The Nervous State: Searching the Archive for a History from Within of Appeasement

This is the third of three documentary films about knowledge exchange and collaboration on "The Nervous State" of historian Julie V. Gottlieb, writer-director Nicola Baldwin, together with archivists, the Historical Association, high school history teachers, artists and the heritage sector.

In this episode we hear from archivists at the Neville Chamberlain Papers, University of Birmingham, and the Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex, and history teacher Sarah Davis about using the collections to illuminate a history from within (an emotional and intimate history) of the Munich Crisis (September 1938) and the coming of WWII.

These sources sit nicely alongside F.L. Lucas's Journal Under the Terror, 1938 (1939), a source in which the Bloomsbury writer and diarist tells the future what it "felt like to live in that strange, tormented and demented world".