by Josh Allen (Past & Present) On the evening of the 30th May-which was then the warmest day of the year-over fifty people, split roughly evenly between academics, students and interested members of the general public; gathered at the University of Birmingham to hear Prof. Lynda Nead (Birkbeck) present her research on “The Grain of History: Photography and Post-War Time c.1945-55”. The lecture represented the high point of a Past & Present funded workshop on the uses of photographs in history organised by Prof. Elizabeth Edwards (DeMontfort) and Dr. Lucie Ryzova (Birmingham) which ran between the 30th and 31st May 2018 at the University of Birmingham. It is envisaged that the proceedings will be published in future as a supplement of Past & Present offering a bold intervention in the field. After an introduction from the University of Birmingham’s Professor Leslie Brubaker, “in the best tradition of art history lectures… the lights [were then] switched off” and Nead’s keynote lecture commenced. Nead began by contending that through “taking a small number of Picture Post photo-stories on post-war reconstruction as a case study [it is possible to] discuss how time is registered in the taking and printing of photographs in this […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present is pleased to be supporting “Beyond Truth: Fiction and (Dis)information in the Early Modern World” at the New College, the University of Oxford between the 17th and 18th September 2018. Organised by Dr. Emma Claussen, Thomas Goodwin and Luca Zenobi (all at the University of Oxford) this “two-day interdisciplinary conference, seek[s] to explore the boundaries between truth and falsehood in the early modern period, thinking about disinformation, fiction, and power in tandem.” Featuring twenty papers and two keynote lectures, the programme has now been published; and registration has opened. Full details and further information can be found on the conference website. In addition to sponsorship from Past & Present this event is also supported by the Royal Historical Society, the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Oxford and the Ludwig Research Fund for the Humanities at New College, Oxford. Past & Present is pleased to support this event and others like it. Applications are welcomed from scholars of at all career stages working on all time periods.

by the Past & Present editorial team Dr. Laura Eastlake and Dr. Andrew McInnes the organisers of Substance Use and Abuse in the Long Nineteenth Century at Edge Hill University (13th-14th September 2018) have announced a creative competition in the run up to the event. The competition Your Research in One Image will be judged by a panel led by Stephen Whittle the Principal Manager of The Atkinson Southport, with whom Eastlake and McInnes are collaborating to mount an exhibition related to themes explored in the conference. Past & Present has been advised that the details of the competition are as follows: We are inviting submissions of creative works which explore any aspect of nineteenth-century substance use and abuse. -Photography, painting, digital art, mixed media, posters? -Still lives of drug paraphernalia? -Microscopic images of chemical compounds -Mapping nineteenth-century drug use? -A sculpture featuring Sherlock Holmes’s 243 types of tobacco ash? This competition is open to undergraduate and postgraduate students, lecturers and researchers, and members of the public. Winners will be announced and prizes awarded at the conference, 13th – 14th September 2018 at Edge Hill University. First prize: £100 Deadline for entries: 17th August 2018 Competition entry forms can be downloaded here, along with the […]

by Dr. Peter Hill (Christ Church) and Dr. Hussein Omar (Pembroke) University of Oxford (workshop organisers) ‘Beyond Circulation: The Intellectual and the Material in the History of the Arab Nahda’ is an international research workshop to be held at the University of Oxford between 21 and 23 June 2018, organised by Peter Hill and Hussein Omar. It is supported by the University of Oxford via the John Fell OUP Research Fund and the History Faculty’s Sanderson Fund, and by the Past & Present Society via a conference grant. The Arab ‘Awakening’ or Nahda of the long nineteenth century has been the object of a growing number of new histories. In these recent works, the Nahda has been regarded as the paradigmatic moment of social transformation, as Middle Eastern society was brought into ever more intense contact with expanding European imperialism and global capitalism. Yet this rich and emergent historiography has tended to be methodologically divided: with those who primarily examine the material – or how the region was integrated into the capitalist world-system – and those who predominantly examine the cultural-intellectual – or attempts to reconcile modernity with tradition – remaining unreconciled. This three-day workshop, leading to a special issue of […]

from Dr. Alison Hudson (British Library) Showcasing the latest research on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts To coincide with the British Library’s Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition, the Library is holding a two-day international conference with papers by leading scholars in the fields of history, literature and art history. This will be followed by a one-day symposium for early career researchers on 15 December. These multidisciplinary, international events will re-evaluate the roles and uses of writing, manuscripts and inscribed objects in early medieval England and beyond, during a period when uses of writing and writing technologies changed and expanded considerably. Papers will cover libraries and readers, objects inscribed in runes, highly illuminated manuscripts, literary manuscripts and documentary writing up to Domesday Book. The papers will place the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in wider geographical, cultural and political contexts. The conference will begin with a keynote lecture on ‘The European context of manuscript illumination in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, 600–900’, given by Professor Lawrence Nees, and will conclude with a second keynote lecture on ‘Exon Domesday, the English and the Normans’, by Professor Julia Crick. reserved The conference will also include a private view of the exhibition. Tickets Two-day tickets are available for the International Conference only, on Thursday 13 and […]

