Of the British scholars gathered by H.J. Dyos in 1966 to give substance to his vision of urban history as a distinctive genre of history only a few would claim the study of cities and city life as their prime academic interest. No more than a handful of those involved in the Urban History Group in the mid-1960s went on to publish major work in urban history. That was left to the generation whose careers were established in the early 1970s. The handful included Jim Dyos himself, Tony Sutcliffe, David Reeder, John Kellett and Peter Hennock. For the latter part of his career Hennock concentrated on the history of the welfare state and social policy in Britain and Germany and that is what those historians familiar with his name will associate him with. But his first book, based partly on his doctoral research, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-Century Urban Government (1973) was as squarely a work of municipal history as one could find, and if a test of a contribution to history is not the quantity of publications but what endures of them, then Ernest Peter Hennock more than justifies our recognition amongst historians of towns and cities.

The present bibliography is a continuation of and a complement to those published in the Urban History Yearbook 1974–91 and Urban History from 1992. The arrangement and format closely follows that of previous years. The list of abbreviations identifies only those periodicals from which articles cited this year have been taken, though many other journals are also checked. There is an index of towns on p. 775.

Over the last three centuries, geographers, oceanographers, geophysicists, glaciologists, climatologists, and geoengineers have shown great interest in Arctic Ocean sea ice extent. Many of these experts envisaged an ice-free Arctic Ocean. This article studies three stages of that narrative: the belief in an ice-free Arctic Ocean, the potential for one, and the threat of one. Eighteenth and nineteenth century interest in accessing navigable polar sea routes energised the belief in an iceless polar sea; an early twentieth century North Hemispheric warm spell combined with mid-century cold war geostrategy to open the potential for drastic sea ice loss; and, most recently, climate models have illuminated the threat of a seasonally ice-free future, igniting widespread concerns about the impact this might have on Earth's natural and physical systems. This long narrative of an ice-free Arctic Ocean can help to explain modern-day scepticism of human-induced environmental change in the far north.

Irregular practitioners (‘quacks’) specialising in male sexual problems succeeded in nineteenth-century New Zealand by taking advantage of the growing population of unattached men who were ignorant of their own sexual physiology. The irregulars also profited from the regular practitioners’ acceptance of ill-defined or imaginary male sexual disorders and the side effects of conventional venereal disease treatments, the lack of a clear demarcation between quacks and the regular medical profession, and an increased availability of newspaper advertising. Improvements in the postal system enabled quacks to reach more potential customers by mail, their preferred sales method. The decline in quackery resulted from scientific advances in the understanding of disease and government legislation to privilege regular practitioners and limit quacks’ access to postal services and advertising.

Climate change has pushed governmental authorities within the United States (US) into new routes of national and transnational policy-making. The normal route for national policy-making runs from Congress in setting policy, to the President in agency implementation, to judicial oversight and enforcement. When that route is blocked, however, federalism and the separation of powers provide some byways and detours that may still be used to make progress. State governments and the executive branch have moved into the breach left by congressional deadlock. In the absence of federal climate legislation or a formal treaty, however, constitutional challenges will predictably meet efforts to limit carbon leakage or to establish linkages between regulatory systems.

These constitutional issues often involve corners of constitutional law such as foreign affairs, where doctrines are particularly murky. Solid arguments can be made in favour of state efforts to avoid leakage and create linkage, despite claims of discrimination against interstate commerce, extraterritoriality, and foreign affairs pre-emption. The Environmental Protection Agency has some statutory authority to deal with leakage, and the President seems to have authority to pursue linkage through executive agreement. Thus, both states and the executive branch should have room to deal with transboundary implications of climate policies. Although the deadlock in Congress regarding climate change may be unusually severe, these modes of response may also be important for other kinds of transnational activity by US state governments and the national executive.