In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, identity documents and proofs of age were often lost or unavailable, bodies and behaviours had been marked by years of malnourishment and persecution, young people had learned to misrepresent their age for the sake of survival, and administrations routinely doubted age claims. The war had profoundly disrupted the system for knowing age that had become

Agnes Arnold-Forster, ‘Racing Pulses: Gender, Professionalism and Health Care in Medical Romance Fiction’, History Workshop Journal 91, pp. 157–181, doi:10.1093/hwj/dbab011

When, during the Revolution, the French government committed to supporting the education of Deaf people, they left it to teachers to determine the methods and contents of this education. Less than a century later, the Ministry of the Interior of the third Republic reformed the teaching in use in most institutions in the direction of methods of pure speech. This moment coincided with the development

Inspections of the body’s most intimate surfaces were crucial to rape cases in early modern England. Female medical experts evaluated bruises, lacerations, and stretched skin for evidence of a violation. Yet numerous courtroom investigations seemed to centre around the marks of venereal disease rather than sexual abuse. These cases reframed the focus of inquiry from rape to disease at nearly every

‘The Lion, the Children and the Bookcase’, Margaret Reynolds C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Anne Frank’s diary, or The Diary of a Young Girl, were published in 1950 and 1947 respectively. Frank’s document is a testament to history. Lewis’s story is usually read as a fantasy or Christian allegory. But both books deal with the experience of racial hatred, betrayal, displacement

How might histories of fascism in interwar Europe help us today? Languages of ‘fascism’ are now constantly in play – as warning and slogan; as emotional rallying-point; as rhetorics of recognition and abuse; as a boundary of legitimate politics – but rarely as carefully informed argument. For effective politics, we need historically grounded analysis that can avert tendentious and direct linkages that

CarbyHazel, Imperial Intimacies: a Tale of Two Islands, Verso Press, London, 2019; 400pp.

AbstractFollowing the foundation of the NHS in 1948, a new sub-genre of romantic fiction emerged: ‘Doctor–Nurse’ romances, usually involving romance between a male doctor and a female nurse, were set in NHS hospitals. Drawing on the Mills & Boon archive and the novels themselves, this article explores representations of the health service and notions of gendered healthcare professionalism in postwar

On 16 September 2018, the University of Glasgow released the report ‘Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow’. This acknowledged that slave-owners, merchants and planters with connections to New World slavery – and their descendants – donated capital between 1697 and 1937 that influenced the development of the institution. In producing this report, the institution became the first British

BlandLucy, Britain’s Brown Babies: the Stories of Children born to Black GIs and White Women in the Second World War, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2019, pp. 271.

This article examines the movement, led by prominent black British activists, which was established in the aftermath of the 1981 New Cross fire. The campaign showed how the racism long experienced by black urban communities eroded trust in state institutions, and it contested the official narrative of the police investigation and a coroner’s inquest through protests and the deployment of alternative

Let’s get a few things straight before we begin. First, I really, really, dislike the word `passion’. If any one says it of me, or my writing, I cringe. (I use it of myself, self-mockingly, sometimes, but only when the satiric mode is dialled up so high that nobody could not hear.) It is so … schoolgirlish, so naively keen; so very … unironic. And lurking somewhere in my dislike is a considered distaste

This paper considers the meetings of the interwar Pan-African Congress movement. It examines the Congress in the context of how conferencing became a dominant mode of international politics in the 1920s and the opportunities this offered to non-state actors. The Congress exemplified the hope which race reformers placed in the new international system established after the First World War, and in the

This essay reveals the ways that runaways and abolitionists, through their critiques of American prisons in the decades prior to the American Civil War, collectively originated the ideas and practices of prison abolition. It began with fugitive slaves who named slavery the ‘prison house’. Runaways, and the most radical amongst abolitionists, many of whom served time for their activism, used fugitives’

MokhtefiElaine, Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers, Verso, London and New York, 2018 ISBN: 9781788730006.

PriceDerrick, Coal Cultures: Picturing Mining Landscapes and Communities, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. xii + 196, illus., h/b, £85.00, ISBN 978-1-350-03783-0.

