Welcome

Welcome to Living History Today, a  site which aims to share the author’s fascination with everyday life in the past. It is slowly expanding to cover a wide range of centuries, skills and ideas. Anyone can pick up a history book and find the clearly documented lives of the famous, but discovering how ordinary people lived is not as easy.

The diverse mix of articles you will find here reflect what has interested me and driven my research. In the classroom it was never the important ‘facts’ that fascinated students, but the details; what people ate, what their homes might have been like and how they viewed the world. These are the sorts of issues that I hope to cover. There won’t be that much on the dress worn in  various periods for two reasons: there are already plenty of excellent resources available and several informative blogs, and also because for ordinary people fashion was not really an issue – the fact that ‘second best’ clothes are mentioned and passed on in wills indicates that until relatively recently in the nineteenth century clothes were worn until they wore out, not changed because they were no longer in fashion. What people wore in the country could lag decades behind the garments currently popular amongst fashionable Londoners.

I do hope you enjoy cruising around the articles.

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