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.
Crimea is at the centre of the current Russo-Ukrainian war, but with its two-thousand-year history, ownership is complicated. Christian Raffensperger explores.
As repressive legislation to restrict protest is passed in India and Britain, how can we understand its historical roots and how can this inform activism today?
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
As the Scottish Parliament considers the ‘not proven’ verdict’s future, Valerie Wallace and Tommy Boyd look back at the nineteenth-century debate on the verdict in colonial New Zealand.
Did medieval states engage in any sort of surveillance of populations based on the collection of their personal data? Trevor Dean and Patricia Skinner ask what we can learn from lists and facial descriptions of police in Italian cities.
In 1977, the UN established the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. How was the struggle for national self-determination supported by global solidarity, anticolonial movements, and international institutions?
A simple prosthetic hand demonstrates care for the physically impaired in early medieval Europe, but does it also say something about the political nature of that care?
Child marriage is often conceived of as embedded in the past, but there is little attention to its historical context. Rhian Keyse explores how this obscures the shifting dynamics and social meanings of such practices.
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…
In the US, abortion rights are under threat. But, as Kelly O'Donnell and Lauren MacIvor Thompson explore, if Roe is lost, we must go back to the beginning, turning to history and what it can reveal about potential paths forward.
What does divorce tell us of the state of Indian democracy? Saumya Saxena explores how the end of a marriage in the country became the site for a conversation about rights, statehood and equality that far exceeded just the separating…
How can the lives of those historically labelled as vagrants be humanised? Nick Crowson explores creative and archival methods for moving past a fixed point of prosecution, and towards visibility across time and place.
In the early morning on Sunday 18 January 1981, a fire broke out at 439 New Cross Road in the London Borough of Lewisham. The fire was almost certainly the result of a deliberate racist attack. Thirteen young Black Britons lost their lives…
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.
Julia Laite discusses her book The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: at once an absorbing historical detective story that puts human faces on the global history of sex trafficking and a riveting meditation on the politics of storytelling.
How does a small gavel on display in the offices of Britain's National Secular Society commemorate past struggles for free thought and free speech? Robert Forder explores.
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.
How do we see walking women? Using archival photography from 1950s and 1960s Turku (Finland), Tiina Männistö-Funk argues that women's care and bodily presence shapes cities as much as concrete and asphalt do.
The "Sex Buyers' Bill" now pending in Parliament aims to protect women from exploitation by criminalizing men who buy sex, yet it is vehemently opposed by UK sex workers. Julia Laite explores the tangled history and woeful consequences of…
When it comes to IVF politics, have the British been too quick to paint Americans as occupying the anti-scientific fringe? Laura Beers responds after the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court.
This virtual special issue of History Workshop Journal tells the histories of states in their interlocking national, international, local, and archival dimensions, and as political and legal contestations of sovereign power.
How should historians respond to acts of violence in the official archive? Catherine Phipps considers the life of Samia, an Algerian-French teenager, arguing that the epistemic attacks she faced highlight the urgency of historical work…
