by the Past & Present editorial team

by Dr David Coast (Bath Spa University) Want to liven up your conversation? Try adding some sixteenth-century proverbs to your repertoire: Has something gone wrong? Say ‘the Bishop hath blessed it’. Overcooked a pudding? Say ‘The Bishop hath put his foot in the pot’. Someone getting above themselves? Call them a ‘pontifical fellow’. Have a friend who wants to oppress the common people? Tut tut. Wag your finger at them and say ‘cut not the bough that thou standest upon’. That’ll learn ‘em. These sayings were recorded by the renegade evangelical priest and Bible translator William Tyndale in his Obedience of a Christen Man (1528). The reason Tyndale included them in his book was to show that before the Henrician reformation even got going, there was already a popular groundswell of hostility to the clergy. Although the bishops tried to dupe and mislead the people, popular proverbs seemed to suggest that ordinary subjects were naturally suspicious of the clergy and perhaps even sympathised with Lutheran ideas like justification by faith alone. The people, in other words, were on Tyndale’s side – which was all very convenient. Tyndale was in good company. The German reformer Andreas Karlstadt idealised simple peasants so […]

by Prof. Peter Mandler (Gonville and Caius, Cambridge) My Past & Present article ‘Good Reading for the Million’ began with Margaret Mead. While writing a book about her attempts to bring anthropology to bear on international relations in the Second World War and the Cold War, I was curious to find out more about her impact on public opinion through the direct influence of her books. I had had a longstanding interest in the growth of the audience for serious non-fiction books, including academic books; I’d written a column on the subject for a Christmas round-up in The Times newspaper in 1993, a short book of my own on the market for history books, and an essay for History Today in 2009 for which I interviewed the pioneers of popular series like the Fontana Modern Masters, Oxford’s Past Masters and the more recent Very Short Introductions. But I was still taken aback by the scale of Mead’s audience when her books went into paperback – I estimated that she had sold a million paperbacks by 1960. I knew that Mead was an unusual academic who angled her books (from the very beginning, with Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928) […]

by Prof. Alison Smith (University of Toronto) As I spent time reading files and writing about Ivanovo, one of the things I wondered about is how exactly the spate of manumissions that first created this odd part-serf/part-industrial society happened. My full investigation into this has now been published in Past & Present (#244) as “A Microhistory of the Global Empire of Cotton: Ivanovo, The ‘Russian Manchester’”. Obviously it happened when a group of serfs gained their manumission, but that’s not actually a simple thing. Manumission was not in general an unknown part of serf life, and a number of accounts of Ivanovo note that the Ivanovo serf E. I. Grachev had received his freedom back in 1802. But that had been a single instance of manumission, and since then Ivanovo had been developing into a major textile center without additional cases over the next two decades. Then, suddenly, in the middle of the 1820s, something changed, as a dozen or so serfs gained their freedom over the course of just a couple of years. The short time period in which this number of serfs gained their freedom is still a clear sign of some specific event. Part of the answer […]

by the Past & Present editorial team

by Joshua Ravenhill (University of York) On the 28th-29th June 2019, the Centre of Medieval Studies at the University of York held a stand-alone conference entitled ‘Belonging in Late Medieval Cities’ at the University of York’s King’s Manor campus. This sold-out event brought together Early Career Researchers and more established academics from the UK, Europe, North America, and Russia. I was also delighted that historians working outside of a university context attended the conference. Delegates contributed to an engaging discussion concerning the study of belonging in late medieval cities. In the late medieval city, there were various groups in which individuals could be included in or excluded from. These ranged from neighbourhoods, long-distance social networks, parishes, fraternities, craft guilds, and the citizenry, to name a few. Ideas of belonging and non-belonging can be conceptualised, and applied, in various ways. The key aims of the conference were the exploration of how ideas of belonging could be utilised in the study of late medieval urban centres and to identify which sources could be used in this study. Well #medievaltwitter, we’re all set and ready to get started on #Belonging2019! If any of you #twitterstorians couldn’t make it, don’t worry! We’ll be live-tweeting […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present was delighted to hear that Jake Richards (Gonville and Caius, Cambridge) has been awarded this year’s Alexander Prize, by the Royal Historical Society (RHS); for his article “Anti-Slave-Trade Law, ‘Liberated Africans’ and the State in the South Atlantic World, c. 1839-1852” which appeared in Issue 241. The Alexander Prize is awarded annually by the RHS for the best published scholarly journal article or an essay in a collective volume based upon original historical research. In “Anti-Slave-Trade Law, ‘Liberated Africans’ and the State in the South Atlantic World, c. 1839-1852” Richards explores how: From 1807 onwards, bilateral slave-trade treaties stipulated how naval squadrons would rescue slaves from slave ships, and how states should arrange the settlement and apprenticeship of these slaves, to transform them into ‘liberated Africans’. Comparing interactions between the state and liberated Africans at sea along the South African and Brazilian coasts, and in the port towns of Cape Town and Salvador, reveals how the legal status of liberated Africans changed over time. Current scholarship has framed liberated Africans in terms of whether they were attributed rights or suffered re-enslavement, and thus focused on their solidarity through claiming rights, […]

by Dr. Merle Eisenberg (Princeton University) and Dr. Lee Mordechai (The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center [USA] and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) “In China, some ten million people died within a span of five years; by the end of 1910, another five million would perish as plague emerged in India, Australia, Scotland, and North Africa, sparking fears that the Black Death…had returned,” or so David K. Randall has recently claimed in his Black Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague. Randall’s book highlights contemporary Western fears of the world’s impending doom, in this case through the quintessential pandemic – plague. Randall’s book falls within the popular catastrophe genre in academic and mainstream writing, not to mention films and even video and board games. If we follow the message of 1995’s Outbreak, for example, there is the distinct possibility that, without careful quarantine procedures and heroic actions, we are all doomed to succumb to a disease outbreak. In 2011 Contagion took the genre a step further and offered us a “scientifically correct” image of how a pandemic would disrupt all levels of social organization worldwide. As Contagion’s last scenes hint, this collapse will occur inevitably […]

Received from Dr. Craig Griffiths (Manchester Metropolitan University) 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York, which began in the early hours of Saturday, 28 June 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street defended themselves against police oppression. The Stonewall riots are often credited as the spark that set the gay liberation movement alight, not just in the United States, but around the Western world. In the years since, the words ‘Stonewall’ and ‘Christopher Street’ have become a recognisable shorthand for gay activism across Europe, inspiring the names of organisations, events, bars and publications. With this one-day conference (6th December 2019, Manchester Metropolitan University), we want to rethink the movements that the riots supposedly spawned in a European context. Gay liberation was never a one-way flow from across the Atlantic. While the Gay Liberation Front, set up in late 1969 in New York, was an important catalyst for similar groups in Europe, activist innovations crossed the Atlantic in the other direction too. Rather than walking fully formed off New York’s Christopher Street, the European gay liberation movements that sprang up in the early 1970s were influenced by national events, or groups elsewhere on […]

by the Past & Present editorial team