19th century

(21) rss icon
The Political Theory of American Populism

The study of the late nineteenth-century American Populist movement has long been one of the liveliest fields in American historiography. This stature definitely is fitting for one of the most formidable social movements in American history – and an uncomfortable outlier to today’s anti-populist consensus.

Read more

Bringing the Past to (Virtual) Life through Digital History Research and Pedagogy

The Mitford and Launditch Hundred House of Industry, now the Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse Museum, presents the historian with major opportunities for (re)imagining the past. Our digital modelling necessitated pulling off the mask it currently wears as a museum, stripping away the residue of its time as a twentieth-century Old Age Home, and uncovering the architectural and functional changes that turned it into a Union Workhouse of the New Poor Law period, after 1834.

Read more

The Wallachian Revolution of 1848

What began in Sicily with a protest against Bourbon rule soon morphed into a European event with the fall of Louis-Philippe in Paris in February... This article explores how the Wallachians attempted to weather the revolutionary storm and balance the sometimes-competing interests of nation, empire, and Europe.

Read more

Sociability, radium and the maintenance of scientific culture and authority in 20th century Ireland: a case study of the Royal Dublin Society

The discovery of radium in 1898 spurred a range of public, industrial and scientific reactions. The public were enthralled by this near mystical element. Its ability to produce its own energy soon gave rise to a ‘radium craze’ in which promises of its health-giving properties were prominent. A range of supposed radium-based products, such as creams and fortified water, were quickly on sale.

Read more

The White Ant’s Burden

My article explores the different meanings of termites, or white ants, for the British empire in India... and shows how South Asians in the 19th and 20th centuries themselves internalised the British imperial rhetoric of white ants to pursue their own distinct political agendas.

Read more

On Not Recognizing Kadu: Russian place naming in the Pacific Islands, 1804–1830

Our umbrella theme is the poorly known contributions of early nineteenth-century Russian navigators and mapmakers to global cartographic knowledge of the far-flung Marshall, Caroline, and Tuamotu archipelagoes. A particular focus is the varied extent to which Russian place names registered local agency during encounters or drew on navigational knowledge divulged by expert Indigenous practitioners.

Read more

Male Anxiety and the English Landed Gentry 1700-1900

Our article explores anxiety as a gendered emotion in a specific part of a social group across a long period of time: the anxieties of younger sons of the English landed gentry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on recent theories and empirical studies in the history of emotions, we analyse anxiety through the correspondence of 11 gentry families.

Read more