This comment is the personal reflection of an early career historian on the challenges of working on Russian history during a time of geopolitical change and declining access. As libraries and archives in the Russian Federation become increasingly difficult to use following the invasion of Ukraine, early-career and younger historians are being forced to adopt remote or indirect methods of research due to formal and informal barriers. I reflect on some of the ethical, practical and epistemological dilemmas of conducting historical investigations at a distance, drawing chiefly on my own experiences working on the tsarist secret police during the First World War. I argue that this is not a return to Cold War constraints, but a new era that demands fresh strategies and a redefinition of expertise.

This article presents a case study of the 1959 UK–USSR film weeks to investigate the political, cultural and industrial motivations shaping Cold War cultural exchange, focusing on the role of the British Council’s Soviet Relations Committee (SRC). Originating from a 1955 Soviet proposal for reciprocal film weeks, the project faced over four years of delays and aborted attempts due to a division of opinion among British state and non-state actors. The SRC sought to bridge the conflicting policy motivations between the British Council, the Foreign Office and the British film industry towards the film weeks, but the contradictory priorities and interests of the groups led to an ambiguous approach. The article reconstructs the negotiations, organisation and delivery of the film weeks from the British perspective, drawing on archival sources including the British Council Records at The National Archives to reveal new perspectives on the divergent policy motivations towards the use of films and film weeks in cultural exchange. In doing so, the article contributes to wider research into the role of the SRC and film weeks in the cultural Cold War.

Dubbed ‘the Impaler’ by his contemporaries, Vlad III Dracula (c. 1431–76), was accused of the slaughter of between 40,000 and 100,000 individuals, 20,000 of them allegedly impaled at the Wallachian capital Targovişte. Although historians have often considered these figures inflated, none of the numerous studies dedicated to the voivode of Wallachia have undertaken a methodical evaluation of the extent of this exaggeration. This article takes up this historiographical challenge by examining all available documentation. In so doing, it provides a full reassessment of the practice of impalement in fifteenth-century south-eastern Europe. Contrary to assumptions of previous scholarship, Vlad’s use of impalement was influenced simultaneously by pre-existing Hungarian and Ottoman practices. Quantitative analysis shows that only 7–10 per cent of the impalements claimed by sources can be considered plausible and proposes a new data-driven estimation of Vlad’s impaled victims. Finally, a comparison with other rulers shows that, while Vlad ordered collective impalements more frequently, the average number of victims per impalement was similar to that elsewhere in south-eastern Europe.

‘Us and Them’ is a community history project and artistic collaboration exploring physical and intellectual disability and mental illness, in the past and present. It is part of a broader initiative to open out wider conversations about the history of psychiatric care in Epsom (Surrey, UK) and to explore ways in which medical histories, creative engagement strategies and oral history praxis can illuminate the instability of contemporary understandings of ‘healthy minds’ and ‘normative bodies’. This article charts our recent reuse of asylum photography and the restaging of wet-plate collodion portrait making, opening out key ethical questions about our complicity as consumers of historical sources, the role of re-enactment and empathy, and the place of the haptic and the ludic in exposing the porous and precarious boundaries between ableism and disability. Exploring our own vulnerabilities and solidarities in co-producing a public history project with our disabled artist collaborators, it offers insight into our evolving ‘micro ethics’, foregrounds lived experience perspectives, and offers some initial thoughts on ways to rethink critically some core tenets of oral history methodology.

The history of early modern scholarship was long written as a subject set at some remove from the rest of early modern society. Learning was the common property of like-minded scholars in the ‘Republic of Letters’, linked by shared codes of elite sociability and united by a mutual concern to transcend religious boundaries. Recent years have seen such views challenged, with studies demonstrating how much scholarly activity was undertaken to achieve confessional objectives. Yet, these contributions have chiefly focused on orthodox clerical scholars. This article uses the case of John Locke to present a new perspective on the place and significance of erudition in the early modern period. It is based on a thoroughgoing examination of Locke’s lifetime of religious reading, bringing together evidence from his manuscript notebooks and journals, his library catalogues and annotated books, and his correspondence and published works. It coins the notion of ‘everyday erudition’ to reveal how learning was not an abstruse concern. Instead, for Locke and his contemporaries at multiple points on the socio-cultural scale, it was a kind of common currency, a tool to be used to come to terms with the historical reality of Christian revelation.

