History: Selling-Up - A Social History of Sales Catalogues

This Day School will offer you the opportunity to learn how to analyse sales catalogues from different historical periods. During tutor-led discussion sessions you will be guided through how to identify and assess different types of sales catalogues from Norwich and East Anglia and put what you have learned into practice in hands-on group sessions. Using examples of historical catalogues, you will discover how they have developed over time by looking at their design, styling and changing content. Your tutor will link these developments to wider economic and social changes such as the Industrial Revolution, the First World War and the creation of the Internet. You will also discover that the contents of household sales catalogues provide unique glimpses into how people lived in the past, what they collected and who bought their worldly possessions. At the end of the Day School, you will be able to extract and evaluate important information about any sale and interpret it within a wider social and historical context. The skills that you acquire will also be helpful in a wide range of other activities such as genealogy research, local history studies and the study of historical documents.