Happy 2017! I’m currently in London on my last big research trip of the dissertation process, woot woot! And it has been 6 short months since my first post, don’t know how that happened already. Thankfully no one is holding their breath, since I haven’t shared the link yet with anyone, there have been zero views of le blog. Maybe today that will change.
On this current trip, I’ve done a few days of research at the Wellcome Library and London School of Economics, and am currently working at the National Archives at Kew where I’ll spend about a week. It has been a humbling experience to try to sort out how British government works and the logic of all these different archives. I think today I FINALLY happened on a research strategy that is going somewhere. For the first few days I was too focused on food programs specifically, whereas today I branched out to look at public/ voluntary sector relations during the 1970s and 1980s and found so many different short-term committees working on this.
In the course of trying to understand what some reports of these committees were saying, I googled an acronym I was seeing all the time: CPRS. I found that this acronym means many things, most commonly complex regional pain syndrome. But I needed to know what it meant in the Thatcher-era, and turns out it was the Central Policy Review Unit. In googling CPRS Thatcher, I found a crazy Guardian article from last November that helped illustrate what Thatcher and some of her close advisor’s perspectives were on public vs. private goods in the early 1980s (something useful for my dissertation!). This article, using newly released documents from the National Archives, reveals that while Thatcher publicly claimed she wouldn’t privatize the National Health Service, behind closed doors she and and a few pals were toying with breaking up the NHS and making private health insurance mandatory. Sadly (totally sarcastic here), the majority of her Cabinet disagreed and the proposal died, except when she and said pals kept talking about it. The 30+ year closure of UK government docs meant that these discussions from 1982 were just opened in the last few years. So, history for the win! I think that’s one thing I really enjoy about history-land, it’s like investigative journalism of the present, but without all the pressures of writing about it really fast, haha.
Well folks, I have some fellowship writing that I am supposed to be doing and this was really a form of productive procrastination, so I’m going to get to it. But I leave you with a photo of my walk back from Kew tonight!
Bridge over the Thames, great sunset! But freezing. I hear it’s raining in California right now, though, so can’t win either way.
History Days 