This article examines the politics of colonial voluntary work as an aspect of settler society and in relation to broader networks of imperial activism and reform. The East Africa Women's League, a predominant white women's organization in colonial Kenya, participated in settler politics during debates in 1930 concerning a Closer Union of British territories in East Africa. This involvement established connections between the voluntary welfare activities of settler women in Kenya and contemporary transimperial activist networks. Drawing on the private archives of the League, this article argues that the public lives of white women in colonial Kenya were entwined in the tensions of welfare in the twentieth-century British imperial project.

This article examines the relationship between shame and police court media trial reports. It explores the social and cultural mores that underpinned the construction of shaming practices in trial coverage and assesses the ways in which the media functioned as a judicial and extrajudicial shaming resource. Far from disappearing with changing sensibilities, as has been argued elsewhere, premodern religious and judicial shaming methods shifted into areas of modernity, being relayed, supported, and influenced by new forms of modern print culture. The media, this article contends, served as an extension of the disciplinary apparatus, with editors applying their own assumptions about the guilt of the accused regardless of judicial verdicts and in line with their own notion of “common-sense” lay justice. The use of shame, though, was discriminatory—mirroring, and even helping to define, middle-class notions of shameful behavior and masculine and feminine conduct—which would, crucially, expose the social and cultural confines of media censure.

This article explores how photographs were used as evidence during the early Northern Ireland Troubles. In particular, it focuses on the collection and use of images at the Scarman Tribunal, which investigated the disturbances of the summer of 1969, and the Widgery Tribunal, which sought to ascertain the sequence of events surrounding Bloody Sunday. Through close readings of how photographs were used at these two tribunals, the article shows how the existence of certain photographs served to anchor discussions of trajectories of violence around certain places and moments, illustrates how photographs taken for publication in newspapers were reread as evidential documents, and indicates the range of plausible truths each photograph was understood to provide. The study shows the importance of exploring the processes and mechanisms through which the state made sense of Northern Ireland to understand how causal accounts of conflict were produced and authenticated—and how, in turn, those explanatory regimes shaped the policies of the British state and the responses of local communities, and became embedded in historical writing on the Troubles.