The Institutional History Society was formed in 2019 by Daniel Shepherd BA and Gemma Minter.
The Society was born out of a shared love of elucidating the past and a realisation that there was a real, tangible gap in our understanding of historical institutions of yore. Their methods, their inmates or patients, even their very locations all lost to the sands of time.
No more.
How Institutional History began…
The Institutional History Society was created in May 2019 to explore the lurid, the scandalous, and often unfair lives, treatments, and crimes of people from times gone by.
Daniel Shepherd BA, co-founder of the Society, says-
“The past is in constant symbiosis with the future, it feeds our impending actions, explains deep-held sentiments and can constrain us with outmoded prejudices: none more so than our attitudes towards the mentally ill, the poor and imprisoned. These people, by virtue (or ill-fortune) of genetic, class or circumstantial quirks, were forced to the fringes of society, incarcerated, mistreated, sometimes experimented upon and then forgotten: unable to give voice to themselves and fated to fade from history. Until now.”
Gem Minter, co-founder and keen advocate of social history adds –
‘We set up this society to battle the erasure of peripheral peoples from the historical record. These inmates, these patients, had lives as exciting and vivid as any baron or poet, they loved, they lost, they endured, but most of all they existed: it’s time we told their stories’.
Their current Project is researching the men’s Woking Invalid Convict Prison, active between 1859-1889, investigating the desultory to the deranged, the dangerous and the detained and everything in-between. Leaving no page unturned, they have already discovered fascinating tales of impropriety in a prison which once housed the likes of the Fenians, zoophiles, a Jack the Ripper suspect, and more.
In order to preserve and share these captivating stories, they have created the new website to house archival documents, useful resources, and hundreds of hours of investigative research poured into podcasts, biographies and blogs – all exploring in detail, the histories of antiquity’s forgotten people.
So if you’re interested in historic true crime, want to find out if one of your ancestors was a felon or if you’re interested in volunteering, why not drop them a message here.