-
Experiencing Exclusion: Scholarship after Inquisition The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-09-18 Natalie Zemon Davis, Stefan Hanß
In 1952, while working on my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, two men from the Department of State came to our apartment and picked up my passport and that of my husband, Chandler Davis. In 1962, Chandler was finally allowed to immigrate to Canada with his family and take up a professorship at the University of Toronto. The ten years in between were packed with politics: Chandler’s refusal to answer
-
Sumptuary Laws, Gender, and Public Dressing in Early Modern Genoa The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-09-09 Ana Howie
This article explores sumptuary legislation and its enforcement in early modern Genoa. Whereas the sumptuary laws from other early modern Italian city-states partitioned society by social rank, profession, or citizenship, the laws in effect in late sixteenth-century Genoa divided the population only into men and women. Genoa therefore represents a key site for exploring gender difference through dress
-
The Construction of ‘Tribe’ as a Socio-Political Unit in Global History The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-30 Elisabeth Leake
This article explores the construction of ‘tribe’ as a socio-political unit of global history, revealing an evolution of ideas and practices, both of which actively sought to limit, by co-opting, the opportunities and agency of Indigenous groups. The category of ‘tribe’ was, and is, co-constitutive of Euro-American empire. Euro-American empires created two interlinked dynamics in the social history
-
Trust, Guilds, and Kinship in London, 1330–1680 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-30 Ammaarah Adam, Raphael Adès, William Banks, Canberk Benning, Gwyneth Grant, Harry Forster-Brass, Owen McGiveron, Joseph Miller, Daniel Phelan, Sebastian Randazzo, Matthew Reilly, Michael Scott, Sebastian Serban, Carys Stockton, Patrick Wallis
How was trust created and reinforced between the inhabitants of medieval and early modern cities? And how did the social foundations of trusting relationships change over time? Current research highlights the role of kinship, neighbourhood, and associations, particularly guilds, in creating ‘relationships of trust’ and social capital in the face of high levels of migration, mortality, and economic
-
Entrepreneurial Philanthropy at Cromford, Quarry Bank, and Saltaire Mills during the Industrial Revolution The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-07 David Yates
This article offers a spatial examination of entrepreneurial philanthropy at Cromford, Quarry Bank, and Saltaire mills during the industrial revolution. It argues that entrepreneurial philanthropy at these mills, with its new social relations, was influenced by both market competition and philanthropy, to the extent that active welfare provision was dependent on profitable enterprise and creation of
-
Unlawful Carnal Knowledge in the Irish Free State, 1924–1935 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-03 David M. Doyle
Despite a growing body of research on sexual violence in Irish history, and on recently reported historic sexual offences, few studies have focused on sex offenders who were prosecuted and convicted contemporaneously in the early decades of the Irish Free State. This article examines hitherto restricted archival files on sixty-five offenders who were convicted of unlawful carnal knowledge under the
-
The Rushdie Affair and the Politics of Multicultural Britain The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-04-25 Kieran Connell
It is more than thirty years since Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa (religious decree) calling for the execution of the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, whose third novel, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988. But the ‘Rushdie Affair’ has yet to be subject to a sustained analysis by historians. Journalists and political scientists continue to focus on the fatwa
-
Melancholy, Spiritual Experience, and Dissent in England, c. 1650–1700 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-04-23 Finola Finn
The involvement of melancholy had the potential to undermine the authority of early modern individuals’ religious experiences, reframing their spiritual afflictions as the mere product of a distempered body. This article refines our understanding of the shifting relationship between melancholy and spiritual experience in the second half of the seventeenth century in England. Focusing on the views of
-
Social Discipline and the Refusal of Poor Relief under the English Old Poor Law, c. 1650–1730 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-04-08 Jonathan Healey
There has been debate about the extent to which the English old poor law could operate as a system of social discipline. This article looks closely at an almost completely neglected set of sources, petitions by local communities asking to stop (or cut) a pauper’s relief, to assess how far poor relief was used as a disciplinary tool. Taking 182 appeals by Lancashire townships from the Civil War to the
-
Phantoms in and of the Archive: Mary Cudmore’s Encounters with a Ghost in Cork in 1688 and 1689 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-04-04 Clodagh Tait
In October 1688, and again in May 1689, Mary Cudmore claimed to have encountered a ‘spectre’ in her employers’ house in Cork city. The great interest the story aroused among the townspeople is indicated in letters from prominent inhabitants and an examination of Mary by the bishop of Cork and Ross. They allow us access into the homes and heads of the people of Cork at a point when significant challenges
