Picture This

How do historians picture the past – and how do they teach us to see it too? In Picture This, Carolyn Steedman asks how fellow historians imagine the people, places and lives they write about, and how those imaginings are conveyed to their readers.Moving from eighteenth-century engravings, London street life and blue-and-white china to domestic kitchens, political satire, Henry Mayhew’s social investigations, rag rugs and twentieth-century classrooms, Steedman uncovers a compelling social history of seeing. How were people taught to look? What did words, pictures and objects allow them to notice – and what remained unseen? Can a historian recover not only a vanished world, but the ways in which its inhabitants perceived and imagined it?Erudite, intimate and alive with unexpected connections, Picture This is both a meditation on the historian’s craft and an invitation to examine our own visual imagination. It reveals history not as the past itself, waiting to be discovered, but as something made – through evidence, language and memory.Essential reading for historians and anyone curious about how the past takes shape in the present.