In 1966 the photographer Martine Franck was commissioned by "Life International" to document the experiences of children in a new library in Paris. The visual essay she produced illuminated the materiality, the design and the children's use of the space. In Birmingham, a recent unconnected research project, 'Libraries in Women's Lives',…

In the nineteenth century city child rescuers developed 'a taxonomy of space' in which geography determined destiny. The privatised spaces of the middle classes were contrasted with the 'dirt, disease and delinquency' of the slums. Yet at the same time as 'dirt' was viewed as 'destructive' and proof of urban neglect it was also accepted in the…

Over the past two decades there has been a growing interest in the exploration of "transnational history". This work has focused in general on understanding the "movement, ebb and circulation" of ideas across borders and in particular on the introduction, transmission, reception and appropriation of ideas through the process of…

In recent years there has been a growth in interdisciplinary work which has argued that disability is not an isolated, individual medical pathology but instead a key defining social category like "race", class and gender. Seen in this way disability provides researchers with another analytic tool for exploring the nature of power. Running almost…

This paper has several concerns. It is about both the stories we tell and the images we place with those stories; it is also about historical practice and the power of the image to generate new research approaches. The paper is organized into three sections: the "eye of history" and historians and the visual archive; histories of black…