-
Prayer for Family and Friends: The Body and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-03-26 Karen Harvey, Emily Vine
This article explores how writers, predominantly adhering to a variety of different Christian denominations but also including Jewish writers, discussed religion and the body in letters throughout the long eighteenth century. It draws on a corpus of over 2,500 familiar letters written by men and women of different denominations between 1675 and 1820. That these letters were not chosen because of their
-
From Field Walking to Phenomenology: A Review of Recent British Landscape Historiography The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-03-21 Jeremy Burchardt
This review identifies three major traditions in British landscape historiography: material/environmental, cultural, and phenomenological. The continuing vitality, methodological rigour, and popular reach of the material tradition is emphasized, notwithstanding persistent questions about the adequacy of its theoretical foundations. Its close cousin historical ecology has meanwhile developed into a
-
Imperial Violence, Law, and Compensation in the Age of Empire, 1919–1922 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Hardeep Dhillon
The intricacies of modern compensation procedures that value human life, injury, and property are often overlooked, despite growing demands for reparations and justice following state violence. This article historicizes the legal structures of modern compensation, arguing that the advent of imperial rule was characterized not only by the extraction of material resources and labour, but also by the
-
Irish-American Anti-Imperialism in Patrick Ford’s The Criminal History of the British Empire The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Robert O’Sullivan
In 1881, Patrick Ford, the Irish-American nationalist editor of the New York Irish newspaper The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, published The criminal history of the British empire, a collection of five letters that he had written to William Gladstone. In The criminal history, Ford constructed a comprehensive account of British imperial history, beginning with England’s conquest of
-
Natural Teleology in John Locke’s Ethics The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-02-27 Graedon Zorzi
According to some of the past half-century’s most influential critics of liberalism, John Locke is the pivotal subverter of the pre-modern ethical tradition. Locke’s view of nature and of human nature, the story goes, divorced ethics from natural teleology and so set off an inevitable spiral downward into moral dissolution. This story about Locke remains influential even though the last fifty years
-
Before Stockholm: Emotions and Victimhood in Mediterranean Kidnapping Narratives, 1866–1921 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Juliane Hornung
Fifty years ago, the infamous bank robbery and ensuing hostage crisis that took place in a Stockholm bank gave rise to the so-called ‘Stockholm syndrome’. Though never recognized as a valid medical diagnosis, the (allegedly) pathological relationship between kidnapper and hostage has become an omnipresent media phenomenon that inspires movies and television series to this day. However, this forced
-
Plane Hijackings between Cuba and the United States and the Opportunity for Diplomacy (1958–1973) The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Dan Porat
Between 1958 and 1973, hijackings between Cuba and the US surged, prompting Cuban officials in the early 1960s to propose an extradition agreement for hijackers. However, the US, leveraging its superpower status, dismissed these initiatives, viewing hijackers as political asylum seekers rather than criminals. By the late 1960s, as hijackings escalated from the US to Cuba, the American approach shifted
-
The British Occupation and the Making of Democracy in Italy and Germany, 1943–1949 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-02-02 Camilo Erlichman, Pepijn Corduwener
Over the past two decades, historians have become increasingly fascinated by the question of what enabled the emergence of a stable model of democracy in post-war Western Europe, characterized by the persistence of pre-war elites and top-down forms of decision-making. This article reveals the importance of the British occupations during and after the Second World War in fostering this model of democracy
-
The Evolution of Scottish Enlightenment Publishing The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-01-23 Yann Ciarán Ryan, Mikko Tolonen
This article uses large-scale bibliographic data to extract and analyse the works, authors, and publishers of the Scottish Enlightenment. By doing so, we aim to encompass a wider scope and definition of Scottish Enlightenment publishing, contextualizing both the major and the lesser-known publishers. We reveal two competing models for key Scottish publishers: those working in Scotland, publishing works
-
The Moriscos of Salé and the Hispanic Monarchy: Power Agents and Identities to the West of the Strait of Gibraltar, 1631–1632 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Luis Salas Almela
This article examines the multiple frontiers between Maghrebi Islam and the southern European Catholic world by focusing on a very specific episode during the struggle for control of Rabat, capital of present-day Morocco. It addresses the problem of military and political control of the Strait of Gibraltar, which was closely linked to widespread corsair raids in the early seventeenth century. It also