Between 1833 and 1841 the Children’s Friend Society, a London-based philanthropic organization, sent some eight hundred children from England to the Cape, where they were apprenticed to local settlers. This article focuses on two of them: Alfred Brooks, aged thirteen or fourteen, and twelve-year-old Elizabeth Foulger. Both of these children appear in archival traces because they transgressed and were

Looking at the casebooks kept by the early modern astrologer-physician Richard Napier, this article offers a close reading of cases in which he linked his patients’ ‘madness’ to their recent childbearing. Exploring this linkage, it engages with a longstanding historiographical debate about the relationship of culture, corporeality, and subjective embodiment. Napier’s ideas about childbirth-related

AbstractThis article explores nationalism and consumption in British-mandate Palestine using a history-from-below approach. It focuses on Arab and Jewish peddlers who regularly crossed national, cultural, and geographic borders in order to conduct petty trade with customers. Colonial and nationalist actors worked hard to curb the ubiquitous presence of such peddlers for various reasons. First, British

Halfway up the exit stairs of a Kyoto subway station lies the entrance to a small nightclub called, appropriately enough, Metro. It’s been there for several decades, serving a cosmopolitan mix of people drawn from the art schools and universities in the immediate neighbourhood and non-mainstream music scenes from across the wider Kansai region of western Japan. Once a month it also hosts the region’s

This article uses the strange and marvellous as a heuristic device to study the relationship between emotions, media and politics in early modern Venice. In particular, it examines how printed news about the marvels of the Levant mediated Venice’s encounters with its colonial subjects and imperial rivals, and analyses the role of wonder and imagination in the creation of an imperial community of feelings

This article offers new perspectives on the commemorative events organized around the UK in 2007 to mark the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (1807). Drawing from the resources contained in Remembering 1807, a digital archive of information about nearly 350 events and exhibitions held in 2007, it offers a closer look at the variety, diversity and creativity of projects organized

In this article, I discuss humiliation parades as described by eleventh-century Byzantine historians, focusing on the role of mules and donkeys in them. More specifically, I examine how the presence of these equids could change the meaning of a scene in the works of Michael Attaleiates, John Skylitzes, and Michael Psellos. I argue that, as the social and religious connotations of mules and donkeys

First established in New York in 1880, the Irish Ladies’ Land League soon had branches across Ireland, the USA, Britain, Canada and Australasia and represented an unprecedented advance in Irish women’s political activism. In Dundee, Scotland the organization found a particularly receptive environment due to the distinctive gender balance of the Irish community there, with working-class women a large

GraysonRichard S., Dublin’s Great Wars: the First World War, the Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution,Cambridge University Press, 2018.

This article introduces an experiment in collaborative historical practice. It describes how six historians visited the East Devon village of Branscombe, with the aim of creatively engaging with the present and past of the village. This was a collaborative and collective act of what we term here ‘creative dislocation’. By dislocating from our usual routines, subjects, places, methods, and styles, and

Focusing upon the achievement of the abolition of British slavery in 1833 has obscured significant continuities between slavery, apprenticeship, and the post-emancipation period, particularly in the new Anglophone settler colonies. During the decade leading up to abolition, domestic unrest intensified the tension between the elite abolitionist movement’s humanitarian concern for Caribbean slaves, and

This article explores the participation of immigrants, or people born outside the kingdom, in urban politics in later medieval England. It demonstrates that the nationality of these newcomers was of only secondary importance. What mattered most was whether immigrants’ economic and political interests aligned with those of the civic political elites. If they did not, aliens’ nationality could be mobilized

This article argues that Pacific Islander labour in Australia was not analogous to earlier Atlantic world slavery and can better be understood as its ‘illegitimate offspring’. Through case studies that connect the Caribbean to Australia, it reveals how the idea of Pacific Islander labour was forged in an environment where the abolitionist battle had been won, but where the interconnected and changing

