teachers, BME heritage groups, and students have pressed university-based historians across the UK to consider what it means to 'decolonise' teaching curricula and research practices, and to challenge ingrained patterns of racial discrimination and exclusion in Higher Education. The phrase 'decolonise the curriculum' has become an umbrella term to describe a range of activities committed to promoting greater representation of diverse stories and experiences in history curricula. It has recently been used to refer to a set of reform-minded, anti-racist activities aimed at exposing historic legacies of colonialism and their present-day effects in the built environments and taught programmes of schools and universities. This network will research directions that history departments in UK universities have taken to 'decolonise' or de-centre their teaching curricula and research agendas, focusing on the theories and methodologies that underpin these efforts, the practical impacts that they have had, and the ways that these processes raise larger questions about reframing the focus of historical research and inquiry. The network will also consider how initiatives to diversify who studies, writes and teaches history have been successful, and where lessons can be learned beyond the academy. We will therefore draw on expertise from schools, heritage organisations, archives, libraries and museums. Responsiveness requires not just thinking about how research enters the classroom, but openness about how academic historians undertake research. We will work closely with the Runnymede Trust, whose award-winning Our Migration Story project has foregrounded the importance of migration history to the study of British history, and offers a template for academics to work with schools and communities. We will build on a smaller, existing network of groups connected to the Runnymede Trust that are committed to, and have a track record in, tackling issues related to 'decolonising' the curriculum and advocating reform of institutional practices that contribute to discrimination and exclusion. By extending this network across sectors, regions, and the four nations, we will maximise impact by creating connections and pathways for participation from non-London based academics and projects. The IHR, HA and RHS, as professional bodies that convene, support and train historians and history teachers across the UK, are particularly well placed to support this work. Our meetings will generate conversations and resources beyond the network's immediate participants, through podcasts, blogs, a website, publications, a public meeting hosted at the IHR in London, and a series of articles published on History Workshop Online. We will encourage, facilitate and support press and media engagement, which has already begun to take place in national magazines, newspapers, television and radio programmes. The network will also create a strategy report of research aims and recommendation that will challenge policy-makers and educators to consider pathways to reform history curricula and actions that can be taken to diversify those who teach, study and write our histories.

Speaking directly to the grant scheme's theme on 'inter-generational communication, cultural transmission, and exchange', this exploratory research project seeks to critically examine the ways the First World War is taught via History and English Literature across secondary schools and universities in England. The ultimate aim of the project is to deepen our understanding of the link between education and the formation of contemporary memories of the war in the English context. It is about examining the war in its articulation in the present, to allow us to be in a position to make recommendations for the future. This cannot be achieved, however, until we find out what is actually happening in classrooms across England. There exists, in England, a specific national perception of the First World War. A tragic disaster, fought mainly in the muddied, rat-filled and lice-ridden trenches of the Western Front, by young, innocent 'Tommies', led by imbecile Generals who willfully sacrificed their men for a cause that would, with the outbreak of the Second World War, be proven to be utterly pointless. Overall, there is a general awareness that the war was a uniquely terrible experience. Where has this view come from? Popular cultural outputs such as Blackadder Goes Forth, Downton Abbey, Birdsong, Regeneration, and War Horse - to name a selection - reiterate and consolidate the above view. Academic commentators such as Stephen Badsey, Ian Beckett, Brian Bond, and Gary Sheffield argue that these programmes, novels, plays and films are popular because they echo the image of the war that has been taught in secondary level History and English Literature classes across the UK. However, until now, no serious study has been undertaken into the way the First World War is taught via the subjects of History and English Literature. Until this is rectified, and in a context that allows dialogue and interaction between academics and secondary school teachers, we cannot make assertions about the links between education and the way the war is understood in the 21st century. With its series of centenaries approaching, the First World War is likely to be of increased interest to teachers in secondary and tertiary education. It is therefore an opportune moment to begin research into the way the war is taught in schools and its role in the creation of a cultural memory of the war. If secondary education does contribute to a narrow and Anglo-centric understanding of the war - and is at a mismatch with some of the latest scholarship taught at university level - the centenary period provides a ripe opportunity for investigating capacity for change and making suggestions that consider the expertise, requirements and aims of teachers at secondary and tertiary level on equal terms. This exploratory project seeks to listen to teachers and academics about their experiences, needs and challenges in teaching the First World War in two stages. Firstly, in the half-term break of February 2013, a symposium will be hosted in London where teachers and academics will come together to discuss and compare the ways the First World War is taught via the subjects of History and English Literature. The aim is to create a positive and fruitful atmosphere to discuss ways of achieving greater continuity between the learning experiences of students who study the First World War at school and university, with lasting outcomes such as an interactive website to allow for teacher-academic dialogue into the future. Stage two will take the form of a questionnaire circulated in a two-tier methodology, online and in face-to-face interviews with focus groups made up of teachers and academics across the country. These two research stages will form the basis of a comprehensive report into the teaching practices in secondary schools and Higher Education and two peer-reviewed journal articles relating to cultural transmission of the First World War through education.

