by Dr. Sam Wetherell (University of York) Every historian, regardless of field or rank, should stop what they are doing and watch a mediocre NBC Sci-Fi drama released last year called Timeless. The hero of this show is Lucy, a young assistant professor of history at Stanford who has just been denied tenure. The same day she gets the news, government officials turn up at her house and whisk her away to a secret compound where she is told that a hubristic Elon Musk style billionaire has invented a time machine which has been stolen by “terrorists”. As an expert in the past, she is recruited to use a reserve time machine to chase them through history, catching them before they alter the past. Accompanying her is a wide-chinned military strongman (Wyatt) and a pilot-cum-scientific prodigy (Rufus). Each episode they go back to a different canonical moment in American (or occasionally European) history from the Alamo to the Moon Landing to (bizarrely) Houdini’s first performance. The show is sometimes forced into performing feats of counterfactual gymnastics to justify the historical significance of some of these heavily mythologised events (the moon landing must be completed, for example, so the Russians don’t […]

by Dr. Anne L. Murphy (University of Hertfordshire)  Are you working against the clock? Struggling to make that next deadline? Operating in an environment of presenteeism where time at your desk counts for more than your actual productivity? In a recent Radio 4 programme, Emma Griffin blamed industrialisation for the tyranny of the clock in our working lives. Eighteenth-century factory owners like Samuel Greg of Quarry Bank Mill made their fortunes by regulating the working day and extracting long hours from their workers. In doing so they transformed the lives of their employees and created a seemingly unbreakable link between time spent at work and perceived productivity. Yet we can’t blame industrialists for this change. By 1783, the year Samuel Greg founded his mill, the City was already working to a rhythm that depended on strict adherence to clock time. In that year, the Bank of England appointed a Committee of Inspection to report on the way the institution worked. In the report we find constant references to the clock and to the timely delivery of the services the Bank provided. The report tells us that the official working day started at 9 and, when the more than 300 clerks employed by the Bank arrived, they […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Five hundred years ago today Martin Luther nailed a handwritten pamphlet to a church door in small university town in central Germany and kick started a chain of events that led inexorably to major cultural, social and arguably economic change. To mark this major anniversary, Past & Present is delighted to present the full details of its 2017 thematic supplementary issue Cultures of Lutheranism: Reformation Repertories in Early Modern Germany. Edited by Birkbeck’s Kat Hill, Past & Present’s latest Supplement offers a new cultural interpretation of the Lutheran Reformation in early modern Germany. It offers a collaborative account of the Reformation as a cultural event, and interrogates what Lutheran culture meant and how Lutherans were made. It goes beyond an account of theological arguments, confessional controversies, and ecclesiastical institutions, to consider how Lutheran culture remoulded men and women’s experiences and forged new identities, and how the Lutheran Reformation transformed individual subjectivity. All the contributors explore the cultural repertoires offer by Lutheranism and available to individuals as they sought to negotiate the world of theology, sex and family, the past and future, or everyday experiences. Focusing on these repertoires in a variety of German contexts, […]

by Dr. Tom Johnson (University of York) I first visited Dunwich in about 2004 on a school trip for Geography. We were, of course, excited to get out of school. It was an usually long journey for a school trip, taking well over an hour from Ipswich. This afforded rich opportunities for messing around on the coach, and the promise, at the end, of a walk on the beach and a lunch of fish and chips. Yet when we arrived, on a windswept, overcast day, I remember feeling grimly cheated. We had been told we were going to “Dunwich”. I had imagined a small town, like its more famous neighbours of Aldeburgh or Southwold, or at least a village, a settlement; a place in which one could arrive. Instead, there was nothing. Just a single row of buildings, a short terrace of Victorian coastguard cottages, serving now as a visitor centre and tea shop (and a holiday rental from the National Trust). And thence, for several miles in either direction, nothing but bare sandy heaths, a typically desolate stretch of Suffolk coast. I would like to be able to say that I recognized, then, the peculiar kind of loss which […]

