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
How can early modern histories of sexual violence in war challenge persistent ideas that such crimes are inevitable and justice out of reach? Tom Hamilton explores
More than just a fruit, the pineapple was a canvas onto which ideas of the ‘exotic’ were projected and proliferated from the early modern period onwards.
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?
Feminist history often focusses on salvaging the experiences of women from the margins of history. But how is feminist history challenged by women complicit it enslavement? Misha Ewen explores in this piece.
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 did seventeenth century communities do when one of their number reported experiencing suicidal thoughts? Imogen Knox discusses the ways in which early modern people sought to help and care for their family members and neighbours in…
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…
Conceptions of risk and uncertainty are traditionally applied to moments of environmental and economic crisis, both real and imagined. This new HWO series seeks to understand how ordinary people calculated perceived and real risks and…
In Britain today, 9 out of 10 women marrying men will change their name on marriage. Rebecca Mason discusses the history of female name changing after marriage in Britain, arguing that reference to tradition is not necessarily rooted in…
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
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.
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.
As the festive season approaches and thoughts turn to gifts and treats, Edmund Wareham explains how gingerbread could be a Radical Object in medieval & early modern Germany.
November 20th marks Trans Day of Remembrance, an annual day of mourning for trans lives stolen by violence in the past 12 months. While many remembrance ceremonies are now moving from community centres to online platforms, the central…
Early modern women and men possessed complex capacities for friendship, love, and devotion, and the nuances of these partnerships defy and challenge our received assumptions about early modern heterosexual and heterosocial relationships.…
The sixteenth-century struggle to balance biological and economic well-being implicated a surprising number of authorities, but not everyone accepted their discipline. Matthew Vester explores in Pandemic Politics During the Renaissance.
With Italy on the frontline of Europe's Coronavirus outbreak, Rosa Salzberg examines how Renaissance Venice established world-leading measures to combat the plague, strategies we are still relying on today.