-
Imagining a Channel Tunnel in France after the First World War The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-11-29 Alison Carrol
The cultural shift that France experienced after the First World War has commonly been analysed through the prism of attitudes towards Germany, and the continuation of wartime prejudices in the immediate post-war period. Yet, an exploration of imaginings of future relations with a wartime ally reveals a broad spectrum of assumptions and expectations that span the transition from war to peace. Taking
-
Quarantine, Diseased Geographies, and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Eighteenth-Century Mediterranean The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-11-29 Marina Inì
The article examines the relationship between quarantine practices and Western European medical notions of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean, as well as the crucial role of quarantine centres in facilitating trade and mobility between the East and the West. I argue that quarantine should be analysed to understand the complexity of the early modern Mediterranean as a shared
-
The Tana-Beles Project in Ethiopia and the Making of Postcolonial Humanitarianism, 1938–1994 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Silvia Salvatici
This article takes the example of the Tana-Beles project – a scheme sponsored by Italy to respond to the 1980s famine in Ethiopia – to demonstrate that postimperial international relief policies and practices were woven into the very fabric of the colonial past. Postcolonial humanitarianism emerges as the transformation of colonial practices and relationships into new policies, which did not depend
-
Ciceronian Jurisprudence and the Law of Nations The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-10-26 Jeffrey Dymond
At the turn of the seventeenth century, jurists such as Alberico Gentili (1552–1608) and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), began to advance a novel account of the law of nations (ius gentium) as a law that binds a world of sovereign states. That they would produce such a theory is surprising, however, considering that sovereign states were neither the dominant form of political organization at the time, nor
-
Maria Weston Chapman, French Salons, and Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-10-26 Kate Rivington
This article examines the idea of anti-slavery sociability as part of a wider analysis of the informal elements of the transatlantic anti-slavery movement. It considers how American abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman drew support for the American anti-slavery cause from French salons during her time spent living in Paris from 1848 to 1855. This case-study highlights how a focus on the informal dimensions
-
Reconstructing the Labour of Care in Early Modern England The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-10-26 Charmian Mansell
Uncertainty about what constitutes work in the past has led to the labour of care occupying a shadowy place in the histories of both medicine and the economy. This article takes a microhistorical approach to shed new light on care in early modern England. Using depositions and other surviving records of a testamentary dispute heard in the Hereford diocesan church court in 1674–5, the article reconstructs
-
Mothers’ Milk and Mothers’ Time: Childcare Advice and the Conceptualization of Demand Feeding in Post-1945 Britain and Italy The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Niamh Cullen, Katharina Rowold
This article draws on childcare advice to investigate the shift from breastfeeding by the clock to feeding on demand in twentieth-century Britain and Italy, to demonstrate that it was not just mothers’ bodies, nor what they fed their children, but their time that was subject to political, medical, and cultural attention. The comparative approach highlights the convergences and divergences in breastfeeding
-
Suffrage and the Secret Ballot in Eighteenth-Century London Parishes The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Jonah Miller
This article argues that pre-nineteenth-century elections at a sub-national level have an important place in the history of ‘modern’ voting practices. It does this through a discussion of unusually well-documented election disputes in eighteenth-century London parishes. Previously neglected records of litigation in the ecclesiastical courts reveal that parish elections in this period generated arguments
-
Paine’s Rights of man in Germany The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-09-28 Elias Buchetmann
This article traces the immediate reception of Paine’s Rights of man (Part One) in Germany. It especially focuses on the publication history of the complete translation published in Berlin in 1792, featuring the translator Meta Forkel, her collaborator Georg Forster, and the publisher Christian Friedrich Voß. This reconstruction affords insight into the process of translation as a collaborative enterprise
-
Proximity, Patronage and Politics in the Correspondence of Lady Elizabeth Anson, c. 1748–1760 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-09-15 Alice Whitehead
This article examines the life of Lady Elizabeth Anson (1725–60), daughter of Philip Yorke, 1st earl of Hardwicke, and the wife of Admiral George Lord Anson, first lord of the admiralty. Using a sample of her letters, this article argues that Lady Anson engaged with letter-writing as an inherently political activity. Previous studies of Lady Anson’s correspondence have emphasized her role in the Yorkes’