This article looks at military history through a social lens, focusing on the identity and experiences of the Irish Catholics recruited for service in the British army during the American Revolution, a conflict which occurred before Catholics were legally permitted to serve, but during which significant numbers were recruited nonetheless. Using Irish Catholic recruitment and subsequent service in the 46th Regiment of Foot as a case study, this article will discuss the integration of this group into a regular regiment on the British establishment, arguing that despite contemporary anxieties to the contrary, the incorporation of Irish Catholics into the British army happened smoothly and without negative impact on regimental cohesion and discipline. They became well-integrated, and while their loyalty to the British state can never be definitively proven, they certainly became effective participants in its army and empire. This provides a compelling viewpoint from which to discuss the integration of ‘others’ into Britishness and the imperial apparatus during this period.

This article explores the relationship(s) between ‘madness’, emotion and the archive in early modern England, taking as its case study the letters of British Library Lansdowne MS vol. 99, sent between c. 1570 and c. 1600 to the government of Elizabethan England and annotated at several stages in their history to describe their authors and contents as ‘mad’. Firstly, by examining the complex history of the archive, it demonstrates the potential for archival practices to bring into focus, and thereby facilitate historical examination of, past emotion. Secondly, it explores some of the ethical and methodological problems of third-party historical descriptions of madness, demonstrating that a focus on emotion – in particular ‘distress’ – offers a more fruitful path to understanding the significance of this material. Thirdly, it explores the Lansdowne 99 authors’ experiences of distress, revealing the ways distressed subjects exercised rhetorical agency when petitioning those in power. It identifies a series of prominent themes: desperation and deservingness; victimhood and persecution; and appeals to status and lineage. Ultimately, I argue that understanding their distress not only brings us closer to marginalised people in the past, but grants us a richer knowledge of past societies and the experience of being human in them.

This article presents a print history of the International African Service Bureau journal International African Opinion and its little-known editor Ras T. Makonnen. In doing so, it makes the case for a reassessment of how we think about anti-colonial movements in interwar Britain. It argues that Pan-Africanism can be viewed as a loose network of anti-colonial activists, where political ideas were fluid and often in competition with one another, yet still operated harmoniously under the wider banner of Pan-Africanism. By analysing the place of print in this competition it demonstrates the role of the history of print within wider histories of empire and anti-colonialism, as well as functions as an engagement with Black British history and histories of Black internationalism.

Nineteenth-century sanitary and burial reform were motivated by public health concerns and transformed the Victorian landscape with two forms of new infrastructure: sewers and out-of-town cemeteries. However, the history of burial reform ‘always sat awkwardly’ (in the words of Julie Rugg) with that of sanitary reform. In this article, we re-examine the campaigning career of George Alfred Walker (1807–84), a surgeon-apothecary who made public health the core of his argument for burial reform, to demonstrate that burial and sanitary reform were deeply intertwined via sanitary science, politics and science communication. We argue that Walker represented city graveyards as a nuisance similar to poor sewerage, utilising Thomas Southwood Smith’s heterodox fever theory to make his argument amenable to Edwin Chadwick’s goals and solutions: infrastructure ahead of poor relief. Walker’s solutions gave the medical profession positive reasons to support sanitary reform, as they proffered much-needed employment via burial reform. At the same time, his extremely active and varied campaigning throughout the 1840s took inspiration and strategy from the broader sanitation movement. By providing a comprehensive account of his campaigning for the first time, we show that sanitary reform politics was central to changing British burial management as a contested scientific theory was utilised to fit political ends.

