by Dr. Samantha Iyer (Fordham University) The United States’s food stamp program is under attack again—again. The current government shutdown has left the nearly 42 million people who rely on the program—now called the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP—in a state of uncertainty. Even more fundamentally, in July of this year, Congress passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which is bound to significantly reduce the number of people who can benefit from the program. That is because the bill increases the state and local costs for administering SNAP, expands the work requirements for receiving assistance, and excludes a range of non-citizens from eligibility. The contraction of government assistance programs is nothing new. It is most often associated with welfare reform under the administration of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. But family food assistance programs have followed a somewhat different trajectory than other government assistance. That trajectory makes the current cutbacks all the more dangerous. For as US policymakers have slashed other welfare programs, these food programs have come to serve as welfare of the last resort. I examine the distinct path of family food assistance programs in a recent article, ‘Agricultural Workers, Tenant Farmers, and the Midcentury U.S. […]

by the Past & Present editoral team Past and Present was delighted to learn that Dr. Daniel F. Banks has been awarded the Society for Italian Historical Studies’ Modern History Article Prize for his forthcoming Past & Present article “Ships, Guns and Money: The Logistics of Revolution and Garibaldi’s Campaign of 1860”. In their citation to prize committee consisting of Prof. Giuliana Chamedes (chair), Prof. Michael Ebner and Prof. Steven Soper stated that: “This article reframes the history of Italian unification and helps us understand a new dimension of why Garibaldi’s campaign against the Bourbon army was successful. Taking us behind the scenes, Banks shows that the Garibaldi expedition was enabled by more than rag-tag idealists and good public relations propaganda; its victories were also made possible through a carefully planned logistical revolution, carried out by businessmen, traders, and economic non-state actors. Shedding new light on the history of capitalism, on Genoa as a geopolitical and revolutionary hub, and on the transnational dimensions of the Risorgimento in exile, we learn how committed radicals mobilized the structures of international capitalism in favor of their cause. Through a rich array of archival, primary, and secondary sources, Banks shows us how complex networks […]

by Dr. Bill Mihalopoulos My recent article “Liberty, the Maria Luz Incident and the liminal legal status of Chinese indentured labourers and Japanese licensed prostitutes” in Past & Present No. 268 (August 2025) focused on the celebrated Maria Luz Incident (1872), which involved Chinese labourers on board a Peruvian ship anchored in the Japanese waters of Yokohama. The resulting 1872 Japanese court ruling rendered null-and-void the service contracts that bound those labourers to eight years of service. And the ensuing release of Japanese licensed prostitutes from their ten-year indenture contracts was an unforeseen consequence of that ruling. The prevailing academic opinion is that the legal ruling of the Maria Luz Incident was the seminal moment when rights talk was introduced to Japan. The Japanese ad hoc tribunal, it is said, freed the Chinese labourers from indentured servitude in Peru and for the first time (temporarily) emancipated Japanese women from sexual servitude by attaching the metaphor of slavery to the domestic issue of licensed prostitution. What has captivated scholarship on the Maria Luz case is what the ruling signified for Japan’s modernization makeover. Was this the watershed moment when modern Japan invested in notions of personal rights, justice, and equity? “Liberty, […]

Received from Dr. George Brocklehurst (School of Advanced Study, University of London) Dates: 5 – 6 November 2025 Location: Magdalene College, Cambridge CB3 0AG Programme (as of 22 September 2025) Registration (free) Past and Present is pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.          

By Niamh Hanrahan (University of Manchester) On May 19, 2025, graduate students, academics, archivists, and researchers came together at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London to discuss the history of tracing individuals persecuted by the Nazi regime during the Second World War. The workshop, generously joint funded by the Royal Historical Society and the Past and Present Society, was organised by Barnabas Balint and Niamh Hanrahan. It focused on exploring the opportunities and challenges presented by one particular collection: the International Tracing Service Archive. At the close of the Second World War, millions of people were displaced across multiple continents. Parents, children, and siblings searched for their missing relatives. Thus began decades of tracing. Many of these searches were carried out by the International Tracing Service (ITS), which gathered and generated millions of pages of documentation. These documents now make up the ITS Archive, accessible at the Arolsen Archives in Germany and digitally in sites around the world. In 2011, it was announced that the Wiener Holocaust Library would become the UKs copyholder for this archive. Since then, Holocaust survivors and their descendants, alongside researchers and members of the public have been able to access over 30 million pages of […]

