Ayahs and Amahs were empire's care-workers, raising the children of colonial families. Julia Laite on a new online exhibition that foregrounds their stories.
Julie Hardwick, Marybeth Hamilton, Kate Gibson, Sarah Roddy, Orsi Husz, Andrew Popp & Alexia Yates
What does it mean to write "intimate histories" of economic life? How might a focus on "the intimate" transform the way historians perceive and describe the economic past?
How did young couples negotiate sexual activity and its reproductive consequences in Old Regime France? Julie Hardwick discusses the real and perceived risks and uncertainties of courtship, arguing that communities ultimately sought to…
Newspaper advertisements for enslaved boys who escaped into early modern London reveal very little about the freedom seekers, and rather more about those who enslaved them. But what can we learn of Cuffee, who risked everything to escape in…
How does age shape the experience of refugeedom and migration? How have power structures used age, a supposedly objective measurement of worthiness and vulnerability, to grant some lives more legitimacy than others? Antoine Burgard…
How can we build a trade union that works for all its members? Mark Pendleton on how it was not only strikes and solidarity in Australia that made him, but also his family's conservatism and lifelong distrust of unions
Madeleine Goodall discusses the radical life of Eliza Sharples, whose letters to freethinking poet Thomas Cooper in the mid-19th century depict an idealistic figure struggling to survive.
Joe Moran reflects on his trip to scatter his father's ashes on Scattery, a tiny island off west Clare, Ireland, and in the process explores its resonances for histories of family, migration, and the power of small places.
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
To what extent can today's diagnoses of postpartum psychosis illuminate past women's experiences of childbirth and "madness"? Philippa Carter explores that question in this companion piece to her article in History Workshop Journal 91.
What part do children occupy in protest movements? Alice Haworth-Booth locates the story of school strikes and children’s activism within a broader history of political change.
In this year's Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture, Hazel Carby uses the lens of her own family history to explore Imperial Sexual Economies. Listen now on the latest episode of the History Workshop Podcast.
'Care Experienced' people are often denied agency and advocacy in the present. By uncovering histories of care and centring their voices, Kate Gibson writes, we can understand inequalities in the past and challenge them in the future.
Writing the history of IVF means linking the intimate experiences of conception, gestation, and parturition with global and transnational processes. Vera Mackie, Sarah Ferber, and Nicola J. Marks explore.
To mark Census Day 2021, Helen Sunderland looks back to 1911 when the state mobilised schoolchildren to help number the nation, tracing a history of contradictory attitudes to children’s citizenship that persist today.
VRG Menon spent a lifetime haunted by the power of this report card and attempting to use other forms of capital he had to compensate for it. But Venu – Moo – also dwelled in a world where the report card’s errors became a running…
Writing History in a Drought Year.
"I want very much to write history that matters. But it should only matter for a little while:"
Editorial Fellow @menysnoweballes brings our #WritingRadically series to a close.
In commissioning this feature, editorial fellow Rachel Moss asked contributors: how can we radically re-imagine the writing of history? Over the next few weeks, our contributors reply with creative new methods, sources and forms that they…
The gatekeepers of history have tended to take few risks. Julia Laite argues for a less certain, more quantum kind of history in the latest in our #WritingRadically series.
What models of love and support get lost if we cling to a linear model of family life? Leighan Renaud calls for a model of genealogical enquiry rooted in a decolonised, expansive and 'matrifocal' understanding of the Caribbean family.
