by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present is pleased to be supporting Substance Use and Abuse in the Long Nineteenth Century on the 13th and 14th September 2018 at Edge Hill University. Convened by Edge Hill’s Dr. Laura Eastlake and Dr. Andrew McInnes, confirmed speakers include Prof. Susan Zieger (California, Riverside), Dr. Noelle Plack (Newman University), Dr. Douglas Small (University of Glasgow).       ‘The body (follow me closely here) lies at the mercy of the most omnipotent of all potentates—the Chemist.’ Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859) In The Woman in White Collins’s villainous Count Fosco expounds on the power of modern pharmacology. Fosco is speaking at the mid-point of a century wherein the body and the mind seemed increasingly easily affected by the influence of substances. From 1821 opium had allowed Thomas de Quincey to explore ‘the palimpsest of the human mind’ and navigate the dream space of the human subconscious. Ether and chloroform banished pain and facilitated new surgical innovations. Stimulants and sedatives regulated waking and sleeping and the working day in between. Reports of alcoholism, addiction and criminality appeared with increasing regularity in the periodical press and featured in the plots of new literary […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Later this year Past & Present will publish “Diets, Hunger and Living Standards during the British industrial revolution” by Prof. Emma Griffin (UEA, Norwich). The article returns to, and seeks to re-frame and focus; the classic social history debates around the impact of early industrialisation upon the living standards of the poorest members of British society. Prof. Griffin recently presented a BBC Radio Four programme, broadcast on International Women’s Day, Mind the Gender Pay Gap. In the programme she explored how gendered assumptions and power imbalances structured the organisation of work, affected the division of labour’s share of the proceeds of industrialisation, during the 18th and 19th Centuries. Through doing this she demonstrates that: “…we can only make sense of the gender pay gap by taking a historical perspective. Beginning in the 15th century, [Prof. Griffin] explores how work has always been divided along gender lines. Then during the industrial revolution, when women started to enter the workplace in record numbers, women’s work was typically defined by lower wages, in comparison to men’s. [Prof. Griffin shows] how the new industrial employers maintained the gender pay gap in the burgeoning cotton mills.” Using cutting […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present was delighted to hear earlier this week that Dr. Jamie Kreiner (University of Georgia) has won the Society for French Historical Studies’ William Koren, Jnr. Prize. The prize was awarded for her article “Pigs in the Flesh and Fisc: an Early Medieval Ecology” which appeared in our August 2017 issue (No. 236). Endowed in the 1980s by friends of the late William Koren, Jnr. the one thousand dollar prize is awarded annually to the “most outstanding article on any period in French history published the previous year by a scholar appointed at a college in the United States or Canada”. Contenders must have published in a journal originating from North America, Australasia or Europe. We are delighted that Dr. Kreiner has been recognised with this highly prestigious honour for her work, and have made “Pigs in the Flesh and Fisc: an Early Medieval Ecology” free for a limited period of time, so as to encourage as many people as possible to read it.