As the summer heats up and the 2012-13 academic year draws to a close, we here at the QUB project ‘Poverty and public health in Belfast, 1800-1973’ have been looking over the past seven months and realised that we have some material to share with you which has emerged from the events that we organised earlier this year.

In February we hosted a very successful and interesting workshop entitled ‘Poverty and Welfare in Comparative Urban Contexts’ (February 2013). Two months later we visited the Crumlin Road Gaol and hosted a QUB Impact event, ‘Queen’s Historians go to Gaol’ (April 2013). In order to bring our efforts, and those of our contributors, to a wider audience, we have been getting to grips with the various methods available for disseminating those papers and presentations including blogging, tweeting and facebooking. We have also created a video and some audio files of said presentations.

The ‘Twitter Machine’ as it is becoming fondly known, has been a great resource for this dissemination. On foot of our video which shows Dr Olwen Purdue’s presentation entitled ‘A den of drunkenness, immorality and vice’; the workhouse and the poor in late nineteenth-century Belfast‘ (see below for link) we have received numerous re-tweets and new followers, along with 51 views of the video itself! Now while this might not compare favourably to the almost 2 billion youtube views received by that star of K-Pop Psy with his ‘Gangnam Style’, we are quite happy with Olwen’s own style! And there will be more videos to follow!

So while I am embedded in my office going through the remaining video and audio, I am leaving you with enough links to last a few weeks hopefully.  Below find a link to the Purdue ‘vimeo’ as well as some audio from various experts in Irish and British social history. If you’re curious about the operation of the Irish and English poor laws, eighteenth or nineteenth century philanthropy or 21st Century low-income families, then you will find something of interest here. Please check back soon for more videos and more presentations from the Crumlin Road Gaol event!

Vimeo

Olwen Purdue (QUB) ‘A den of drunkenness, immorality and vice’; the workhouse and the poor in late nineteenth-century Belfast‘

Audio

LarryGeary (UCC) ‘The best relief the poor can receive is from themselves’: The Society for Promoting the Comforts of the Poor

JanetGreenlees (GCU) The Church of Scotland and the poor: politics and paradoxes, c 1880-1950

VirginiaCrossman (OBU) Some reflections on the urban / rural poverty divide in Ireland 1850-1914

DavidGreen (KCL) ‘It is here that we find the English poor law system in its most complete form’: London and the poor law in the nineteenth century

GraceKelly (QUB) Family life in conditions of low income in Northern Ireland