This article introduces the scope, content, and capabilities of a new born-digital archive. The Medieval Londoners Database (MLD) uses an online platform to collect from and connect to both documents (printed and archival) and digitized resources (such as British History Online and the History of Parliament Online). As a digital prosopography, MLD is a freely available resource that offers sophisticated search options to discover more about the lives of both the civic elite and ordinary individuals who resided in the city of London or its suburbs of Southwark and Westminster between ca. 1100 and 1520. MLD exemplifies how digitization and the semantic web enhance historical research by creating super-powered archival collections that are ever-expanding, accessible via multiple entry points, and able to facilitate highly analytical research.

In 1805, during a lull in hostilities between England and France, minor Warwickshire landowner and slaveholder Bertie Greatheed was on a European tour with his family when his son died, leaving behind an illegitimate child. Greatheed acquired his granddaughter from her Dresden-based mother and brought the child up as his own. This article revisits Steedman's earlier scholarship on Greatheed, which focused on questions of domestic service, through the lens of slavery. It uses the seventeen volumes of his diary-writing compiled between 1805 and 1825 to explore the connections between Greatheed's ownership of enslaved people on his St. Kitts estate and his possession and nurturing of his grandchild. It considers the contradiction between Greatheed's position as an abolitionist and his profit from slavery and slave ownership, which he used not only to sustain a way of life, but also to develop Leamington, Warwickshire, into a spa town and pleasure resort.

The Neptune Islands Group and Western Kangaroo Island Marine Parks were declared as part of South Australia’s representative system of Marine protected areas (MPAs) in 2009. Sanctuary zones, located within these MPAs, prohibited commercial fishing in the state’s Northern Zone Rock Lobster Fishery from 2014. In 2022, dedicated surveys were undertaken both inside and outside two of the sanctuary zones to estimate the relative abundance (catch per unit effort; CPUE) and size of southern rock lobster (Jasus edwardsii). Survey results were then compared to estimates of abundance obtained from long-term commercial fishery-dependent data within each area. The legal-size CPUE by weight of lobsters was 389% and 411% higher inside sanctuary zones of the Neptune Islands Group and Western Kangaroo Island, respectively, compared to outside, based on survey data. Survey catch rates inside the two sanctuary zones were also considerably higher than historical catch rates estimated from commercial fishing data. Lobsters inside both sanctuary zones were larger than those outside in terms of mean weight compared to historical estimates. However, surveys recorded similar mean size in lobsters both inside and outside the Neptune Islands Group sanctuary zone, indicating a possible spillover effect of MPA protection. The Northern Zone Rock Lobster Fishery is currently in a biomass rebuilding phase. The results highlight the productivity potential of temperate reef ecosystems within South Australia in terms of southern rock lobster abundances.

In recent decades, researchers have analyzed professional military education (PME) organizations to understand the characteristics and transformation of the core of military culture, the officer corps. Several historical studies have demonstrated the potential of this approach, but they were limited by both theoretical and methodological hurdles. This paper presents a new historical-institutionalist framework for analyzing officership and PME, integrating computational social science methods for large-scale data collection and analysis to overcome limited access to military environments and the intensive manual labor required for data collection and analysis. Furthermore, in an era where direct demographic data are increasingly being removed from the public domain, our indirect estimation methods provide one of the few viable alternatives for tracking institutional change. This approach will be demonstrated using web-scraping and a quantitative text analysis of the entire repository of theses from an elite American military school.

This article examines the measurement systems used in the built environment of Xochicalco, a significant Epiclassic archaeological site located in Central Mexico. Through careful analysis of the dimensions of the various structures, we identified two primary measurement units: U7 (1.47 m) and U8 (1.68 m). These units exhibit similarities to the Mayan zapal and Nahua maitl, which have been previously documented across diverse temporal contexts and other regions within Mesoamerica. The investigation revealed patterns in the application of these units related to orientation, functionality, and construction methods, indicating meticulous planning and potential symbolic importance. The frequent use of measurements that are multiples of three, four, nine, and twelve times the base units suggests the utilization of standardized measuring instruments. This study enhances our understanding of Mesoamerican measurement practices, particularly at Xochicalco, and provides insights into cultural interactions and construction traditions during the Epiclassic period.

