History最新文献

This article discusses the ‘Global March for Peace’ of 1960–61 – an initiative that took a group of activists from San Francisco to Moscow, crossing countries on both sides of the Cold War divide. While the general development of this march is well known, this article offers a fresh perspective in several ways. Drawing on a varied range of sources, it pays particular attention to the expectations, experiences and reflections of US activists who had strongly been involved in the march. Moreover, it uses the history of the march to examine different elements of internationalist practice and reappraises the march as an experiment in ‘grassroots diplomacy’, while also revealing the latter's intrinsic tensions.

The Battel Hall Retable – created around the late fourteenth to early fifteenth century and once belonging to the Dominican nuns of Dartford Priory – offers a rare glimpse into the visual lives of late medieval English nuns, inviting an insight into the intersections of communal identities for these women religious. This article builds on scholarship that has predominantly addressed Dartford's textual history, and of the piety and experiences within female monastic communities more widely, by exploring the intersections of English, female and Dominican spiritual identities for the community within, reflected by and provoked by this visual culture. It argues that the iconography, the specific portrayal of the figures and the potential positioning of the altarpiece speak to the engagement of these women with key facets of their identities, partially forming and enhancing a community identity that enabled them to withstand the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

Drawing on extensive archival research in Berlin and Ibadan, this article makes an original contribution to the growing body of research that acknowledges the global features of the First World War. The article explores this wider subject by examining the wartime position and treatment of German civilians in Nigeria. In recent decades, there has been growing interest in wartime measures against enemy subjects, but developments in West Africa have attracted little scholarly attention thus far. The article begins by analysing German activities in the region before 1914, highlighting the prominent role of German merchants in the regional economy. It then traces various measures that the British colonial authorities adopted upon the outbreak of the war, as well as noting concerns about the role of German propaganda in provoking social and political unrest in Nigeria. The article covers the initial wartime restrictions on German companies as well as the internment and subsequent removal of German subjects from British West Africa.

This article offers a fresh analysis of Olbie (1798), a frequently overlooked essay by the French author and economist Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832). It positions Olbie as a central text for comprehending Say's political thought and situates it within the wider historical context, in particular French republicanism during the 1790s. In doing so, the article argues against interpretations that read Olbie as a pioneer in placing economics before morals and politics. Instead, this article stresses the eighteenth-century understandings of ‘political economy’ that integrated economy and morals. Say's story of Olbios, on this reading, is a testament to the binding presence of eighteenth-century and French revolutionary political economy that considered mœurs as the primary factor connecting and controlling the politics and economics of a society conceived as an organic body. Olbie, then, is a republican version of political economy, a society of an exquisite system of non-monetary rewards and punishments to establish and maintain republican mœurs through a hierarchy of merit and virtue. Placed in its historical context, Olbie’s incentive-design approach does not represent the first case of its kind, nor is it purely economic in nature. Instead, it embodies revolutionary republicanism that draws on a utopian form, trying to depict an ideal republic, one intended to provide a more practical framework for addressing the challenges faced by reformers in the 1790s. In conclusion, this article underscores the rich ideological tapestry woven into Say's Olbie, shedding light on its historical position within the broader landscape of political and economic thought during the French Revolution.

This State of the Field article discusses how, when and why the history of masculinities has emerged since the 1980s, and why it continues to be an important research field today. The article begins with the field's multiple origin stories and then discusses its expansion in chronology, geography and theme, as well as newer directions for masculinities in disability history, trans history and Indigenous history. Many scholars involved in this history over the years have openly wondered whether it remains useful, or whether analysing categories of privilege like masculinities only turns the lens back on men as default historical actors, to the detriment of marginalized peoples and themes. However, this article argues that the history of masculinities has done and continues to do important work in demonstrating to other academic disciplines that masculinities are never static or fixed but dynamic and shifting according to historical time and place. The article concludes that with the rights of women and transgender people increasingly under threat in the United Kingdom and North America as well as globally, it is essential for scholars to continue to historicize masculinities, patriarchal constructs and men's relationships to power. Historians are poised to help bridge the gap between the ivory tower and various publics, moreover, who continue to create and consume their own historical narratives about masculinized behaviours and expectations in the past and today.

This roundtable explores four historical episodes in the history of state–university relations in the United States. In doing so, it addresses issues that also figure prominently in present-day debates, including questions of academic freedom and free speech, the state's role in research funding as well as the international features of higher education. Convened by the journal's editor, the roundtable features individual contributions from four historians, each of whom focuses on a particular document and moment in time: a 1912 report from the US Commissioner of Education, Philander Claxton, that indicated a shift towards an internationalization strategy (Charlotte Lerg); a 1915 statement on academic freedom by the American Association of University Professors (Tomás Irish); Vannevar Bush's 1945 report on Science – the Endless Frontier (Christopher Loss); and a ‘Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students’ from 1967 (Kate Ballantyne). Taken together, these pieces point to a wider question – namely the role and public value that different political and academic actors attribute to academic research and higher education – and to the institutions and individuals that are engaged in it.