Spreading the Revolution: Paine’s Rights of Man in Germany
Tom Paine’s revolutionary Rights of Man, whose first part was published in London in 1791, was an extraordinary publishing success and extremely influential.…
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The Historical Journal
(65)
World War in the Library: How the burning of the Leuven library in the First World War continues to resonate today
A burned library in a ruined city, civilian victims of shelling by a ruthless invader, a policy of occupation including linguistic censorship, the deportation and internment of professors teaching in the vernacular, condemnations by the international community: today all this might sound like the description of Russia’s war against Ukraine, or perhaps Nazi Germany’s policies in the General government of occupied Poland during the Second World War.
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The Holy Coat of Jesus: Mass Pilgrimage and the Usable Empire in a Napoleonic Borderland
Borders are not going anywhere. In Europe alone, the stark realities of our time include the aftermath of Brexit, the tendency to shore up ‘Fortress Europe’ against refugees from the Middle East and Africa, drastic border closures implemented to slow the spread of COVID, and the ongoing Russian attempt to redraw the map by waging war on Ukraine.
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The Indian Civil Service, Classical Studies and an Education in Empire
The years around 1900, when the British Empire was at its height, witnessed a flurry of publications comparing the British Empire to ancient Rome.
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Planned Plunder? The British Museum and the 1868 Maqdala Expedition
In 1871 Prime Minister William E. Gladstone made a statement to the House of Commons in which he regretted.
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Poverty comes like an armed man: the economic crisis of the 1690s
In a new article on the economic problems of this decade, I argue that we need to pay close attention to the impact of these events on the lives of workers and traders at this time.
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Up the Yangzi: American merchants and the Taiping Civil War
The American Civil War’s impact upon Sino-American commerce – a topic explored more thoroughly in my recent article with the Historical Journal – is more fascinating still given the parallel unfolding of China’s own Taiping Civil War.
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Human ‘Sacrifice’ and the Status of Slaves
‘Human sacrifice’ isn’t a practice that we tend to associate early modern Europe. Nor would we expect it to be defended in a court of law. Yet this is exactly what happened in 1783 in a case concerning a British slaving ship, the Zong.
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Beyond When and Why: North Korea’s Reluctant Embracing of “Peaceful” Nuclear Power
Nobody knows when and why did the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) begin its nuclear weapon program. Our current state of knowledge regarding these simple questions is at best partial; scholars point to different periods as its origin such as 1950 (when the Korean War broke out), 1958 (when the United Stated brought nuclear weapons to South Korea), 1964 (when the People’s Republic of China tested its first bomb), or 1979 (when South Korea started its undeclared enrichment activities that were revealed only in 2014).…
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Neutrality and Displacement: Refugees in Hong Kong and Macau during the Second World War in East Asia
My article analyses the entanglement of neutrality and displacement in two European colonial territories in South China – British-ruled Hong Kong and Portuguese-ruled Macau – during the Second World War in East Asia (1937-1945).
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‘no power, no money, no influence and little experience’: Why read more about a history of ‘gifted children’?
The article contributes, instead, to new writings about ‘popular individualism’ in this period, showing how large scale political movements around ‘the individual’ reshaped cultural and social life.
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Kind hearts and colonists? Italian military culture and imperialism before the First World War
It’s sometimes assumed that colonial war crimes were the product of fascism, but I discuss some atrocities of the Liberal era and the military culture that helped to produce them.
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The Materiality of English Suicide Letters, c.1700-c.1850
Usually slipped quietly between the pages of a coroner’s inquest, these deeply personal letters always gave me the greatest sense that I was hearing the voices of the people I studied.
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The First Earl of Shaftesbury’s Aristocratic Constitutionalism in Protectorate and Restoration England
It is shown that Shaftesbury’s opposition to both Cromwell during the Protectorate and Charles II in the Restoration was guided by a resolute ‘conscience’.
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The Kingdomes Monster? Assessing Sir Thomas Wentworth’s programme for government
Without doubt, the troubling events in the wake of the Bishops’ Wars and Wentworth’s intention to recruit Irish Catholics for the army left an indelible mark on Protestants in England.
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Intoxicants and Early Modern European Globalization – the Special issue
A special issue on the spaces, practices, and material culture that characterised the production and consumption of intoxicants in Europe, the Atlantic, and South Asia between the 16th and 18th centuries.
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The Intoxicant as Preservative and Scientific Instrument in the World of James Petiver
This article highlights the fact that, alongside its other roles in the early modern British empire, alcohol was also an active force in imperial scientific culture in its role as medium of preservation and display.
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Tobacco and the Social Life of Conquest 1580-1625
This article uses the material culture of smoking to connect an American-sourced intoxicant to changing tastes and expressions of masculinity in early seventeenth-century London.
