Hannah Worthen, Ed Brookes, Kate Smith, Gill Hughes, Stewart Mottram & Briony McDonagh
How can flood petitioning in the past & present increase local participation and resilience? The Risky Cities team explore 'learning histories' as a spur to climate action
What can early twentieth-century debates about renewables tell us about energy policy today? Tobias Silseth argues that a focus on 'efficiency' and 'acceleration' has often led to an expansion of fossil-fuel use.
What can tools - for cutting, sharpening or carrying - tell us about the nature of work in the past? Paul Warde on how the skills that tools embodied can nuance narratives of modernity and productivity.
The British pride themselves on being a nation of dog lovers. However, Chris Pearson reveals that colonial Britain’s canine savoir-faire was conditional and only certain types of dogs were acceptable in 'civilised' countries.
What is the difference between poverty and scarcity? Julia McClure explores how different communities and societies mitigated the risks of resource scarcity before capitalism created poverty.
What can the twisted histories of one Sri Lankan canal tell us? Sujit Sivasundaram on how the coastal environment of Colombo has been colonised and marketised, but in turn creates its own paths, through winds, waves and waters as well as…
"By excavating the archives of urban hydrology in Chennai, we can see how the unequal production, impact, and representation of floods is embedded in property making and belonging." Aditya Ramesh argues that responses to flood must go…
How far did wood scarcity in England trigger deforestation in its colonies at the dawn of empire? Keith Pluymers traces a complex story of conservation, commerce, and colonisation in the early modern Atlantic
How have US projects to preserve 'paradise' in the Virgin Islands marginalised native Afro-Caribbean people? Jessica S. Samuels examines a cutting-edge ecotourism venture in the 1950s that reveals the colonial nature of American…
As the global ecological crisis deepens and spreads through virus, fire and flood, Elly Robson introduces a new HWO series on The Political Environment. How have politics shaped the way we identify ecological problems and solutions, and how…
How did a desire for meat in a climate that did not support cattle rearing allow settlers to expand their reach? Efrat Gilad explores the history of meat consumption and the expanded meat trade as larger numbers of European Jews arrived in…
How did Russian anarchism, Teesside socialism and Jewish phenomenology find a home in rural Essex? Ken Worpole delves into the fragile archive of an influential pacifist settlement at Frating Hall farm.
Family history is in robust health, after years in the scholarly wilderness. Sophie Scott-Brown looks at new horizons for this rich seam of history, colliding private with public and biology with culture in provocative ways
How should we understand the Green Deal in relation to the legacy of its predecessor, the New Deal? William Rees argues that much can be learnt from the environment of disorganisation, contradiction and compromise that led to FDR's economic…
As the government considers banning live animal exports, James Bowen unpicks the contentious history behind this practice. How have activists, farmers, and government policy converged on this economic and ethical issue since the…
As Britain is wracked by another winter of flooding, Elly Robson looks at how deluge in seventeenth-century Yorkshire led to a contentious politics of risk.
Bruce Campbell argues that interactions between climate and disease during the fourteenth-century Black Death can inform insights into Covid-19 and alter historians' understanding of the nature of historical change.
Environmentalism is a topic that has entered the mainstream, with two-thirds of Britons now believing we are in a climate emergency according to a 2019 poll. It has even, surprisingly for many, been embraced by parts of the radical right.…
The radical historian Alun Howkins was a founder editor of History Workshop, a singer and historian of folk music, and a chronicler of the land and its people. Becky Taylor explores his work and his legacy.
