Researching and Teaching with British Newsreels

Following the free online publication of several digitized newsreel collections, this article seeks to articulate a place for newsreels as a primary source base in twentieth-century British history, and to provide some basic guidance for students, teachers, and researchers who might wish to integrate newsreels into their work. It briefly traces the history of the newsreel industry in Britain, the conditions of newsreel production and distribution, and newsreels' audience. It discusses how a digital newsreel archive came to be constructed and how it has been used in the past for both academic and pedagogical purposes. It argues that researchers and teachers can overcome scepticism about newsreels' unreliability as primary sources, engaging with the sources critically to a variety of ends. It demonstrates these claims with a case-study about films of inter-war university 'rag' festivities, and with a variety of practical suggestions about how to incorporate newsreels into undergraduate teaching.