by the Past & Present editorial team  Past & Present was pleased to learn that Dr. Lydia Walker (Dartmouth College, NH/Institute of Historical Research, London) had a feature article in The Washington Post that drew upon some of the research that she published first in Past & Present. The Washington Post article is entitled “Why have we forgotten one of WWII’s most important battles?” and explores the legacy (and relative lack of public awareness regarding) of one of the major battles of the Second World War in South Asia. Her Past & Present article is called “Decolonisation in the 1960s: On Legitimate and Illegitimate Nationalist” Claims-Making” and appeared in Past & Present #242 (February 2019). In conjunction with The Washington Post article our publisher Oxford University Press have agreed to make “Decolonisation in the 1960s: On Legitimate and Illegitimate Nationalist” Claims-Making” free to read and download for a limited time period (until the end of June 2019). Dr. Walker is a Past & Present Society sponsored Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London during 2019-21.

received from Kiran Mehta (Wolfson, Oxford) Hello! We invite you to join us for this two-day conference on prisons and incarceration in England, 1500-1850, that is taking place at Keble College, Oxford, UK on the 15th and 16th of July 2019. A provisional programme will be available online here and the poster can be downloaded here. Overview This conference will bring together senior academics and early career researchers to share their ongoing research into English imprisonment, discuss recent developments in the field, and set out new agendas for the history of prisons and imprisonment. This conference is interdisciplinary–our speakers are historians, literary scholars and criminologists–, spans a wide chronology, and takes an inclusive view of imprisonment, including not only criminal custody and incarceration, but also the imprisonment of debtors and prisoners of war. Our speakers employ a myriad of approaches in studying imprisonment, and the conference will encompass the complete range of prisons that existed in this period, beyond the penitentiary, including lock-ups, roundhouses, compters or counters, gaols, houses of correction or bridewells and prison hulks. Together, our speakers seek to explain the role that imprisonment and prisoners played in English society, economy and political life. Early scholars of imprisonment […]