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We've Won! Kellogg College Community Engagement and Impact Awards 2019

1 March 2019 / 0 Comments
News

Get History, a website designed to bring interesting, up-to-date, and accessible history to students and adults alike, has won a Community Engagement and Impact Award from Kellogg College, Oxford.

The annual Community Engagement and Impact Award rewards Kellogg College 'students who have demonstrated a genuine commitment to community engagement, increasing impact, promoting knowledge exchange, or widening participation.'

The college writes that the 'website brings history and historical research to as wide an audience as possible. Initially started as a study aid for secondary-school students, it has expanded to include the wider public, introducing current historiographical debate in a fun and accessible manner. As well as topic-based articles, which encourage the audience to develop their own opinions and undertake further practical and book-based research, it has increased the impact of other historians’ work, by including interviews and competitions. Quizzes, facts, and ‘on this day’ bring the bizarre and wonderful side of history to life, inspiring engagement with history, and showing its importance in the world today.'

Get History was established in 2014 as a reaction against the 'dumbing down' of history for children. Its guiding principle is that history doesn't have to be boring or oversimplified; it just has to be well-expressed. Complex historical ideas, concepts, and debates can and should be brought to life, because understanding history helps us to understand who we are now and why we are here: it is the story of us. This principle is carried through the site in articles, reviews, interviews with leading historians, quizzes, facts, and quotations.

Debbie Kilroy, the site's founder, writer, and editor, has said: 'It is an immense honour to receive this award and to be recognised for the hard work involved in running the site. I think Get History has so much potential, and has so much to contribute to historical study; it's nice that others - and particularly an Oxford college - think so too!'

You can find out more about the Kellogg College Community Engagement and Impact Award here.

Author Info

Debbie Kilroy

Having read history at the University of Birmingham as an undergraduate, where I won the Kenrick Prize, I worked as a trouble-shooter in the public sector until I took a career break in 2009. Thereafter, I was able to pursue my love of history and turn it into a career, founding Get History in 2014 with the aim of bringing accessible yet high quality history-telling and debate to a wide audience. Since then, I have completed a Masters in Historical Studies at the University of Oxford, from which I received a distinction and the Kellogg College Community Engagement and Impact Award. As well as continuing to write for and expand Get History, I am now a freelance writer and historian. I have worked with Histories of the Unexpected and Inside History, and my article for Parliaments, Estates and Representation won the ICHRPI Emile Lousse essay prize (2019).

Fact of the Day

Frederick the Great always dressed in a threadbare military uniform. He considered a crown a useless hat which let the rain through.

Quote of the Day

"Parliaments are of the Nature of cats: they ever grow curst with age. "
~ Charles I

On This Day

1579 Thomas Gresham, merchant, financier, and founder of the Royal Exchange, died suddenly, apparently of apoplexy. He bequeathed his estate, after the death of his wife, to the Corporation of London and the Mercers' Company to set up a college to provide free lectures to the public; Gresham College thus became London's first institution of higher education.
1916 The hospital ship Britannic, sister-ship of Titanic, hit a mine and sank, killing 30.
1918 Ten days after the Armistice, the German navy surrendered to the British in the Firth of Forth. 
1920 The assassinations of British intelligence officers ordered by Michael Collins in the Irish War of Independence led to thirty-one dead (from both sides) in what became known as 'Bloody Sunday'.
1974 21 people were killed and 182 injured when bombs exploded in two Birmingham pubs. The IRA was probably responsible, but the real culprits have never been found. The Birmingham Six, originally convicted of the bombings, were released because of dodgy police practices.
1981 The proceedings of the House of Commons were televised live for the first time.