by Dr. John M. Collins (Eastern Washington University) My article, appearing in the May 2020 issue of Past & Present (#247), explores the “law of necessity” in seventeenth century England and is a complementary piece to my book on martial law in the early modern period.1 In this article, I show that narratives of necessity structured many aspects of English law and were vital for state building, both during the Personal Rule of Charles I, the English Civil War, and after. The Long Parliament, for example, invoked it to tax, impress, violate due process rights, break contracts, and to seize and destroy property. Many of these powers, in spite of the wars ending, remained. The modern state was built from emergencies. The article, alas, is more relevant than I (or probably you) would like. Then, like now, the fear of societal calamity, even collapse, allowed the government to take extraordinary powers to save the polity. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the main threats were war and rebellion, with politicians analogizing them to natural disasters like fires. Now, it is the reverse. Politicians have frequently analogized the response to the pandemic to fighting a war. Like now, claims to necessity […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present is delighted to hear that Dr. Stephen Spencer who was a Past & Present Society funded Research Fellow at the Institute of History Research (London) between 2017 and 2019 has been shortlisted for the Royal History Society’s (RHS) 2020 Gladstone Prize. He has been shortlisted for his book Emotions in a Crusading Context 1095-1291 which developed from his PhD work and was completed whilst he was a Past & Present Fellow. The book has been published by Oxford University Press as part of their “Emotions in History” series. In the book Spencer provides: The first book-length study of the emotional rhetoric of crusading Explores the ways in which two emotions (fear and anger) and one affective display (weeping) were represented in Latin and Old French narratives of the crusades Identifies the various influences which shaped western chroniclers’ approaches to, and representations of, emotions in a crusading context Calls for greater sensitivity in using historical narratives to reconstruct crusaders’ lived emotions, beliefs, and ideologies Makes use of a broad range of comparative material to gauge the distinctiveness of these narratives: crusader letters, papal encyclicals, model sermons, chansons de geste, lyrics, and […]

Dr. Samuel Dolbee (Yale University) Few archives I have worked in are more idyllic than the Archives of the League of Nations and United Nations Organization in Geneva (ALON-UNOG), nestled in a corner of the imposing edifice of white stone that now houses the United Nations. The squawks of peacocks wafted into windows and intermingled with the clicking of keyboards. In the distance, the silvery waves of Lake Geneva stretched toward the snow-capped peaks of the Alps, a majestic view of nature that, when it was built in the interwar period, was intended to signify the international institution’s transcendence of the parochial concerns of nationalism. This period of my research formed the basis for my article “The Desert at the End of Empire: An Environmental History of the Armenian Genocide” in Past & Present #247 (May 2020). On the desk in front of me there in the summer of 2014 were images decidedly different than what I saw through the window: the 1920s-era intake forms of Aleppo’s League of Nations-affiliated orphanage. Known as the Armenian Rescue Home, it was operated by the Danish missionary and humanitarian worker Karen Jeppe (written about by Keith Watenpaugh, among others). Jeppe’s organization, along with […]

by Dr. Sonia Tycko (The Rothermere American Institute and St Peter’s College, Oxford) Prison and detention center authorities around the world have begun to release some inmates in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic, at the urging of prisoners’ rights activists. These releases seem to vary from the unconditional release of convicts who were already near the ends of their sentences, to the temporary release on bail or license of prisoners on remand or mid-sentence. With advocacy efforts and media attention focused on the decisions about release, little has been reported about what awaits prisoners beyond the prison walls. Historically, captors have often let captives go from hazardous disease environments. Past jailors’ methods and prisoners’ reactions can remind us that the mere fact of release—while clearly a crucial public health measure today—is not, in itself, enough. Prisoners should not be expected to be indiscriminately grateful for release. How prisoners are freed matters, and disease plays a major role in their experience of freedom.1 I briefly mentioned the effects of disease in my recent article, “The Legality of Prisoner of War Labour in England, 1648–1655” (Past & Present #246), which explains that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, prisoners of war were […]

by the North American Conference on British Studies editorial team Introduction Jonathan Connolly is the recipient of the 2019 Walter D. Love Prize. Connolly’s winning article (for the best entry in British history) was “Indentured Labour Migration and the Meaning of Emancipation: Free Trade, Race, and Labour in British Public Debate, 1838-1860,” Past & Present 238 (February 2018). In August 2020, he will take up his new position as assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Interview How did you become interested in this topic? Early on in graduate school, I began reading about indenture in the South African context, where I was interested broadly in processes of imperial expansion. Like many I think, I was struck by how quickly the indenture system took shape, so soon after abolition. An interest in origins led me to the southern Caribbean and then in particular to Mauritius. As I read more, I became increasingly concerned not only with what indenture ‘was,’ but with how it was represented. Many of my interests and nascent commitments as a historian involved the political culture of imperial rule—attempts to understand and rationalize power. So my earliest question, the question […]

