Where do we come from, where are we going?
How can family and personal heritage change the world?
Origins preoccupy us today. From politics through television period dramas to family histories, we want to know about our collective pasts, the ones that lie beyond our individual memories and that involve lives other than our own.
BBC genealogist Nick Barratt talks about the power of personal heritage to transform education and to generate travel and tourism. In Café Culture’s ‘Tracing Origins: Roots and Rivers’ event, you can also hear UCL’s Jane Gilbert and Katherine Ibbett discussing their work on origins and identity. Jane discusses some of the ways in which medieval Europeans thought about individual and collective pasts and futures in terms of places, migrations and identities. Beginning with world maps, we can trace the trajectories that medieval lives took, individually and collectively, and the complicated, overlapping stories which people considered themselves to be living out. Katherine looks at why sixteenth century French people were obsessed with the sources of rivers, and what that obsession meant for everything from family trees to landscape gardening. In the last few weeks in Britain we've seen how rivers and their behaviour can change our political landscape in significant ways. Now that we are more and more likely to live near a river, has the way we think about this water in our midst changed?
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