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Tropical Hospitality, British Masculinity and Drink in late 18th Century Jamaica
It shows that drink, dancing, and illicit sex combined to create a milieu in which activities frowned upon in Britain, or which were confined to specific and highly regulated homosocial encounters, defined white male cultural practices in the island.
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Rhetoric, politics, and decorum in the Renaissance
Some thought that civil speech was a denial of civic ideals. Others, such as Erasmus and Vives, believed that civic life in the service of the community could only be realized through civil speech.
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Fake news and state manipulation, First World War style?
Rather than sinister and corrupt state manipulation, this close look at the instructions, never previously undertaken, suggests a relatively flexible and responsive attempt to balance safety and security with press freedom.
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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.
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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.
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Why remember the fifth of November?
It shows that the king did not share the interpretation of the Gunpowder plot and the purposes of thanksgiving which were propounded by parliament and by generations of English preachers and writers... as further justification for anti-catholic beliefs and policies.
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Nationalism, capitalism and the swadeshi movement in colonial India
This notion of swadeshi capitalism was a cultural, political and economic response to colonialism, one which aimed to secure economic and political sovereignty.
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Sociability and religious conversion in 18th and early 19th century northern England
Conversation and visiting could be considered as aids to piety, by encouraging individuals to debate and reflect on religious doctrine and to share their struggles with their faith and receive encouragement.
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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.
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Political participation and the multiethnic civil society of interwar Hong Kong
A hundred years later, the claims that KRA members made about widening political representation and constitutional reforms sit at the heart of the protests taking place on the streets of Hong Kong.
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Envoy to Apartheid: The Royal Ballet in South Africa, 1960
In late 1959, before the tour began, the company’s decision to leave behind its only dancer of colour, the South African-born soloist Johaar Mosaval, ignited parliamentary debates and media uproar... [my article] shows how ballet worked as a tool of British ‘soft power’, aiding the decolonizing state in its effort to shore up ties with white South Africans.
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Publishing Nature in the Age of Revolutions: Joseph Banks, Georg Forster and the Plants of the Pacific
This article reviews the differing approaches to scientific publishing of Joseph Banks and Georg Forster, following James Cook’s 1775 2nd voyage of exploration.
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Wildness and Domesticity: the Addo Elephant National Park in early 20th century South Africa
This blog accompanies Jules Skotnes-Brown’s Historical Journal article Domestication, Degeneration, and the Establishment of the Addo Elephant National Park in South Africa, 1910s–1930s
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Federation, partnership, and the chronologies of space in 1950s East and Central Africa
My article traces four ‘sketches’ of East and Central African interdependence, charting how the Federation constrained possibilities for wider regional anti-colonial coordination. The Nairobi Anti-Federation League shows that in 1952 the Federation was considered an East African problem too.
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Projections of Desire and Design in Early Modern Caribbean Maps
There is a unique pleasure that comes from being involved in research that exceeds the expertise of any single scholar. Perhaps every historian entertains ideas for such projects, yet demur when confronted with acquiring another language, familiarity with new archives or historiography, or proficiency in a different time period.
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Politics in schoolgirl debating cultures in England, 1886-1914
School debates are just one example of how the histories of education and childhood can shed light on political change.
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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.
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Reforming Food and Eating in Protestant England, c. 1560 – c. 1640
In my article, I bring together theological tracts with those concerning diet (dietaries and regimens) to illuminate a printed discourse in which English Protestants sought to define a new relationship to everyday food and eating in light of the Reformation.
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From ‘nice girls’ to ‘cool girls’: Teenage sexuality in mid-twentieth-century England
Drawing upon original oral histories and reflective testimonies collected as part of the Mass Observation Project, my article explores the ways in which teenage girls’ friendship groups and extended network of classmates and peers shaped their sexual lives.
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The materiality of marriage in the artisan community of Renaissance Verona
Building on recent scholarship studying the materiality of the non-elite this article investigates the domestic material culture of the artisan community in sixteenth-century Verona.
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John Locke and the Toleration of Catholics: A New Manuscript
Our article investigates the provenance and significance of the manuscript, showing how its content reveals that Locke is commenting on a book by Sir Charles Wolseley (1629/30-1714) called Liberty of conscience, the magistrates interest (1668), as a way of asking whether Catholics can be tolerated.
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Before Political Theory
In our article, we argue that a major fault line in early-modern Britain was the propriety of engaging in abstract speculation on the political order, and that this constituted a particular context for debate over theory.