by the Past & Present editorial team We were delighted to hear that Dr. Jamie Kreiner (University of Georgia) recently was awarded the Agricultural History Society’s Wayne D. Rasmussen Award. Dr. Kreiner received the award for her article “Pigs in the Flesh and Fisc: An Early Medieval Ecology” which was published in Past & Present last summer (No. 236, pp. 3-42). The Agricultural History Society awards the Wayne D. Rasmussen prize annually “for the best article on agricultural history published outside [the Society’s own] journal Agricultural History in the preceding twelve months. In addition to the honour of the prize, recipients are granted a year’s membership of the Society, free registration at their annual conference and two hundred US Dollars in cash. In recognition of Dr. Kreiner’s achievement and to ensure the widest possible readership for her award winning research, out publishers OUP Academic have made “Pigs in the Flesh and Fisc” free to access until 29th June 2018. It also offers our web editor an excuse once again to share “The Pig[er] Picture” Dr. Kreiner’s blog post about her research which he considers “amongst the most exuberant things [he] has ever published”.   

Dr. Chris Evans (University of South Wales) and Dr. Göran Rydén (Uppsala University) What took us so long? We first got interested in “voyage iron”, one of the currencies of the Atlantic slave trade, two decades back, so why does our (open access) article on the subject only appear in Past & Present in 2018? Archival research takes time, of course, but not always twenty years. The real reason lies in our failure to ask the right questions. So, not so much “What took us so long?”, more “Why were we so obtuse?”. Voyage iron came to our attention in the late 1990s. Like so many historians at the time, we were trying to push at the boundaries of Atlantic History. We were convinced that early modern Sweden had an unsuspected Atlantic dimension, one provided by its iron industry, which exported huge volumes of bar iron to Britain. As late as the 1780s, it should be remembered, most iron on the British market was shipped in from the Baltic. In some sectors of the economy there was total reliance on Swedish material. Every steel manufacturer in Britain, for example, depended upon high-grade Swedish iron. That had important Atlantic consequences. It meant […]

from Prof. Peter Jones (University of Birmingham) We are delighted to let you know that the programme of A Date with History – the second edition of our annual Franco-British collaboration with the York Festival of Ideas – is now available! Over the 9th and 10th June, this second edition Imagining Revolutions will bring together top historians including Peter Mandler of the University of Cambridge, Laura Lee Downs of the European University Institute, Florence Tamagne of the University of Lille, Helen Rogers of Liverpool John Moores University, Mike Savage of the London School of Economics (LSE) and David Andress of the University of Portsmouth! Over the weekend, leading historians from France and the UK will discuss how national narratives are written, from revolutions and empires, to the industrial revolutions in France and Britain during the following panel discussions: –          Were the 1960s a Revolution? (Sat 9 June, 12.30pm – 2pm) –          Revolutions and Empires (Sat 9 June, 2.30 – 4pm) –          Gender Revolutions (Sat 9 June, 4.30 – 6pm) –          Industrial Revolutions and Social Welfare in France and Britain (Sun 10 June, 11am – 12.30pm) –          Revolutions in History Writing (Sun 10 June, 1.30pm – 3pm) –          A Revolution in Universities (Sun 10 June, 3.30pm – 5pm) We are looking forward to welcoming you! We would be grateful if you could spread the word around […]

by Prof. Emma Griffin (University of East Anglia) For the past decade, I have been looking at the impact of the British industrial revolution on the lives of ordinary men, women and children, drawing upon life-writing and autobiography and focusing on the lived experience. My reading of the autobiographical evidence suggested that adult men working in industrial occupations earned higher wages and enjoyed a raft of advantages compared with those who remained on the land, and although I emphasised these gains were not shared by women and children, the suggestion that industrialisation brought any meaningful benefits to any segment of the working classes, nonetheless proved to be controversial. A collection of extraordinary working-class household budgets collected between 1790 and 1850, offered the promise of studying the living standards of the early industrial workforce in a more quantitative way than was possible with the working-class autobiographies. The budgets were recorded by gentlemen investigators – vicars, landowners, and other members of elite society with an interest in the lives their poorer neighbours. The investigators collected information about income and expenditure in selected households in their parishes, making it possible to compare the incomes and diets of those who lived in the industrial […]

by Dr. Song-Chuan Chen (University of Warwick) Located in Taipei, the voluminous records on tomb protections in the Academia Sinica archives, piqued my curiosity. It was 2009, and I was leafing through a collection of Qing dynasty foreign office documents when my attention was arrested by accounts of Chinese villagers ardently protecting ancestral tombs against Western encroachment during the closing decades of China’s last dynasty. The villagers’ tears and protests against tomb destruction conjured personal memories of growing up on a remote outer island of Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s where an old evolving tradition of ancestor worship escaped the disruption of modernity. In those days, my mother faithfully prepared annual rituals of ancestor worship during important festivals, and my father careful maintained his father’s tomb, to which he has a deep attachment. To him, the tomb provided a physical connection to his father, whose remains lay just beneath the earth. Because my father and brother believed that my career was not going anywhere (in fact I have been not a day without employment even before graduation), they sought to improve my fortunes in 2011 by trimming the overgrown Acacia trees surrounding the burial site. In their minds, the […]