Received from Dr. Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia) The programme for Contested Minorities in the ‘New Europe’: National Identity from the Baltics to the Balkans, 1918-1939, which will take place at Birkbeck College, University of London between 1st and 2nd June 2019, has been published. Among the many challenges facing the new, or enlarged, nation-states that arose on the territories of the former empires of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe in 1918, few were as vexing or complex as the ‘minorities question’. Across this mosaic of geopolitical boundaries, what the Czech philosopher Tomáš Masaryk emphatically termed ‘New Europe’, thousands of disparate communities suddenly discovered that they now existed as minorities, often in areas adjacent to their designated homelands. Historical scholarship typically characterises this as coming to fuel authoritarian repression and nationalist animosity. This conference presents an alternative perspective to these notions of inherent antagonism by exploring how interwar minorities strove to develop or preserve their respective sense of national or cultural identity through non-violent means. It also wishes to consider how the interwar period shaped and influenced the idea of minority rights as a legal and ideological concept among international bodies, such as the League of Nations, as well […]

Received from Joshua Ravenhill (University of York) Two day conference at the University of York 28-29th June 2019, programme available here. In recent years belonging has become an increasingly important concept in historical research. As a socially constructed category which revolves around an individual’s inclusion and exclusion from formal and informal groups, belonging has the potential to be a useful conceptual tool within the scholarship of late medieval urban centres. Indeed, late medieval cities were environments with many formal and informal groups to which people could belong, such as street communities, parishes, guilds and the citizenry, to name a few. Belonging can be thought of, and applied, in different ways and it is the aim of the conference (28th-29th June 2019) to explore how these different ideas of belonging might be utilised in the study of late medieval cities. The conference will provide a forum in which both early career researchers and established academics can discuss which ideas of belonging are of use, and which are problematic, in the study of medieval urban centres. The papers have been carefully chosen so that the conference showcases research regarding an array of geographical areas, with the aim that this will foster discussion […]

Received from Miranda Reading (King’s College, London) This one-day conference on 26th April 2019 at UCL, will bring together postgraduate, early career and established historians to map out the current and future directions of eighteenth-century British history. The conference marks the 30th anniversary of the British History in the Long Eighteenth Century Seminar, and celebrates its work in providing an important forum for debate on all aspects of research into the history of eighteenth-century Britain, across thematic and methodological boundaries. The study of Britain in the long eighteenth century is a dynamic and rapidly expanding research area, with almost 30,000 books and articles published on the subject between 2007 and 2018, up 8% on the previous decade. Subjects experiencing the most marked growth include the senses and emotions, the body, consumption, gender, and imperial history. All of these themes, and others, will be addressed in roundtables and panel discussions at the conference, to create a dialogue about the current state of the field, generate new research questions, and map out the field’s future trajectory. Speakers include Professor Joanna Innes (Somerville, Oxford), Professor Tim Hitchcock (University of Sussex), Professor Penelope Corfield (Royal Hollaway/Newcastle University), Professor Carl Griffin (University of Sussex) and […]

Received from Dr. Leonie Hannan (Queen’s University Belfast) This conference invites scholars from the arts, humanities and social sciences to participate in a discussion about the development, experience and construction of material knowledge in the past. Contributions are welcomed from a wide range of historical eras, from the ancient through to the modern. This conference seeks to break with the age-old separation of hand and mind and uncover examples of material and embodied knowledge across a broad range of periods, geographical locations, spaces and places. Developments in histories of science, medicine and technology have fundamentally re-oriented our understanding of knowledge production. Recent scholarship has made a break with narratives that privilege a few ‘great men’ and engaged with a more diverse range of actors (e.g. women, indigenous peoples, tradesmen, technicians) and prioritised an approach that uncovers complex interactions between humans, their environments and the material things they have at their disposal. However, ‘knowledge’ or intellectual work took many different forms and scholars from fields such as food history, gender history, literary studies, historical geography and art history have increasingly viewed activities that were traditionally dismissed as unexceptional (such as cooking or craft) as playing a critical role in knowledge production. […]