Between 2014 and 2019, millions of people witnessed and participated in a mass of commemorative activities for the First World War. Millions of pounds were spent for projects that brought together academic historians, community groups, artists, schools and the general public. These projects have been reviewed in government evaluations, by arts organisations and universities. However, commemoration is highly context-specific, affected by the contemporary actors as much as the events commemorated. Since 2019, the pandemic and the ongoing financial crisis in Higher Education have undermined the strength of the research community and the arts and heritage sectors. The world is becoming increasingly polarised and new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence pose new challenges for our discipline. By 2039, we can expect that there will be increased public interest in commemorating the Second World War. This contribution reviews the learning from the commemoration activities between 2014 and 2019 to identify what we can apply to 2039 and how we can begin to prepare in our current environment.

This article seeks both to reassess the dynamics of the Northern Irish civil rights movement during the mid to late 1960s, as well as to suggest a new understanding of the role of parliamentary forces in furthering the goals of social movements. During the 1960s, Northern Ireland underwent significant socio-political upheaval, centred on the rights of the region’s Catholic minority and their long-term concerns regarding democratic representation, unemployment and housing. The resulting civil rights movement sought to avoid the traditional ethno-nationalist fault lines of Ulster politics and appealed directly to the British government and people, bypassing the devolved Stormont parliament with its permanent Protestant-Unionist majority. While vital work has been done to analyse this important period, aspects of British-based activism for civil rights in Northern Ireland have not yet been fully scrutinised. One key British group was the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster (CDU). Primarily made up of backbench Labour MPs, the CDU pursued civil rights at Westminster by advocating for governmental inquiries and legislative reform to address Catholic grievances. Although highly energetic, the CDU faced deep constitutional barriers and the organisation’s efforts have generally been seen as unsuccessful. However, new archival work and a reappraisal of previous studies suggests a more nuanced view. The CDU had more influence than the organisation itself believed. This has implications not only for our understanding of the civil rights movement, but also for interpreting the actions of groups such as the CDU, described here as ‘Parliamentary Activists’, both historically and in the present day.

Historians of empire have long been interested in how interpersonal relationships between coloniser and colonised did or did not conform to imperial ideologies. Yet, the relationships that developed between European and Indian officers in the East India Company’s armies remain underexplored. This is an important omission, because the armies employed thousands of people and represented a significant point of cross-cultural contact, while also being governed by a distinct set of rules and conventions. This article uses the variety of materials generated by a controversy in the Fifth Light Cavalry, Madras Army to understand the nature and limits of what contemporaries called friendships. Both interested parties and neutral onlookers testified to the existence of friendships and factions that bridged race and rank. Indian officers sought the goodwill of their superiors to ensure their professional security, while British officers looked to Indian allies for information and legitimacy. Although existing scholarship has often assumed that British and Indian officers led largely separate lives, the scandal in the Fifth Light Cavalry demonstrates instead that British and Indian officers could, and did, form parties defined by shared objectives. When disputes broke out between rival British officers, however, Indian allies risked becoming collateral damage, while British officers who sided with Indian friends were punished for violating social codes. Through this controversy, we see how and why hierarchies of race and rank were contested, as well as the mechanisms whereby they were ultimately preserved intact.

This article reflects on my experience recovering and organising two judicial archives in Uganda — the High Court and Mengo Court archives — which had long been neglected due to bureaucratic disinterest and legal hierarchies inherited from the colonial period. Together, these archives contained over 150,000 uncatalogued case files documenting how ordinary Ugandans used both native and colonial British courts to contest injustice and claim rights. Their exclusion from formal archives was not incidental; it reflected a legal order that considered British colonial statutes, appellate decisions and English-language records as authoritative expression of law, while dismissing native court records, as informal without precedential value and unworthy of preservation. Drawing on critical scholarship and my own archival experience, I argue that the archive of law should not be seen merely as a collection of sources or as sites of power and knowledge, but as a space where legal authority and legitimacy are produced, preserved, and erased. The recovery of these records not only unearthed a neglected legal history shaped by ordinary people but also challenges dominant narratives of legal authority in Africa. This work also exposed the omissions in the archival collections, the influence of colonial memory, and the importance of vernacular legal records for both historical research and contemporary legal practice.

