by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present is pleased to be supporting Substance Use and Abuse in the Long Nineteenth Century on the 13th and 14th September 2018 at Edge Hill University. Convened by Edge Hill’s Dr. Laura Eastlake and Dr. Andrew McInnes, confirmed speakers include Prof. Susan Zieger (California, Riverside), Dr. Noelle Plack (Newman University), Dr. Douglas Small (University of Glasgow).       ‘The body (follow me closely here) lies at the mercy of the most omnipotent of all potentates—the Chemist.’ Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859) In The Woman in White Collins’s villainous Count Fosco expounds on the power of modern pharmacology. Fosco is speaking at the mid-point of a century wherein the body and the mind seemed increasingly easily affected by the influence of substances. From 1821 opium had allowed Thomas de Quincey to explore ‘the palimpsest of the human mind’ and navigate the dream space of the human subconscious. Ether and chloroform banished pain and facilitated new surgical innovations. Stimulants and sedatives regulated waking and sleeping and the working day in between. Reports of alcoholism, addiction and criminality appeared with increasing regularity in the periodical press and featured in the plots of new literary […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Later this year Past & Present will publish “Diets, Hunger and Living Standards during the British industrial revolution” by Prof. Emma Griffin (UEA, Norwich). The article returns to, and seeks to re-frame and focus; the classic social history debates around the impact of early industrialisation upon the living standards of the poorest members of British society. Prof. Griffin recently presented a BBC Radio Four programme, broadcast on International Women’s Day, Mind the Gender Pay Gap. In the programme she explored how gendered assumptions and power imbalances structured the organisation of work, affected the division of labour’s share of the proceeds of industrialisation, during the 18th and 19th Centuries. Through doing this she demonstrates that: “…we can only make sense of the gender pay gap by taking a historical perspective. Beginning in the 15th century, [Prof. Griffin] explores how work has always been divided along gender lines. Then during the industrial revolution, when women started to enter the workplace in record numbers, women’s work was typically defined by lower wages, in comparison to men’s. [Prof. Griffin shows] how the new industrial employers maintained the gender pay gap in the burgeoning cotton mills.” Using cutting […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present was delighted to hear earlier this week that Dr. Jamie Kreiner (University of Georgia) has won the Society for French Historical Studies’ William Koren, Jnr. Prize. The prize was awarded for her article “Pigs in the Flesh and Fisc: an Early Medieval Ecology” which appeared in our August 2017 issue (No. 236). Endowed in the 1980s by friends of the late William Koren, Jnr. the one thousand dollar prize is awarded annually to the “most outstanding article on any period in French history published the previous year by a scholar appointed at a college in the United States or Canada”. Contenders must have published in a journal originating from North America, Australasia or Europe. We are delighted that Dr. Kreiner has been recognised with this highly prestigious honour for her work, and have made “Pigs in the Flesh and Fisc: an Early Medieval Ecology” free for a limited period of time, so as to encourage as many people as possible to read it.  

by the Past & Present editorial team In honour of the career of Prof. Paul Slack (Oxford), distinguished early modern British social historian and long serving Past & Present stalwart. Current Past & Present editorial board members Prof. Michael Braddick (Sheffield) and Prof. Joanna Innes (Oxford) were recently pleased to publish the edited collection Suffering and Happiness in England 1550-1850: Narratives and Representations. The festschrift was published in the second half of last year by Oxford University press and forms part of the wide ranging and ever expanding Past & Present book series.

By Natasha Pesaran (Columbia) On 18 and 19 December 2017, Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge hosted a conference on “Sovereignty, Economy, and the Global Histories of Natural Resources.” Organized by Tehila Sasson of Emory University, winner of the 2017 International Research Awards in Global History, the conference brought together scholars from diverse fields to discuss the global history of natural resources from multiple vantage points. Rather than focusing on a single natural resource or geographic region, the conference aimed to take a holistic approach and the papers as a whole transcended the global north and south divide and drew upon a number of different methods, archives, and theoretical frameworks. A central aim of the conference was to explore the ways in which a concern with natural resources might offer new ways of writing histories of empire and decolonization. This theme was taken up directly in Angelo Matteo Caglioti’s paper, which demonstrated how a focus on natural resources could lead to re-interpretation of the history of Italian colonialism. In particular, Caglioti argued that imperial competition between Britain and Italy over water resources, specifically the Lake Tana dam project, shed explanatory light on Italy’s decision to invade Ethiopia in 1935. […]

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by Michelle Tusan (University of Nevada at Las Vegas) Filmmaking always has had a politics. Nowhere have the stakes been higher than in representing acts of atrocity, terror and genocide. It started with the dawn of film in the early twentieth century when the first atrocity film ever made and was released to transatlantic audiences in 1918. Ravished Armenia or Auction of Souls as it was known outside of the US told the story of the massacre of 1.5 million Armenian civilians during World War I (1914- 1918) by the Ottoman imperial government. It was followed by a host of other attempts to represent the massacres on film. This included MGM’s failure to turn Franz Werfel’s book The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933) into a movie because of lobbying and interference from Turkey. More recently, director Atom Egoyan’s critically acclaimed film Ararat (2002) depicted the genocide through stories of remembrance and denial. The Promise (2017), the $100 million dollar MGM epic gave the movie studio another chance to tell the story. Intent to Destroy (2017), a documentary about the making of The Promise and its historical context, is the latest in a series of attempts to get the popular […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Dr. Benjamin Thomas White has won the 2017 Syrian Studies Association “Prize for the Most Outstanding Article or Book Chapter” for “Refugees and the Definition of Syria, 1920-1939” which appeared in Past & Present No. 235 (May 2017). Deeming the piece “remarkable”, the prize committee summarised the article’s contribution to scholarship in the most glowing terms: “Examining the influx of refugees into the Syrian Mandate during the interwar period, Benjamin Thomas White convincingly argues that modern state formation in Syria was largely shaped by its response to the presence of these refugees and the attendant controversies over their place in the nascent Syria.  Combining Arabic newspapers with French colonial archival documents, White demonstrates that the flow of refugees brought state authority into many rural areas for the first time, while intensifying it in the cities.  Refugee flows also brought geographical borders into sharper definition and profoundly influenced the crafting of nationality laws.  White’s innovative and informative article sheds light on the complex interactions among various Syrian and foreign actors in shaping a national and territorial Syria.  This article greatly contributes not only to our knowledge of Syrian history but also to the present crisis in Syria and its repercussions in Europe and the Mediterranean.” In addition to the prize itself White has been invited, as is the Syrian Studies […]

by the Past & Present editorial team We were recently pleased to hear that the University of Glasgow’s Dr. Benjamin Thomas White has been awarded this year’s Khayrallah Prize in Migration Studies. He received the prize-which recognises outstanding work in the field of Middle Eastern migration and diasporas regardless of discipline-for his article “Refugees and the definition of Syria, 1920-1939” which appeared in the May 2017 issue of Past & Present  (No. 235). Our congratulations to Benjamin. To enable even more people to read this award winning piece of work, our publishers Oxford University Press Academic have made it free to read online until 14th December 2017.