How did people with learning disabilities live before the asylum? Simon Jarrett interrogates the assumption that this community has always been hidden from mainstream society.
Rachael Scally draws out the legacies of slavery of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, and what it means for the decolonisation of Scotland's healthcare institutions.
How was the eighteenth-century pursuit of knowledge intertwined with enslavement and empire? Lucy Moynihan on the history of literary institutions in the British colonial world.
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?
The term 'racial capitalism' has been widely used by activists and historians. Catherine Hall turns to the 18th century entanglements between Jamaica and England to reflect on the shifting forms of racial capitalism across generations.
How might we understand the origins and the impact of current controversies raging in Britain over changing interpretations of British colonial history? Corinne Fowler has close personal experience of those controversies.
Wikipedia: a digital wasteland of opinionated cesspits or a glorious repository of knowledge? Andy Drummond explores how one Wikipedia article turned into Central European battlefield.
Who were Alexander Hamilton’s blood relatives? What did they value and how did this influence the founding father’s own attitudes toward slavery? Richard Addington explores.
How did enslaved women calculate risks when petitioning for their freedom in colonial Mexico? Amos Megged explores the complex life story of María de la Candelaria, arguing that enslaved women sought restitution of their rights, and…
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…
In the late eighteenth century Wedgwood’s medallion rallied people to the radical cause of abolition. Can it still inspire radical change today? Georgia Haseldine discusses the medallion’s historic radical power and re-making the…
What was it like to live in the Roman Ghetto under the shadow of papal authority? Using historical maps and personal testimony, Ariana Ellis recounts the story of Anna del Monte, a young Jewish woman who was subject to forcible removal and…
Molly Corlett reflects on the links between her research on racial trauma in the eighteenth-century, and her work for youth justice reform in Britain today.
Is Maggi Hambling's 'A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft' attuned to the intellectual accomplishments of the woman it was created for, or to the particular struggles of women in the present? Vic Clarke investigates.
How do we name empire and genocide, the structural violence embedded in our built environments, and why does it matter? Melanie J. Newton unpicks the contested legacy of Henry Dundas, eighteenth-century imperialist & "Uncrowned King of…
Warrane, which the British called Sydney, was invaded in 1788. Rosalind Carr shows how just as polite male gallantry in the eighteenth century enabled men to enact assumed gender superiority, in a colonial context friendship and civility…
How has the recent passing of the historian Bernard Bailyn become a new weapon for conservatives attacking critically engaged approaches to history? Asheesh Siddique explores.
A culture of hyper-vigilantism and the conflation of skin colour with criminality did not begin with the abolition of slavery or with the current age of mass incarceration. Joseph Yannielli and Christine Whyte explore its 18th-century…
