1/2 idea No. 9: What’s your CHOICE?

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

 

This one I followed up.

I wanted to find examples of objects that have the highest significance for historical argument.

CHOICE stands for Crucial Historiographical Object in Collections or Exhibitions. I proposed that a CHOICE has two ideal features:

1) a CHOICE object reveals significant, otherwise inaccessible, knowledge about a significant historical narrative.

2) materially, either in total or in part, a CHOICE represents a ‘fork in the road’, a moment of significant historical contingency, revealing how history could have been different.

I described the concept in 2013 and invited suggestions of cases in an earlier blog post here.

It was meant to be provocative, in a productive way, not least to friends and colleagues in the museum world. I wanted examples that could unambiguously justify object-based history, especially in the study of modern periods and subjects for which there are immense documentary archival resources. But it’s fair to say the response was quite chilly. Perhaps the bar was too high. Perhaps CHOICEs don’t exist.