Received from Dr. Henry Miller (Northumbria University) Oaths and Oath-Taking in Historical Perspective, 1600 to the Present: 1-day historical workshop on the theme of oaths/oath-taking in Britain, Ireland, and the British Empire, 1600-the present organised by Dr. James McConnel and Dr. Henry Miller with support from the Past and Present Society, the Social History Society, and History: The Journal of the Historical Association. Date and times: Thursday, September 11 · 10:30am – 6pm Location: Northumbria University – London, 110-114 Middlesex Street, London E1 7HT Registration Overview As the 2023 coronation of King Charles III highlighted, oaths remain a feature of modern British public life. Indeed, though largely taken for granted, oaths and declarations continue to play a much wider role within many state agencies (e.g., cabinet government, parliaments, the judiciary, the magistracy, the armed forces, and the police force). Oaths also feature in other parts of life in the UK: professions including doctors, senior lawyers, and CoE ministers are still required to take oaths. Oaths are also a requirement of some civil society groups (e.g., the Scouts) and are required for membership of some mass-membership associations (e.g., Freemasonry and Orangeism). And since 2004, oaths have been performed at UK citizenship […]

by The Margins to the Centre 2025 Organising Team The Margins to Centre Conference 2025 was an undergraduate-organised conference which took place on the 24th of April 2025 at the University of York. This conference was organised with the primary goal being to provide an academic space to aid in amplifying the voices of marginalised communities throughout history. In addition to this, the conference aspired to enrich the field of historical studies by creating an inclusive, reflective, and interdisciplinary space for academics, students and scholars through curating discussions that bridge traditional scholarship with fresh perspectives. In doing so, we aimed to highlight the contributions of marginalised groups and to critique the lasting influence of dominant narratives and cultural memory which dominate countless academic fields. The conference was organised around the focal theme of ‘Belonging’. Our organising committee opted to split the conference into four main segments, each of which engaged with significant issues or topics related to the field of historical studies which we felt connected back to our theme of ‘Belonging’. The segments were as follows: Gender and Identity in Historical Perspectives, Marginalisation and Power: Dynamics of Exclusion and Resistance, Reassessing Marginalised and Underutilised Sources, and Colonialism and the […]

by Dr Mariana Bodnaruk (Masaryk University Brno), Dr Stephan Bruhn (German Historical Institute London), and Dr Michael Eber (University of Cologne) On 22–23 May, the German Historical Institute in London hosted a conference titled ‘Trans Sainthood in Translation, ca. 400–1500’. Seventeen presenters from eight countries covered the translations and artistic depictions of the lives of the so-called monachoparthenoi. According to their legends, these saints were assigned female gender at birth but lived as monks in male monasteries. While most of their vitae originated in the Greek-speaking regions of the Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean, versions of their stories appear to have circulated in almost every Late Antique and Medieval Christian community. The conference focused on the five monachoparthenoi who received full-length biographies in both Greek and Latin (Eugenia*us, Euphrosyne*Smaragdus, Marina*us, Pelagia*us and Theodora*us), but papers also covered these vitae as they appear in Syriac, Coptic, Ge’ez, Church Slavonic, Old English, Old French, Middle High German and Old Norse. Visual depictions and relics from Constantinople, Cyprus, Palestine, the Balkans, Rome and Iberia were also explored (the programme is available here). Although the stories were literary constructions written mainly by monastic authors, they had an original historical core and a long oral tradition. […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Three of the 2023-25 Past and Present postdoctoral fellows Drs. Lamin Manneh, Ana Struillou and Malika Zehni (Institute of Historical Research, London) have edited a virtual issue of the journal on the subject of Immobility. In their introduction they explain that: “Increasingly, since the early years of the twenty-first century, some have questioned the relevance of historians’ ‘fetishization of mobility’ in an era of closing borders. This has led to greater attention being placed on systems of ‘regulation and intervention’ that shape global migration. Shifting away from the narratives centred on movement and fluidity, we argue that immobility is not a mere lack of movement: it is about the power relations and barriers that enforce, experience, and resist stillness. By delving into the archives of Past and Present, we aim to construct a conversation around the processes of enforcing, experiencing, and challenging immobility. We have found that immobility shapes the experiences of both the historical actors found in the journal and the historians and scholars who write these histories.” Outlining the basis of their interest in the topic and why this should be a matter of interest to historians working in the contemporary […]

by Kate Shore (Lincoln College, University of Oxford) and Dr. Fred Smith (Balliol College, University of Oxford) What have the English ever done for us? This central question guided participants in a one-day workshop, organised by Fred Smith and Kate Shore, exploring the European impact and legacy of England’s early modern reformations. Once seen as insular and introverted, historians have increasingly come to recognise the extent to which England’s reformations, both Protestant and Catholic, developed in close and intimate dialogue with religious changes elsewhere throughout Europe. However, the history of Europe‘s many reformations and counter-reformations is still often told without much reference to England. Indeed, it is often assumed that England’s reformations had relatively little to offer their continental counterparts: as Diarmaid MacCulloch once suggested, ‘the flow of ideas in the [English] reformation seems at least at first sight to be a matter of imports from abroad, with an emphatically unfavourable balance of payments.’ The workshop, held in Balliol College, Oxford, on 27 March 2025, sought to interrogate this narrative by bringing together an international group of historians, literary scholars and theologians. Over the course of 12 papers and lively discussion, a number of things became clear. The first was […]