Received from Dr. Chloe Ireton (University College, London) This event was initially scheduled to take place 3rd to the 5th September 2020 at UCL in London. Due to the ongoing worldwide COVID-19 pandemic and public health emergency, the organisers have decided to postpone the event until the 2nd to the 4th September 2021. The CFP (details below) is unaltered but the deadline for proposals has been extended until the 30th April 2020. Overview: This colloquium is designed to discuss ideas and methods from intellectual histories outside of a European context, especially how they might stimulate new approaches in the discipline of intellectual history as constituted in the Western academy. We plan to bring together scholars working in and on different regions to start a conversation about how intellectual history is researched, taught and configured in different places, bringing into stark relief the politics of knowledge of the field. We hope that all intellectual historians, whatever their specific area of research, will be interested in joining us to rethink the endeavour of intellectual history in a global context. Over the last few years, since the publication of Moyn and Sartori’s landmark collection of essays Global Intellectual History (2013) and the launch […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Our publisher Oxford University Press Academic has released a free to read collection of articles about the history of illness, disease and pandemics entitled “History of Outbreaks”. All articles in the series are free to read until 31/03/2020. Oxford University Press Academic introduce the collection by saying that: “When a disease occurs in greater numbers than expected in a community, region, or season, it is considered an outbreak. In addition to human suffering, outbreaks create panic, disrupt the social and economic structure, and can impede development in the affected communities. While we cannot predict exactly when or where the next epidemic or pandemic will begin, we can explore and learn from outbreaks of the past.” There are four Past & Present articles, drawn from issues released in recent years as well as one which is still forthcoming. Please find them listed below: *‘Loving Capitalism Disease’: Aids and Ideology in the People’s Republic of China, 1984–2000, Julian Gewirtz *The Path to Pistoia: Urban Hygiene Before the Black Death, G. Geltner *Rejecting Catastrophe: The Case of the Justinianic Plague, Lee Mordechai and Merle Eisenberg *The Antonine Plague, Climate Change and Local Violence in Roman Egypt, […]

by Dr. Tyler Parry (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) & Dr. Chaz Yingling (University of Louisville) In accordance with testimonies from many runaways, ex-slave David Holmes from Mecklenberg County, Virginia detailed his own harrowing escape from slavery, recalling how environmental knowledge aided him in successfully evading the bloodhounds used to track him. British journalist L.A. Chamerovzow, who interviewed Holmes in 1852, recorded that such knowledge was “secret” and not “known generally” to protect strategies from prying slaveowners. He thus omitted the type of substance that Holmes used to confuse the bloodhound’s sensory power, saying that it “must remain an editorial secret” and that he would “not betray it, for the benefit of the planters; but it is at the service of friends.” Such covert archives, transmitted through quiet conversations among the enslaved, enabled many across the Caribbean and North America in escaping bondage. Though not all slaves were so secretive in interviews and memoirs, the ubiquity of slave hounds in the rise of slavery and fall through abolition has remained obscured. Holmes’ reference does offer useful insights into how slaves curated knowledge and guarded it from masters. Collectively, the primary sources that remain reveal the terror of slave hounds as […]

by Dr. Dan Callwood, Dr. Craig Griffiths (Manchester Metropolitan University), Dr. Rebecca Jennings (University College London)   Held on 6 December 2019, “Stonewall 50 years on: gay liberation and lesbian feminism in its European context” at Manchester Metropolitan University, attracted scholars from around the UK, Europe and the US, mixing with a large audience of researchers, students, activists and members of Manchester’s queer community. Online discussion around this event has been collated and can be viewed here. June 2019 marked the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City, often credited as the spark that set gay liberation alight, not just in the U.S., but around the Western world. The organisers of this one day conference saw the 50th anniversary as an opportunity to rethink the various gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements that the events at Stonewall supposedly spawned in Europe, asking to what extent they were influenced by their own national events, ideologies and imaginaries, as well as interacting with each other in a network of action and ideas. The conference consisted of four panels. The first, on ‘Protest Repertoires,’ considered some of the ways in which LGBT communities have mobilised political protest in the 1970s to […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Dr. Shamima Akhtar (IHR, London) was interviewed about her work as the Royal Historical Society’s Race, Ethnicity, and Equality in History Fellow, by The Guardian. Interviewed for an article entitled “‘I’m used to being the only brown person in the room’: why the humanities have a diversity problem” Akhtar reflected that: “[‘She’s used to being the only brown person in the room,’ [says Akhtar] a post-doctoral fellow working with the Royal Historical Society, whose race, ethnicity and equality report found history is one of the least diverse subjects in the UK – black historians make up less than 1% of university history staff. Akhtar believes the problem in her subject starts in schools, where the history taught is predominantly white and Eurocentric, and is the start of an enduring and implicit bias against history from the perspective of those who are not white. ‘If students never see anyone who looks like them in textbooks, they’ll think the subject’s not for them. They won’t feel welcome. By the time students graduate from a history degree, they may have studied Nazi Germany three or four times,’ she says.” The article in which her comments appear […]