ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the idea of symbolic space, as well as Mick Jagger’s performativity in a live broadcast interview. It explores how historians grapple with the contextual understanding and associations which past and present audiences bring to a site, both unique and shared. The book focuses on an historical period of short duration and further, within that, identified the final three years of the reign of Charles II Stuart. It shows that a requirement to join-up fragmentary references from multiple contexts: the historian’s research is a spatial context in itself. Most historians, when pressed, can reflect that they became interested in pursuing knowledge because that enquiry in some way spoke to them in a personal sense. The book deals with objects, either in themselves or because the source – the photograph album and the scrapbook – becomes an object.