This collection gathers thirteen contributions by a number of historians, friends, colleagues and/or students of Jinty’s, who were asked to pick their favourite article by her and say a few words about it for an event held in her memory on 15 January 2025 at King’s College London. We offer this collection in print now for a wider audience not so much because it has any claim to be exhaustive or authoritative, but because taken all together these pieces seemed to add up to a useful retrospective on Jinty’s work, its wider context, and its impact on the field over the decades. We hope that, for those who know her work well already, this may be an opportunity to remember some of her classic (and a few less classic) articles, while at the same time serving as an accessible introduction to her research for anyone who knew her without necessarily knowing about her field, as well as for a new and younger generation of readers.

This article argues that a relational and trust-based understanding of fides can explain its use and impact in a variety of secular and religious settings, but particularly between members of different religious communities and especially in commercial contracts. The Latin word fides can be translated in a variety of ways, from ‘faith’, ‘trust’ and ‘trustworthiness’, to ‘proof’ and ‘belief’. Within these meanings there are complex religious and legal implications. Most understandings focus on the ways in which the term defines and creates relationships within a community. Contracts from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Barcelona and Mallorca demonstrate the meaning and significance of the use of the term between merchants and investors from different religious communities. The article provides a new understanding of the place of faith language within the creation of trusting relationships.

In April 2023, eighteen scholars from nine different subjects representing the humanities, natural and social sciences came together for a one-day workshop at St John’s College, Durham. Despite our differences, all had one aim: the study of past environmental change and its effects on human societies. Talking across disciplinary divides, we discussed what environmental history is, how it may or may not contribute to tackling the climate crisis, and the problems of sources, scale and temporality. This article collects select conversations into a roundtable format split into four areas: scale, time and space, interdisciplinarity, and the future of environmental history. We argue that environmental history is more usefully understood not as a distinct sub-field of history, but as an interdisciplinary meeting place for innovative collaboration. This also presents a model for future research aimed at tackling the climate crisis at higher education institutions.

On a November evening in 1618, the newly appointed governor of Virginia, George Yeardley, dined with James I at the royal hunting lodge in Newmarket, speaking to the king about his plans to turn Virginia into the English civil society investors had long promised it might become. One of Yeardley’s primary tasks was to inaugurate what has become known as the First General Assembly, held in Jamestown in 1619 in the heart of a region that its Powhatan inhabitants called Tsenacommacah. This article examines the assembly within the context of the Powhatan Chesapeake, examining how English attempts at establishing this meeting, ‘in the nature of a Parliament’, operated within a broader Indigenous political landscape. It considers some of the methodological challenges that historians face when writing about political assemblies in colonised spaces, arguing for the value of approaches that place a greater emphasis on Indigenous sources, knowledge and perspectives. A focus on material culture and archaeological remains, from embroidered deerskins to goffering irons, demonstrates how different claims to authority were tangibly imparted and contested, offering a more expansive archive of seventeenth-century transatlantic political culture.

In March 1645, a large number of Potiguara people from various regions of north-eastern Brazil gathered in the aldeamento (Indigenous settlements under colonial control or supervision) of Tapesserica on Itamaracá. The primary objectives of the assembly included the establishment of Indigenous câmaras (municipal councils) and deliberations on the law of native freedom. Notably, in this period, some Indigenous people in Brazil were still held as slaves in territories under Dutch jurisdiction. The Tapesserica Assembly produced a remonstrance (‘remonstrantie’), which was delivered to the Dutch government in Recife by the Potiguara. This article scrutinises the Potiguara Assembly, the earliest recorded Indigenous assembly in Brazil, and reconstructs its connections to Indigenous political culture predating the European arrival in Brazil. It explores the Indigenous perspective on the Dutch–Portuguese wars and demonstrates the role of the Potiguara as historical agents, navigating the complexities of conflict and decision-making processes that ultimately shaped their destiny.