-
English Travel Writers’ Representations of Freedom in the United Provinces, c. 1670–1795 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-09-06 William H. F. Mitchell
From the Second Anglo-Dutch War to the fall of the United Provinces (c. 1670–1795), dozens of English writers published accounts of their travels across the North Sea. The English and the Dutch were bound by centuries of intellectual, political, and cultural interaction. Factors like a shared confession and similar economic structures meant that Anglo-Dutch relations were uniquely intimate, and this
-
Reassessing the Marginalization of Astrology in the Early Modern World The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-09-06 Michelle Pfeffer
The marginalization of astrology – the protracted process by which a rich scholarly field and a highly skilled trade migrated into the margins of European culture – is coming to be recognized as one of the most fundamental transformations in the transition from the pre-modern to the modern world. Long assumed to be a casualty of the ‘scientific revolution’ and ‘Enlightenment’, since the 1970s historians
-
Alsace in Algeria and the Notion of ‘Failure’ in Settler Political Culture, c. 1870–1960 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Avner Ofrath
This article explores a key trope in the history of French colonial Algeria: the idea of the colony as a failure. The focus is on the resettlement of Alsatians and Lorrainers in Algeria in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. What started as a wave of nationalist elan that sought to rebuild the lost provinces in France’s largest colony soon became the object of criticism and controversy, depicted
-
Toll Disputes, Grain Marketing, and Economic Culture in England, c. 1550–1800 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Hillary Taylor
Tolls were not only fundamental to the operation of early modern English markets, but also had the capacity to generate tensions that belied their seemingly unremarkable role in contemporary economic affairs. Yet, tolls and toll disputes have received little attention in studies of market regulation and have also been neglected in studies of the politics of grain supply and marketing. This article
-
William Munro Tapp: Colonial Investor and Caius College Philanthropist, 1925–1937 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Nicolas Bell-Romero
William Munro Tapp, the largest post-foundation benefactor to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, was a prominent lawyer who directed multiple businesses interested in water utilities, motor car manufacturing, and brewing. That much is acknowledged at Caius today. Yet Tapp was also a director of the sugar refiners Manbré & Garton Limited, and he helped establish a sugar plantation in Kenya. Alongside
-
Noble-Bourgeois Elites in an Age of Revolutions, c. 1790–1850 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-08-24 Amerigo Caruso
This article focuses on the shift toward post-revolutionary politics supported by reform-minded aristocratic clans and their bourgeois allies. Using the example of the Balbo family – one of the leading aristocratic families in Sardinia-Piedmont – I will argue that the quest for stability and pragmatism is crucial to understanding the political, cultural, and ideological reorientations within the noble-bourgeois
-
The Western Design Revised: Death, Dissent, and Discontent on the Gloucester, 1654–1656 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-08-09 Benjamin W. D. Redding
In December 1654 a large naval force departed from Portsmouth and sailed across the Atlantic. Its goal was to expand the English Commonwealth in the Caribbean at the expense of Spanish colonies. The Gloucester, a third-rate frigate recently constructed as part of Oliver Cromwell's ambitious shipbuilding programme, was one of the largest and most heavily armed warships of the expedition. Combining analysis
-
The Making of J. S. Mill's Collected Works, and Its Aftermath The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-08-08 Bruce Kinzer
In 1973, a conference was held in Toronto to mark the bicentenary of James Mill's birth and the centenary of John Stuart Mill's death. By that time, Toronto had emerged as the centre of Mill studies. Between 1963 and 1973, the University of Toronto Press had published, in a scholarly edition, eleven volumes of Mill's Collected works. A further twenty-two volumes would appear in the eighteen years that
-
Prosperity and Precarity in Imperial Russia's Long Nineteenth Century The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-27 Alison K. Smith
This article looks at four families living in and around the small town of Gatchina, not far from St Petersburg, Russia, in the long nineteenth century. Their family histories are recreated from archival files based in tsarist Russia's system of social estates (soslovie), supplemented by city directories, newspapers, and many other sources. Taken together, the four family histories expand our understanding
-
The Scottish Enlightenment and the Remaking of Modern History The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-05 Tom Pye
This article offers a new interpretation of the history-writing produced in Enlightenment Scotland. It argues that after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 was blamed on Scotland's ‘feudal’ institutions, Scottish jurists and historians began to interrogate what it meant to become 'modern'. Instead of accepting the Whig claim that England provided the ideal model for social and political development, they
-