A number of distinct and usually separate avenues of scholarship examine early modern border spaces, sometimes characterized as lines and sometimes as zones, including Atlantic history, maritime history, the 'frontier' or continental history of North America, hemispheric histories of the Americas, and Native American history. Each of these approaches is defined by a distinctive geographic perspective and set of questions. This network is innovative in challenging participants to bridge across space and methodology, reorienting perspectives and facilitating a comparative analysis of the early modern origins of and contests over the borders and bordered spaces that inform immigration debates today. With the discovery of routes to and around Africa and the Americas from the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, the map of the world seemed to be redrawn, in the process casting up for debate which borderlines would persist. A range of people--political officials, merchants, and ordinary women and men--drew, debated, and denounced boundaries, observed or ignored them, fought over them, and forged networks that transcended them. Boundaries were meant to demarcate sovereignty and political control, assert claims to natural resources and inhabitants' loyalty, establish closed zones of economic activity, and in myriad ways determine who was in and who out. Some borders today are readily visible: a concrete wall, a motorway barricade, an airport immigration officer. Early modern boundaries were more amorphous for three reasons: first, in a newly 'Atlantic' world, the definition and practice of trans-oceanic empires had to be reconfigured, involving perpetual contest between Natives and newcomers, centres and peripheries, and among imperial rivals. Native Americans, Britain, Spain, and the United States all claimed West Florida, for instance, during the eighteenth century. Second, and simultaneously, newly emerging notions of the nation-state provoked internal debate about who had the right to claim territory and what determined membership in a national community; the United States struggled with these questions from the 1770s to the 1860s. Third, on a practical level, such boundaries were often impossible to define or defend because they existed in places where people couldn't see or enforce them, like the interior of a continent where Native Americans such as the Chickasaws marked out borders that Europeans did not recognise. These problems meant that however they were drawn, boundary lines were impermanent, particularly in places beyond the direct military and administrative oversight of European empires. Our network will bring together multiple scholarly conversations, to ask how early modern empires, on-the-ground inhabitants, and voyagers defined, defied, and took advantage of Atlantic World borders, be they on land or on water. We propose a network that will expand over time, bringing together scholars through three linked workshops. The first will take place at Temple University (Philadelphia, USA), and will feature a select group of participants, each of whom will commit to attending one of the two remaining workshops. This workshop will delineate additional questions that will help scholars think through best practices for working in these often disparate fields. The next workshop will take place at the University of Southampton (Southampton, UK), and will feature participants from the first workshop and additional attendees chosen through a call for papers. The last workshop will take place at the Institute of Historical Research (London, UK), and will focus upon early modern maps and mapping. In consultation with the IHR's archivists, each participant--including speakers from the first workshop and participants selected through a call for papers--will centre their paper on a historical map in the IHR collections. They will use the maps as tools to think through and ground their analysis about early modern borders.

Eighteenth-century elections are largely synonymous with corruption and debauchery, epitomised by the infamous 'rotten' and 'pocket' boroughs, and memorably represented by William Hogarth's 'Humours of an Election' series (1755). Certainly only a small proportion of the population could vote. Even fewer could exercise their vote freely. Although general elections were supposed to be held every three, then seven, years, the huge expense of campaigning ensured only a small proportion of constituencies were contested. This was no modern democracy. Yet parliamentary elections were fundamentally important to all, not only for the selection of MPs, but also in bestowing a sense of power and belonging (even if only temporarily), in helping to form the nation's self-image, and in helping to forge a new constitutionalist tradition. Moreover, we want to show, elections not only affected, but also engaged, a wide section of the population - both those enfranchised and those not. Elections were often accompanied by an explosion of print, sermons, and song; countless ceremonies, assemblies, and entertainments; new modes of dress, decoration, and behaviour. Men and women, adults and children, rich and poor, franchised and unenfranchised, all participated - as consumers, but also as active makers of this unique cultural and political experience. Our project's fundamental aims are to shine an intense light on these extraordinary moments of participation, ritual, and sometimes carnival, and to consider their consequences and legacies. To do this we will collect new polling data from constituencies across England 1696-1831, working in partnership with local historian groups; subject this data to new kinds of scrutiny using innovative digital tools; and gather the cultural artefacts and practices which constituted people's lived experiences of elections. We will gain new insight into electoral demography, voter behaviour, and how voting patterns changed over time, across regions, and in different types of constituency. And from a combination of archival and creative practice research (the latter designed to reimagine and re-enact important elements of elections now lost) we will gain new understanding of the extent, pervasiveness, and inclusiveness of electoral culture. By placing polling data in its cultural contexts, we will come to understand whether the elements of campaigning - print and processions, banquets and ballads, sashes and sermons - made a difference to political outcomes, or left any significant legacy beyond election time. So this project is about two things: how people participate in politics, both with and without the vote; and how interventions across a proliferating range of media affect polling behaviour and outcomes. Both remain highly relevant in our own time. Today, many choose not to vote. This is very different from being excluded from the franchise, as was the great majority in the 18th century. But our research will challenge us to think differently about how non-voters may engage with democratic processes - through music, literature, fashion and art, for example, or via broadcast journalism and social media when once it was handbills and the hustings. We will want to ask whether contemporary phenomena such as data analytics and targeted digital communication strategies have counterparts, even origins, in pre-Reform Britain, and what effects, if any, these kinds of interventions have on people's relationship to the demos. Working with our partners, History of Parliament and the IHR, we aim to communicate our findings to audiences well beyond academia, particularly to schools and at a series of events timed (if possible) to accompany the next UK General Election. As well as reshaping our understanding of how elections functioned before parliamentary reform, we intend that this project should usefully inform pressing debates about political communication and political participation today.