Get yourself educated Fatty .
David Cressy, George III Professor of British History Emeritus at The Ohio State University, is the author most recently of "
Gypsies: An English History" (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Whenever I told anyone that I was writing a history of Gypsies they would offer an anecdote, a memory, or an opinion about modern Gypsies blighting the English countryside, begging and pick-pocketing in European cities, or otherwise causing a nuisance. The views I heard were largely hostile, a mixture of myths and confused impressions about traditional Romani Gypsies, Irish Travellers, and newly-immigrant Roma in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Some also had romantic notions about Gypsy freedom and exotica, that made the Gypsies enviable and attractive, in galleries, boutiques, and fashion-styles with names like ‘The Gypsy’s Secret’.
Missing from popular notions is a sense of history. Too many of us have been persuaded that the Gypsies are a people without history, or outside of history, for whom the passage of time is irrelevant. A related idea, prevalent among some Romani activists, is that Gypsy history is complete, that enough is known about past persecutions, so that further research is unnecessary. The work presented in my new book,
Gypsies: An English History, proves both propositions to be wrong. The history of Gypsies in England and Europe is closely bound up with social changes and the powers and policies of the state over several hundred years. Explorations in English archives yield dozens of fresh stories of interactions with Gypsies that require a reassessment of ideas about their visibility, status, identity, criminality, neighborliness, and victimhood. Gypsies are part of English history, and their treatment over time reveals much about that society’s dealings with its minorities.
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