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  

Received from Dr. Joe Harley (University of Derby) In recent decades the ‘home’ has come to the forefront of historical investigations. Domestic production and work, such as spinning and farming, has received some renewed attention as part of this, yet the poor are still relatively under-researched compared to richer people. This conference aims to address these issues by focusing on domestic production in the homes of the poor. View the Domestic production and work in poor British homes, c. 1650-1850 programme here. The conference will bring together speakers who research a wide range of domestic activities, such as textile production, brewing and dairying. This will allow us to create a dialogue between people working in various areas and develop a holistic understanding of the relative importance of different types of domestic production and work in poor British households. Professor John Styles, University of Hertfordshire, has been confirmed as keynote speaker for the event. He will be discussing some of the project findings of a major Economic Research Council project he led on hand spinning and the industrial revolution. Registration for the conference can be made here, through the University of Derby. *Registration Update* As of 27/08/2019 this event is at […]

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 […]

Prof. Jane Whittle (University of Exeter) For years I have been frustrated by many historians’ approach to women’s ‘domestic work’. Domestic work is used as an explanation for women’s failure to contribute to the same extent as men to the rest of the economy, but is rarely subject to serious study in its own right. Additionally, writers were rarely clear what they meant by ‘domestic work’, and when they did specify its meaning, it was evident it meant significantly different things to different people. My article in Past & Present #243 on ‘A Critique of Approaches to “Domestic Work”’ is an attempt to unpick these issues. It was a journey that took me to unexpected destinations, and the more I probed, the bigger the issues involved became. As a result, the article ended up being about how we conceptualise work and the economy, tracing these ideas back into the history of economic thought. And the solutions lay primarily with the work of feminist development economists and political scientists in their blistering critiques of the real-world consequences of adopting a definition of work that prioritised men’s activities over women’s. Behind all this lay the work of economist Margaret Reid, who in […]

by the Past & Present editorial team