This article takes a micro-history approach, focusing on the life of a man identified only in the British records as “Ned” in order to illuminate the complexity and slipperiness of categories of “race.” Ned had lived in the Zulu Kingdom and, after fleeing a civil war there, became employed in Natal by an English colonist-settler, Thomas Handley. Ned traveled with the Handley family to England in 1859, and during this time, unexpectedly “disappeared” from the Handley's residence near Sheffield. A manhunt ensued and, as locals ruminated on Ned's possible status as a “slave,” the case attracted the interest of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Ned was eventually taken to London and housed in the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders before his tragic death a few months later. His repeated escapes transfixed the public and resulted in detailed press coverage. Numerous parties became interested in his case, and complex and changing processes of racialization were key to the shifting ways in which he was represented. In this article, we both search for Ned's agency and volition, and demonstrate how the case also speaks to major issues in British history, including race, humanitarianism, and enslavement.

The period after 1850 is often assumed to have witnessed some amelioration in the operation of the game code. This article highlights the origins of a little-researched statute, the 1862 Poaching Prevention Act, which conversely augmented the existing game laws and, most significantly, bestowed new responsibilities and powers on the police to tackle poachers at a critical point in the development of the new county constabularies. This controversial measure owed much to the particular circumstances of the 1850s and early 1860s when the violence and criminality associated with the activities of poaching gangs in Midland and northern counties threatened both game preservation and the authority of the new police. In these circumstances, an alliance of magistrates, police leaders and parliamentary advocates successfully lobbied for new measures to deal with this specific class of offenders who were increasingly held as representative of a wider urban criminal class.

How do counterterrorism policies enable terrorist groups to thrive and survive? This article examines the relationship and how counterterrorism policies and political structures impact terrorist group success. While studies of terrorism have tended to separate the two phenomena, there is considerable complexity in the interactions between violent action and coercive state response. To demonstrate the complexity of these interactions, this article examines the persistence of three transnational terrorist groups from 1989 to 2022 – the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and the Hizbul Mujahideen – that operate in the Kashmir region despite India’s coercive counterterrorism policies. While existing research emphasises macro-level factors in transnational terrorism, this article, based on original qualitative data, demonstrates the critical importance of granular, localised opportunities for terrorist groups to carry on. We show how these structures interact with civilian perceptions of state legitimacy and security to create nuanced patterns of support. In doing so, we challenge simplistic explanations of terrorist recruitment and resilience. The article dispels existing misconceptions about the efficacy of coercive counterterrorism to end militant groups and further suggests that softer, non-coercive approaches might not necessarily generate public sympathy. In fact, select counterterrorism policies might inadvertently legitimise violence by extremist groups to their constituency and increase sympathy in the process.

Heath forests, or known locally as kerangas, in Indonesia and Malaysia form a distinct and understudied ecoregion. We document the distribution and ecological significance of the largest extent of kerangas in Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. We mapped 16,586 km2 of kerangas to the nearest one square kilometre across Kalimantan, showing a significant reduction from previous estimates. About 19% of this area exists as a poorly documented mosaic landscape in Central Kalimantan’s Rungan-Kahayan region. Here, peat-based forests transition to heath and dipterocarp forests, making it difficult to reliably classify these forests for conservation planning. Using remote sensing and tree plot data, we identified three forest types—kerangas, low pole, and mixed swamp. Vegetation structure is influenced by soil, topography, and hydrology, while peat depth and elevation affect species diversity. Our findings indicate that these forests are dynamic ecosystems with diverse vegetation communities adapted to peat as well as sandy soils. Lowland heath forests in Rungan-Kahayan exhibits higher tree densities compared to other Bornean heath forests, reflecting unique ecological adaptations to challenging environments. Despite covering just 3% of Kalimantan’s forest area, these ecosystems remain largely unprotected, facing threats from land conversion and fire. Our study highlights the ecological complexity of kerangas and underscores the urgent need for targeted conservation and further research on these forests.