Paul Brassley's Top Book Recommendations

Paul BrassleyThe interesting thing about the book is that in effect it created an entirely new subject of landscape history. Hoskins and his colleague Maurice Beresford, as a result of walking in the English Midlands during the Second World War, realised that there was a whole story about the landscape that hadn’t really been told. He published the book in 1955. It examined the way in which the countryside... (Source)

Paul BrassleyThe full title, Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day, gives you an idea about what the book is about. In many ways it sums up Joan Thirsk’s life’s work. The book is based around a very simple but powerful idea. Thirsk divides the history of agriculture into two sorts of period, ‘mainstream periods’ and ‘alternative periods’. In the ‘mainstream periods’... (Source)

Paul BrassleyThe author, George Ewart Evans, was in many ways one of the pioneers of oral history. Back in the in the late 1940s and early 1950s he took one of those early tape-recorders which were very big and very cumbersome, and he went to talk to old people in East Anglia. These people had memories which went back well into the 19th century. He was almost talking about what seems like a pre-industrial... (Source)

Paul BrassleyAkenfield is another kind of oral history, and it’s also based in East Anglia. The difference is that the author did not go out with a tape-recorder. What he did was to just ask people about what had happened, and write up his recollections of people at a later date. Of course, the implications of this are quite significant. Rather than directly quoting people there is this mediation through a... (Source)

Paul BrassleyThe Death of Rural England is a much more recent book. It is written by Alun Howkins, a historian who has officially retired, but is still actively writing. Its subtitle, The Social History of the Countryside Since 1900, again gives away what the book is about. The book summarises all the 20th-century changes that we’ve been talking about. If The Making of the English Landscape looks at the... (Source)