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Malthusian Moments – a special issue from The Historical Journal
This special issue offers a series of essays focused on variously pivotal Malthusian ‘moments’, showing the extent to which Malthus remains a living presence in debates about demography and the industrial revolution, as well as the history and reception of political theory, particularly radical forms of egalitarianism.
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Malthus, 19th Century Socialism and Marx
In his Historical Journal article Gareth Stedman Jones argues that the need to answer Malthus led to the most profound recasting of 19th century radical thought, conjoining science and Enlightenment with a radical, and eventually revolutionary social movement.
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The 1860 Japanese Embassy and the Antebellum African American Press
What did samurai and African Americans in 1860 have in common? Quite a lot, according to the Weekly Anglo-African, Douglass’ Monthly, and other African American and abolitionist publications.
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‘I had enough last war’: Remembering the First World War during the Second World War
My article for the Historical Journal examines how the memory of the First World War shaped morale at the start of the Second World War.
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Women Investors and the Virginia Company in the Early Seventeenth Century
Unfolding the histories of women who invested in the Virginia Company was the starting-point of this research, but as I began tracing Romney and Hueriblock through the archives, I learned that their involvement in the Virginia Company was part of a wider story.
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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.
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Why (not) Feathers? Period Hands and Material Encounters in Colonial Peru
My article on feather-work in colonial Peru shows, above all, that we should no longer differentiate between non-literate (material) Native Americans with feathers on their heads and literate Europeans with feathers in their hands. Far more important should be the historian’s distinction between non-literacy and knot literacy as this separates or connects cultures in the stories that we tell about the past.
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Ghost Stories in Early Modern England: The Social, Personal, and Spiritual Dynamics
In early modern England, spectral figures like Madam Savage were regular visitors to the world of the living and a vibrant variety of beliefs and expectations clustered around these questionable shapes.
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The Ancient Constitution and the Languages of Political Thought
My essay explores the nature of the myth of the Ancient Constitution, its manifestations over three centuries, and its historical and conceptual difficulties.
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Science in History: From the Cold War to Trump
This episode neatly captures the way in which Cold War politics framed much of the debate about the history of science in the twentieth century. My Retrospect essay, and the accompanying articles, chart that changing historiography.
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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.
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Talking by means of the calligraphy brush
This blog accompanies Rebekah Clements’ Historical Journal article Brush talk as the ‘lingua franca’ of diplomacy in Japanese–Korean encounters, c.…
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What does peer review do?
This blog accompanies the article The Royal Society and the Prehistory of Peer Review, 1665–1965 by Noah Moxham and Aileen Fyfe published in The Historical Journal.…
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When subjecthood and citizenship did not matter: the Royal Navy and foreign seamen in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
This blog accompanies Sara Caputo’s Historical Journal article Alien Seamen in the British Navy, British Law, and the British State, C.…
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The Tudor banquet: digital text mining reveals new information
The sweet banquet was a pervasive dining practice from the 1520s until the middle of the seventeenth century. It quickly spread beyond the court to the country houses of the nobility and gentry...
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‘Operation elections’: voting, nationhood and citizenship in late-colonial Africa
This blog accompanies the Historical Journal article Voting, Nationhood, and Citizenship in Late-Colonial Africa by Justin Willis, Gabrielle Lynch and Nic Cheeseman.…
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The Feminist Origins of the Midlife Crisis
This article tells the history of the midlife crisis, for the first time. The term “midlife crisis” conjures up the image of an affluent, middle-aged man speeding off in a red sports car with a woman half his age.…
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Women of Discord – the power of women in Aztec society
Women held an extraordinary position in Aztec society. Through their connection to the earth through childbirth, they were believed to wield primal forces which gave them both access to awesome power and the potential for catastrophic disruption.…
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The House of Lords as Scotland’s high court, 1707-1875
Philip Loft, ‘Litigation, the Anglo-Scottish union and the House of Lords as high court, 1660-1875’, Historical Journal Much ink has been spilled in debates over the union of the Edinburgh and Westminster parliaments in 1707.…
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Gift giving to guilds in sixteenth and seventeenth century London
In this blog Dr Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin discusses her article Gifting cultures and artisanal guilds in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London which was published in The Historical Journal.…
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The impact of the South African War (1899 – 1902) on working-class British women and families
In this blog Dr Eliza Riedi discusses her article Assisting Mrs Tommy Atkins: Gender, class, philanthropy, and the domestic impact of the South African War, 1899–1902 which was published in The Historical Journal.…
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Adding Ireland to the Analysis – Ireland’s impact on the ‘Decade of Reform’
Read Jay Roszman’s recent article, ‘Ireland as a Weapon of Warfare’: Whigs, Tories, and the problem of Irish outrages, 1835 to 1839‘ in The Historical Journal.…
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Brexit and Our World Wars
In this blog Professor David Reynold’s discusses his article ‘Britain, the Two World Wars, and the Problem of Narrative’ which was published in The Historical Journal.…
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Historicizing Citizenship
Historicizing Citizenship in Post-War Britain was published in The Historical Journal This article has its roots in a very simple question: what was citizenship?…
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Rethinking the English Revolution of 1649
Rethinking the English Revolution of 1649 by Jonathan Fitzgibbons was published in The Historical Journal When the axe fell on 30 January 1649, cutting short the troubled life of King Charles I, one eyewitness claims that there followed ‘such a groan’ from the crowds of spectators ‘as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again’.…
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An Interview with the editors of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: Part One
Please introduce yourself. Rosanne Currarino: I am a co-editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and I’ve been on the editorial team since January 2020.…
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Why Objects Speak
This text is identified as my own by the name placed above it, which seems sensible enough. Marking ownership was one of the earliest uses to which the ancient Greeks put their alphabet—which was to spawn among others the alphabet in which this text is written—but they had a strikingly different way of doing so. ‘I am the kylix of Korax’, declares an eighth-century BCE wine-drinking cup from Rhodes; ‘I am the lekythos of Tataie—whosoever steals me will go blind’, threatens a seventh-century oil flask from Cumae; ‘I am the remembrance of Ergotimos’, announces a shelf of Attic rock from the sixth century.
