Our Story
History journals and magazines exist. History blogs and websites exist. Women’s and queer history journals and blogs exist. Yet these histories are still novel. Their historians struggle to get their work into mainstream publications. When featured in public media, they fulfil a diversity quota, or a ‘special interest.’
Abby, our founder, knew that she wanted to be a historian when she started trying to stay up and watch The Tudors with her mum. Unsurprisingly, their first and forever interest will lay with the Tudor Court, but that is another story… Abby did the sensible thing, she read, she went to Uni, graduating from her BA in 2021 and then her MA in 2022. She found her specialism (women, art, sex, and politics in the Early Modern period). Then they ran into a brick wall. Heritage, history, and research is a saturated industry, there is a common saying that the jobs in museums are so rare because people will ‘die in them’, before they retire. Which put Abby in a tricky employment situation. So, they focussed on their research, building up an academic CV and working on PhD proposals. Then, they received the rejections, standard.
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Abby had had enough, reigniting a fantasy she had at 9 years old and inheriting the Horrible Histories Magazine Collection from her older cousins: writing her own history magazine. She decided that if no one wanted to publish the history she wanted to write and read, then she would do it herself.
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Throughout December 2022 Abby planned out what they wanted to create: a website which was colourful, engaging, easy to understand, and educational. In January 2023 she built and launched the (very basic) site and started writing. In June 2023 she started building a team. Despite assuming no one would want to join, Abby was, by the end of the summer, leading a team of 27 volunteers. (They’re amazing and you can meet them here).
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The HERstory Project is a platform for early career historians, academics, and writers to engage with their research interests in a judgement free, accessible way. The Project came from a desire to share the histories that get censored from mainstream history, to showcase and spotlight the events and people that are still too often ignored and overlooked.
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We pledge that the website will always remain free access and prioritise underrepresented histories and their historians.
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To learn about the core values of the project, read here