Analysing a comprehensive shift in the governance of the British Empire in the mid 1830s, this article introduces the context for the following three articles in the Feature, ‘Legacies of Slave Ownership’. This shift included the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean, upon which these articles concentrate, but also the restructuring of the East India Company. A reformed British parliament introduced

E. R. J. Owen – known to his family, friends and colleagues as Roger – died on 23 December 2018 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of eighty-three. Over the course of a long and distinguished career Roger produced pioneering scholarly work of lasting importance on many different dimensions of the economic, political and social history of the modern Middle East, a field in whose intellectual

Roger was a romantic. When I first knew him, in the late 1950s, he would talk intensely about how we are born alone, we die alone, and we must learn to be alone.

When the British government abolished slavery in the Caribbean and compensated the slave-owners, some of the beneficiaries and/or their children and grandchildren went to Australia to make a new life and if possible a new fortune. This essay traces the history of one such family, the Shiells of Montserrat, alongside two other contemporaneous histories – that of Yorkshire radical and convict, John Burkinshaw

AbstractIn the summer of 1981 a series of riots broke out across England. Here we look at the contemporary photojournalism of the Moss Side, Manchester, riots in the local newspaper, the Manchester Evening News, in order to better understand the riots and media representation of riots more generally. We begin by exploring the contradictory nature of photography (and news photography in particular)

AbstractIn this article we reflect upon the many advantages of collaborations between academic historians and artists, as a method for presenting our work, communicating with different audiences and, most importantly, beginning conversations which cause us to think about our research in new and creative ways. We argue that collaboration allows us to rethink the boundaries of expertise, it opens up

AbstractOn the back of the Royal Historical Society’s 2018 report on race and ethnicity, as well as ongoing discussions about ‘decolonizing the syllabus’, this is a conversation piece titled, ‘Decolonizing History: Enquiry and Practice’. While ‘decolonization’ has been a key framework for historical research, it has assumed increasingly varied and nebulous meanings in teaching, where calls for ‘decolonizing’

AbstractThis essay traces the movements of a library from New York to Lahore in the wake of the First World War and then to Shimla and Chandigarh following the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. It explores how this collection of books, assembled by the anti-colonial nationalist Lajpat Rai (1865–1928), intersected with and informed key moments of political struggle in twentieth-century urban

AbstractCan dogs be racist? Posing this question may seem odd and at worst, unhelpfully provocative at a time when the discourse of ‘colour-blindness’ is so pervasive. Yet the idea of ‘racist dogs’ remains salient within the post-settler societies of eastern and southern Africa, where dogs have been an integral if overlooked tool of colonial practices of racialization. This article traces the colonial

GreenFrancis and KynastonDavid, Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem, Bloomsbury, London, 2019; pp. viii+308; ISBN 9781526601261.

PasseriniLuisa, Conversations on Visual Memory, European University Institute, Florence, 2018. Available from Cadmus, European University Institute Research Repository, at: http://hdl.handle.net/1814/60164.

TrentmannFrank, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First, New York: HarperCollins, 2016.

Thatcher UlrichLaurel, Anne CarterSarah, GaskellIvan, SchechnerSara, and van GerbigSamantha, Tangible Things: Making History through Objects, OUP USA, New York, 2015.Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: the Creation and Destruction of Value – New Edition, intro. Joshua O. Reno, Pluto Press, London, 2017.

Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, ‘Metadata, Surveillance and the Tudor State’, History Workshop Journal 87, 23 January 2019, pp. 27–51, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dby033.

RedikerMarcus, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: the Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist, Beacon Press, Boston, 2017; 212 pp.