by Hannah Rodger (University of York) On 25-26 January 2019, academics and scholars from across the world met at the University of York to take part in a workshop on ‘Early Modern Global Soundscapes’. The main aim of this workshop was to examine how sounds shaped the lives of individuals and their communities in the early modern world. Through bringing together researchers from Music, History, History of Art, English, Theatre Film and Television, and Ethnomusicology, this workshop aimed to address several, as yet unresolved, questions concerning historic sounds; especially the tension between the particular and the universal. This workshop contained four panels which consisted of short presented papers and chaired discussions. Within these, it was debated whether there were any commonalities between soundscapes, or whether all soundscapes are unique. Central issues such as what a soundscape actually is, and whether definitions are dependent on disciplinary perspectives, were also considered. These discussions ultimately enabled an examination of whether there is a collective way that all scholars can, and even should, conceptualise soundscapes. The first panel, which opened the workshop, concentrated on ‘sounds from England and Germany’. The first paper was on ballads in the soundscape: six consecutive notes, and was presented […]

by the Past & Present editorial team

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present was pleased to hear just before Christmas that Dr. Jakub Beneš (University of Birmingham) had won the Czechoslovak Studies Association’s biannual Stanley Z. Pech Prize. The award was made for his article “The Green Cadres and the Collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918” which appeared in Past & Present  No. 236 in August 2017. The Association’s Prize Committee has now released its citation outlining the rationale for awarding the prize to Dr. Beneš and we are pleased to reproduce it below: Few historians, not to mention the general public, are familiar with the “Green Cadres,” irregular forces of former soldiers and local farmers that banded together at the end of the Habsburg Monarchy. At first glance, this disparate group of ordinary folk might seem peripheral to the central narrative of imperial collapse and the establishment of new national states. In his masterful article, Jakub Beneš demonstrates to the contrary that these seemingly marginal individuals built on revolutionary traditions, threatened longstanding orders, channeled old prejudices, and helped to create new societies. As Beneš traces the changing role of the Green Cadres from bandits to avengers, to national heroes, to social revolutionaries, he shows […]

by Prof. Rodney Hilton (University of Birmingham)  Moscow, Autumn 1953 “…Only a small number of students study in university history departments. In Birmingham University, for example, there are between twenty and thirty students in each of the three years. When they finish university, the students in history departments take exams for the degree of BA. A very insignificant number of graduates (not more than two or three students each year) have the opportunity to continue study as postgraduates, so that the number of postgraduate students in history does not usually exceed ten. The basic factor that limits the number of postgraduates is a lack of material resources and sources of finance for their research work. Various capitalist organizations finance research primarily into those problems whose resolution is necessary to the interests of capital and the war industry… …The academic work of postgraduates in the history faculties of English universities usually begins after the award of the degree of BA, that is, after a three-year university course. The postgraduate chooses the topic of his research on the advice of the supervisor allocated to him. After two years the student takes a qualifying exam, which admits him to submission of a thesis. […]

by Dr. Lydia Walker (Dartmouth College) Twentieth-century global decolonization changed the map. In the thirty years after the Second World War, sixty countries—mostly in Asia and Africa—became independent from colonial powers. During the high point of accelerated decolonization in 1960, the United Nations recognized seventeen independent states. At times it seemed that there was a new country every week. This narrative of progressive national liberation ignores two important implications. First, it overlooks the existence of people who claimed—yet did not receive—independence during this period of heightened possibility. Second, it elides the fact that international recognition required an external audience—sometimes the United Nations, or a former colonizer, or a great power backer—to determine which ‘people-territorial match’ was a nation deserving a state, or a minority requiring protections, or indeed, a group of humans needing rights. Recognition signifies seeing a people as a state, considering a people as a political unit that ‘deserves’ statehood, and therefore being willing to hear their claim in international politics. The unspoken presence of a silent, sometimes shifting entity that bestowed international recognition suggested that it was incumbent on the nationalist movement to demonstrate its legitimacy, and construed the granting of statehood as a moral rather than […]

by the Past & Present editorial team We write as the editors of a number of academic journals in History and associated Humanities disciplines, based in the UK, continental Europe and North America, in collective response to the call for feedback about the proposals for the implementation of Science Europe’s Plan S. The overall aim of Plan S, to make publicly funded research freely accessible to all users, is a laudable one. As a group we are committed to the principle of Open Access (OA). We welcome initiatives that facilitate the dissemination of scholarship to the widest possible audience and that enable new developments in knowledge. We endorse the objective stated in the Guidance document of creating a culture that ensures that young scholars have opportunities to excel and advance their careers. A transparent, fair and efficient system of scholarly publishing that does not discriminate against researchers or institutions with no or limited ability to pay APCs is clearly in the interests of our discipline. We also share Plan S’s insistence on the need for robust and sustainable OA repositories that will preserve and curate scholarly publications for future generations. We are, however, concerned about some key aspects of Plan […]