by Manjeet Baruah (Jawaharlal Nehru University) , Jasmin Daam (Universität Kassel) & James McDougall (Oxford) “Bordering Empire, Crossing Frontiers”, our panel, addressed the issue of empire’s spatialities. Empires have often been conceived of as primarily spatial configurations due to their obvious geographical extent. These three talks, however, questioned the assumption of imperial spaces’ unity. Their overall argument might be subsumed under James McDougall’s observation that “unity in diversity” is not necessarily the most defining feature of empire. His talk on deportation and migration in the French colonial empire demonstrated that in the French case, empire did not simply mean the unification of a huge landmass, although imperial propaganda routinely highlighted this image. To understand the French empire’s spatial structure, McDougall instead focused on citizens’ and subjects’ actual movements, concluding that such mobilities constituted an imperial space which differed significantly from geographical mappings of empire. The patterns of movement and circulation – both voluntary and coerced – of imperial subjects suggested a maritime rather than a land empire. Moreover, the space of empire itself was produced less by the extent of an idealised sovereignty, which was often more theoretical than effective, than by these patterns of movement and of embodied experience. […]

by Dr. Sarah Frank, University of the Free State Our panel on ‘Plumbing in the Metropole: Time, Memory and the Senses’ drew the Everyday Empires conference towards its close. The panel delved into the visceral, often unpleasant lived experiences of colonial subjects across two different time-periods and empires. The papers, “A Colony in the Metropole? Daily Experiences of French Colonial Soldiers Interned in Vichy France” by Dr. Sarah Frank (University of the Free State) and “The Filth of the Abode of Felicity: Sewers, Stinks, and the Late Ottoman Empire” by Dr. Michael Talbot (University of Greenwich) drew methodologically on labour history, among other approaches, to explore the textures and odours of imperial subjects’ varied quotidian experiences in locations close to the centre of imperial authority. Labour history in both cases proved generative of deep, strong and nuanced case studies, connecting the local scale to the national to the international. In the Ottoman case, local officials in Istanbul petitioned municipal and central government to build sewers to overcome the threat posed by sewage and stinks, while workers in the area around the naval arsenal went on strike against the risk of cholera. Michael Talbot showed how workers’ everyday experience of foul […]

by Dr. Nathan Cardon and Simon Jackson, conference organisers (University of Birmingham) with Josh Allen (Past & Present)  Over the summer of 2017; Nathan Cardon and Simon Jackson, the co-organisers of the Everyday Empires conference, edited a series of blog posts that reflected upon, responded to and rifted off; the intellectual conversations sparked at the two day event. Highly ambitious in terms of its global sweep and desire to make legible the ways in which the process of imperialism in the modern era wove its way into the material fabric of everyday social existence. Past & Present was very pleased to support the conference, speaking as it does to exciting new ways of approaching questions that have exercised the journal ever since its foundation over sixty years ago. To this end we were delighted when the co-organisers approached us to jointly host-alongside hosting on their own platform-a series of rapid responses by panellists and other attendees to the themes under discussion at the conference. Generally taking the form of panel reports serving to make accessible in concise and engaging form the ongoing work being undertaken by those who spoke, whilst also forming a permanent record of the event, the blogs published as […]

by Dr. Sacha Hepburn (IHR, London) and Olivia Robinson (University of Oxford), conference organisers Two weeks ago, the conference we had been planning for the last 10 months finally came into being. When we first drafted the Call for Papers, we wondered just how many people we could get around a table for a day of discussions about servants’ lives ‘beyond the home’. We were not prepared for how popular this call turned out to be: by the deadline in March, we’d received more than 40 abstracts from researchers on 6 continents. By 7th September, as conference delegates took their seats and we began our opening address, the event had grown to a two-day conference of papers and special sessions, including a keynote address from Carolyn Steedman. We now know that the subject is of interest to a wide audience, including those within and outside of the academy. We share here our thoughts on what we’ve learned, and what comes next. Aims & ethos of the conference The conference aims were twofold: to place servants’ lives centre-stage and push beyond the boundaries of existing research on domestic service, and to gauge the appetite for developing a network of researchers to continue working […]

Powered by Wakelet Powered by Wakelet

Powered by Wakelet Powered by Wakelet