History Day

Items

• Spoonful of sugar: hospital food and medicine
  This online exhibition explores the history of hospital food and medicine
• Ten Minute Talk & Tea: Mine's a Pint of Ale: The History of Drinking at St John's Gate
  Our Events & Partnership Lead Zachariah Young gave a ten minute talk on the history of Drinking at St John's Gate. The Talk starts in the Medieval Period and brewing in the priory and goes all the way to the modern day iteration of the Jerusalem Tavern.
• The Act of (Not) Eating in the Middle Ages
  This blog post was written by Maisie Brewster, one of the Library Graduate Trainees at the Warburg Institute Library, for History Day 2023 and explores library material relating eating in the Middle Ages.
• The Groundnut Scheme: a colonial failure
  The ill-fated Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme was planned and put into practice in the mid-twentieth century, coming to an abrupt end in 1951. The story of its collapse is a powerful example of why top-down, colonial approaches to agricultural development often struggled to produce the desired results. It raises important questions about why the voices of local agricultural workers and communities were often ignored, and how this contributed to the Scheme’s demise. This online exhibition has been devised to make sense of scattered holdings throughout The MERL collection. Together these groundnut and East Africa-related farming resources can help shed light on this infamous project and its failings. This exhibition was compiled in partnership with undergraduate History students from the University of Reading, including Charles Clemens, Rebekah Fry, Katie Crook, Jakob Longden, and others. We are also grateful for the support of Atenchong Talleh Nkobou from the School of Agriculture, Policy, and Development who provided support and expertise, and to Tim Jerrome and Dr Ollie Douglas for editorial and technical input. You can watch the 1948 film, 'The Groundnut Scheme at Kongwa' via the University of Reading's Virtual Reading Room.