AbstractThis article explores the practice of neonaticide – the killing of an infant at the moment of birth – in Manchester during the first decades of the industrial revolution. Using a set of previously unexamined pre-trial witness statements, the author makes the case that newborn-killing was practised by working-class women in the town as a known and even accepted form of birth control. There is

AbstractThis short article evaluates the changing and conflictive discourse and practice around homosexuality over the twentieth century in Spain and Portugal. The Iberian states were under dictatorship at the time of the Stonewall riots in 1969. Despite the repressive legislation introduced in both countries, it is possible to discern resistance against the law and against a general climate of social

AbstractThe philosopher meditating alone in his study is a cliché of western culture. But behind the hackneyed image lies a long history of controversy. Was solitude the ‘palace of learning’ that many learned people, religious and secular, perceived it, or a debilitating state of solipsistic misery and intellectual degeneracy, as its enemies described it? In the mid eighteenth century the debate became

AbstractThe Netherlands and Denmark housed Europe’s first two postwar homophile organizations, and by the 1960s, activists were already debating anti-homosexual laws in national media (in the Netherlands) demonstrating publicly; thus Stonewall was not the origin of activism in either of these countries. Yet the events in New York City 1969 had two lasting influences in these countries: first, Stonewall

AbstractThe mandate to think of Stonewall as a global historical event within South Asia necessitates a difficult act of translation. Was my goal as a historian of sexuality and South Asia to decentre the primacy of Stonewall with local historical events of import? Or was it more epistemological, to address instead the question of why historical causality and memorialization works differently within

AbstractThe first experimental trials of smallpox inoculation were conducted on a group of prisoners in London’s Newgate Prison in 1721. These inmates were long believed to have been facing execution, but archival material reveals that they had in fact received pardons conditional on penal transportation to the Americas. This article rereads the design, progress, and reception of the experiment, reorienting

Huw Bennett, Michael Finch, Andrei Mamolea and David Morgan-Owen, ‘Studying Mars and Clio: Or How Not to Write about the Ethics of Military Conduct and Military History’, History Workshop Journal 88, autumn, 2019, pp. 1–7, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbz034

This paper was published twice due to an administrative error.

This article provides the first rigorous survey of coverage in the twentieth-century British press of what we now call ‘child sexual abuse’. It argues that abuse was always visible, but its place on the press agenda changed significantly. After 1918, coverage was mainly restricted to brief, euphemistic reports of court proceedings. During the 1950s and 1960s, reporting became more explicit, but abuse

This article presents the first historical account of the spectacular growth of British leisure centres throughout the 1970s. The first section explains why the concept of leisure became so prominent, and emphasizes the extent of the boom in construction of centres. The second section offers a tour of a pioneering leisure centre in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire. The third provides a history of a firm

This paper examines the explosion of activism around housing in Ireland in the late Sixties. At a time of political commemoration around the anniversaries of the 1916 Rising, and the establishment of the first revolutionary independent parliament (Dail) in 1919, a group of activists calling themselves the Dublin Housing Action Committee sought to disrupt political consensus and ask serious questions

Dibben was a small farmer and, according to Castleman’s private notebook, his conduct had been ‘commendable all these years’. Dibben’s trespass proved to be a rallying call for the people of Handley. During the next four months, more than five hundred ‘lugs’ of new fencing were destroyed and over thirty people arrested for their participation in what came to be known as ‘Dibben’s cause’. Trespass,

Doing historical research on the smaller islands of the Caribbean has always been something of a challenge. Aside from the British government’s determination to ‘migrate’ files that might cause it embarrassment, until recently official buildings offered little protection from the ravages of natural disasters. On Dominica, for example, much local documentation was destroyed in Hurricane David in 1976

This article uses a charity appeal made on behalf of one old white man in South Africa in 1912 as an entry into considering the importance of age for social histories of empire – and for settler colonialism in particular. John Lee, aged eighty-five when he made his appeal, demanded the restitution of a piece of land he claimed to have been given by an African king and, to gain public sympathy, had

This article examines how the digital is politicizing medium within historical studies. Through a critical evaluation of Mass Observation Online (MOO: the online portal for the Mass Observation Archive), the paper traces how OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has established a new hierarchy in a key archive of British social memory, centred around the typewriter, whose products are much easier to

This article, part of History Workshop Journal's 'Historic Passions' series is an analysis of an unpublished manuscript that the author's grandfather wrote on the history of the Labrador Fishery in light of the author's own life in 1990s Newfoundland, during the early years of the cod moratorium.