by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present sponsored the creation of six blog posts by postgraduate students, which documented and critically engaged with the Past & Present supported workshop series hosted by Dr. David Geiringer (QMUL) and Dr. Helen McCarthy (Cambridge) under the title ‘Rethinking Britain in the 1990s: Towards a new research agenda’. The series ran between January and March 2021, bringing together contemporary historians from a range of career stages to map existing work and stimulate new thinking on a decade which, from the perspective of our present times, looks very unfamiliar indeed. Blog Posts When Was the Nineties? by Matt Beebee (University of Exeter) The Political Narratives of Britian in the Nineties by Alfie Steer (Hertford College, Oxford)  Cultural Narratives of the Nineties by Jessica White (University of Manchester) Global Narratives of Britian in the Nineties by Christopher Day (University of Westminster) Digital Narratives of the Nineties by David Dahlborn (St. John’s College, Cambridge) What is the Archive of the Nineties by Amy Gower (University of Reading) The blogs above are presented in chronological order from the earliest event, to the latest in the series. Past & Present was pleased to support these events […]

Received from Shyam Sridar (Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford)  States, local jurisdictions and borderlands in Europe and the Americas, c.1713-1914 is a free to attend international conference on the processes of state building in the 18th and 19th centuries. It will take place online via Zoom on the 1st and 2nd June 2021 Event Overview “States, local jurisdictions and borderlands in Europe and the Americas, c.1713-1914” is an international conference organised by Luis Gabriel Galán-Guerrero and Shyam Sridar (University of Oxford) with the support of the Past & Present Society and the Latin American Centre, University of Oxford. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, populations and settlers in Europe and the Americas set up a wide range of public offices, administrative bodies and corporations that asserted their own jurisdictions within monarchies and republics. In recent years, more nuanced interpretations on the process of state formation have highlighted the process of negotiation within republics and ‘composite monarchies’, and acknowledged the importance of corporations, legal pluralism, overlapping jurisdictions, local elites and borderlands in the functioning of the state. This conference extends these existing lines of enquiry into the nature of states and aims to establish connections and comparisons on the processes […]

by the Past & Present editorial team We were delighted to hear that Dr. Antoine Acker (University of Zurich) has been awarded the 2021 Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Prize by the Brazilian section of the Latin American Studies Association for his article “A Different Story in the Anthropocene: Brazil’s Post-Colonial Quest for Oil (1930–1975)” which appeared in Past & Present No. 249 (November 2020). In recognition of this acheivement and so as to enable as many people as possible to read Dr. Acker’s award winning scholarship our publisher Oxford University Press have made “A Different Story in the Anthropocene: Brazil’s Post-Colonial Quest for Oil (1930–1975)” free to read for the next few months.