Clerical Child Sexual Abuse and the Culture Wars in France, 1891–1913 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-06-26 Timothy Verhoeven
This article investigates clerical child sexual abuse in the first decades of the French Third Republic. Thanks in large part to the difficulty of accessing relevant archival records, we know very little about this crime or how it was investigated by judicial officials. This study addresses this gap by drawing on a rich and untapped collection of correspondence between local prosecutors and the Ministry
-
Myth, Manchester, and the Battle of British Public Opinion during the American Civil War The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-06-19 David Brown
Manchester ‘working men’ approved an address in support of Abraham Lincoln's emancipation policy and the American Union at the Free Trade Hall on 31 December 1862. The US president described their gesture as ‘sublime Christian heroism’ when hopes of restoring the cotton supply and reopening the mills were better served by Confederate recognition. This transatlantic exchange became an integral part
-
Librarians as Agents of German Foreign Policy and the Cultural Consequences of the First World War The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Dina Gusejnova
In this article I explore the cultural impact of the First World War by analysing the work of libraries and librarians in different settings, from German-occupied Belgium and prisoner-of-war camps to Germany's own public and private libraries. By examining the work of German, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and American librarians, the article makes a case for applying the notion of a ‘long’ First World
-
Author's Response The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-30 Javier Fernández Sebastián
First of all, I would like to thank my interlocutors for their interest in my work, and for their kindness in agreeing to participate in this Roundtable. It is a great honour for me to have three such distinguished scholars commenting on my book and offering their criticisms and remarks, which help me to refine and nuance some of its arguments. I also hope that this discussion will enable readers of
-
Learning ‘To Read Again’ The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-30 Eduardo Posada-Carbó
Javier Fernández Sebastián's latest book is truly a tour de force. While it offers a lucid appraisal of conceptual history, with a focus on the ‘conceptual revolution’ that the Iberian Atlantic underwent during the first half of the nineteenth century, it is also a serious statement on the profession – indeed, ‘no discipline’, as he tells us, can sustain itself ‘if it is not based on a theoretical
-
Rethinking Conceptual History in an Iberian Atlantic Perspective The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-30 Maria Elisa Noronha de Sá
Javier Fernández Sebastián's outstanding book, Historia conceptual en el Atlántico ibérico: lenguajes, tiempos, revoluciones, is already an essential reference for all those interested not only in conceptual history or the history of Ibero-American societies, but also in reflecting on history itself, as well as on the dilemmas and challenges involved in its writing. Its text is the fruit of a seasoned
-
Theory of History, Epistemic Transformations, and Presentism The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-30 Nicola Miller
This remarkable book is an outcome of many years of reflection on conceptual history by one of its leading exponents, who through the magnificent Iberconceptos project has explored the scope for thinking about the life of ideas ‘beyond Bielefeld (Koselleck) and Cambridge (Skinner)’. Fernández Sebastián here offers a master class in what conceptual history can be in the hands of a seasoned practitioner
-
Finland and Military Volunteers in the Swedish Fascist Imaginary, 1809–1944 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Nathaniël D. B. Kunkeler
This article explores the place of Finland and the Swedish military volunteers of the 1918 civil war, and 1939–44 Finno-Soviet wars, in the Swedish fascist imaginary. The loss of Finland to Russia in 1809 was heavily romanticized in Swedish nationalist culture, and shaped Swedish responses to both conflicts, mediated through famous literary works which encouraged a sense of shame and betrayal. Through
-
The 1939 Option Agreement and the ‘Consistent Ambivalence’ of Fascist Policies towards Minorities in the Italian New Provinces The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-02 Emmanuel Dalle Mulle, Alessandro Ambrosino
The 1939 Option Agreement between Italy and Germany concerning South Tyrol was the first population transfer agreement in western European history. Its analysis offers a unique opportunity to shift the focus of the historiography on interwar minority questions from eastern to western Europe, thus challenging the lingering view of eastern Europe as a land of endemic ethnic heterogeneity and conflict
-
Locating Childbirth Devotion in the English Parish Church, 1450–1580 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Róisín Donohoe
Childbirth in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England was not simply a medical affair but a social and religious event, with an associated array of complex devotional practices. This article challenges the widely held view that such practices were generally confined to the home and shows how the English parish church accommodated public devotional childbirth customs and objects. Using the perspectives
-
The Indian Civil Service, Classical Studies, and an Education in Empire, 1890–1914 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Heather Ellis