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Conversations with Authors: Collective Remembrance and Private Choice: German–Greek Conflict and Behavior in Times of Crisis
In this “Conversation with Authors,” we spoke with APSR authors Vasiliki (Vicky) Fouka and Hans-Joachim Voth about their open access article “Collective Remembrance and Private Choice: German-Greek Conflict and Behavior in Times of Crisis.”…
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Coping with the Unforeseen. Bounded Rationality and Bureaucratic responses to the Covid-19 crisis
Central aspects of governmental decision-making are veiled in secrecy. This explains why behavioral public administration has had so little to say about the behavior and decisions of top civil servants and political executives.…
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Border clashes: the distributive politics of professional liberalisation in Greece
As Douwe Truijens and Marcel Hanegraaff have recently remarked (Truijens and Hanegraaff 2023), interest groups can play a very large role at the implementation stage of the policy cycle, potentially even reversing decisions made earlier in the cycle.…
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Sociopolitical reputation and the reform of pharmacies in Greece and Portugal
In 2005, pharmacies in Greece and Portugal enjoyed some of the highest regulatory protections from competition in the EU. Fifteen-plus years later, Greek pharmacies are still highly protected, while Portuguese pharmacies have had to undergo several bouts of liberalization.…
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Analysis of the vortex-dominated flow field over a delta wing at transonic speed
Sharing insight that could prove invaluable for optimizing delta wing configurations in diverse aerospace applications, opening doors to safer and more efficient aviation.
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A Q&A with the course leader of Control Engineering
What are your current research interests? I have a long-term interest in ‘fault-tolerant control’, namely if the system you are controlling develops a fault, can an automatic system successfully control it? We know that in principle we can control for faults, for example where experienced pilots can sometimes successfully fly planes that have been badly damaged.
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Academic publishing in 2023: what’s front of mind for archaeologists?
With 2023 on the horizon, and the landscape of academic publishing in flux, Cambridge University Press spoke to the Editors of the SAA’s journals to find out what topics and questions are currently front of mind – for archaeologists, researchers and publishers alike.…
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Austerity and Young People’s Political Attitudes in the U.K.
In 2012, a Conservative-led coalition implemented austerity measures to restore the UK’s finances. The measures aimed to address the increase in public spending that had occurred during the Great Recession and included significant cuts to public services in the form of the 2012 Welfare Reform Act.…
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Conversation with Authors: Moderates
In this “Conversation with Authors,” we spoke with APSR authors Anthony Fowler and Lynn Vavreck about their open access article (coauthored with Seth Hill, Jeffrey Lewis, Chris Tausanovitch, and Christopher Warshaw), “Moderates.”…
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Experimenting with tablet-making
At the end of the Greek Bronze Age, between c.1400-1200 BCE, the Mycenaean palaces of Crete and mainland Greece used small clay tablets to keep their accounting documents.
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Conversations with Authors: Education or Indoctrination? The Violent Origins of Public School Systems in an Era of State-Building
The main goal of the paper is to explain the emergence and the expansion of public primary education systems.
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Extension of Legal Personality to Ecosystems and Beyond-Human Organisms
World leading innovation is going on right now in granting legal personhood for mountains, rivers, and forests in New Zealand and elsewhere – but what will this mean for governance and how these new ‘entities’ relate with both companies, people and the law?…
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