The years between 1890 and 1914 saw several prominent studies from statesmen-administrators comparing British India with the Roman empire. These were not the self-congratulatory comparisons of earlier decades, but serious comparative studies aimed at learning practical lessons from Rome's successes and failures. To gain a clearer picture of the significance of these analogies and how they were used
-
Interpreting Eric Hobsbawm's History of the Fin de Siècle ‘Twilight Zone’ The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-07 Mark Hearn
Eric Hobsbawm's account of the fin de siècle of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its post-First World War aftermath, raises the questions of how historians place themselves autobiographically in their histories, and how personal history informs their interpretations. A focus on the fin de siècle reveals Hobsbawm exploring a cultural social democracy as an alternative to the market
-
Luís Fróis, Gendered Knowledge, and the Jesuit Encounter with Sixteenth-Century Japan The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-28 Jessica O'Leary
This article argues that our understanding of the sixteenth-century Jesuit encounter with Japan is improved by taking into account the role gender played in cultural translation. Recent histories of the mission and the writings it produced have highlighted the strategies adopted by Jesuits to rely on and manipulate knowledge of local cultures to facilitate conversion. Yet, few scholars have used gender
-
Explaining the Calendar: The Catholic Church and Family Planning in Poland, 1930–1957 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-15 Natalia Jarska, Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska
This article explores continuities and discontinuities in Polish Catholic discourses on family planning across a time span that tends to be divided in the historiography on Poland and political history in general. The period we analyse begins in 1930, with the pivotal encyclical Casti connubii defining church doctrine on contraception, and ends with the legalization of abortion in 1956, and a state-sponsored
-
Mass Pilgrimage and the Usable Empire in a Napoleonic Borderland The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-15 Kilian Harrer
This article analyses the biggest pilgrimage event of the Napoleonic era, showing how Catholics used imperial opportunities and imperial loopholes to progress on their path toward religious revival. In September 1810, more than 200,000 pilgrims rushed to the small provincial city of Trier to venerate one of Christianity's most important relics, the Holy Coat of Jesus. This pilgrimage could take place
-
Understanding Early Modern Beer: An Interdisciplinary Case-Study The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Susan Flavin, Marc Meltonville, Charlie Taverner, Joshua Reid, Stephen Lawrence, Carlos Belloch-Molina, John Morrissey
Beer was a staple of early modern diets across northern Europe and the Atlantic World. While its profound social, economic, and cultural significance is well established, little is known about the nature and quality of the drink itself, particularly its nutritional characteristics. Until now, attempts to estimate calorie and alcohol content have been monodisciplinary in approach, involving either theoretical
-
Modernity, the State, and New Medical Histories in Non-European Contexts The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-03 Saurabh Mishra
Histories of medicine and science in the colonies have, conceptually and theoretically, travelled some distance in the last three decades. While public health and epidemics in certain Asian contexts,1 and mental health and medical stereotypes in the African case,2 appear to have preoccupied historians during the early years, there has been an increasing willingness to charter new paths and explore
-
The Early Political Thought and Publishing Career of V. K. Krishna Menon, 1928–1938 The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-02 Jack Bowman
This article assesses Indian activist V. K. Krishna Menon's early political thought, formed during his years in Britain prior to Indian independence. It argues that this was more nuanced than has been previously characterized, with a range of influences and foundations. To analyse the formation and evolution of Menon's political thought, it looks at his political actions from this period, which largely
-
The Right to Life, the Right to Nature, and the Impact of Irish Land on Political Thought in the 1880s The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-01-27 Andrew Phemister
The Irish Land War was a pivotal conflict in the history of liberal political thought. With significant impacts on both sides of the Atlantic, events in Ireland were about more than Irish self-determination. Heavily reliant on a discourse of natural right, and asserting a relationship between land ownership and democratic-republican citizenship, the Land War provided a vehicle for popular radical opposition
-
Planned Plunder, the British Museum, and the 1868 Maqdala Expedition The Historical Journal (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-01-18 Lucia Patrizio Gunning, Debbie Challis
In 1863, Emperor Tewodros II of Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea) took a British consul hostage; five years later, the British sent a punitive expedition. This military expedition continued the brutal tradition of earlier ones and shaped later campaigns in Sudan and West Africa in the 1890s. Typically, a large contingent of non-military personnel accompanied these expeditions and the 1868