From Ritual to Commodity: How Does the Study of Drugs Illuminate Early Modern Globalisation?
In a phenomenon historian David Courtwright termed the "psychoactive revolution," the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the...
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ARTICLES.
Joshua Redden
- Aug 27
- 14 min
Popular Culture, Collective Memory & 'Great (Wo)man History?: Decoding a Nineteenth-Century Scottish Biograph of Joséphine de Beauharnais
The most recent major addition to the popular cultural canon of the Napoleonic period is, at the time of writing, Ridley Scott’s...
T. Alexander Puutio
- Jul 1
- 12 min
History is an Unreliable Source of Memory
In the intricate dance between memory and history, each partner influences and reshapes the other. This essay discusses the complexities...
Ally Addison
- Jul 1
- 24 min
The Russian Civil War and the Evolution of Soviet Terror
Anyone who claims that an historical event was formative must necessarily assume that things would have turned out differently if that...
T. Alexander Puutio
- Mar 18
- 11 min
Words That Bent Space: János Bolyai And His Failed Epistolary Exchange With Carl Friedrich Gauss
I cannot say more, only that from nothing I have created a new different world János Bolyai, letter to Farkas Bolyai describing his...
Scarlett Croft
- Dec 24, 2023
- 15 min
A Rare Case: Black Women and Hysteria
This essay argues that mainstream psychiatrists and physicians between 1860 to 1900 conceptualised Black women (both those inside and...
Sandra Liwanowska
- Dec 24, 2023
- 12 min
Cultivating Insanity: The Role of Culture in Understanding Mental Illness in Nigeria, Kenya and China during the 19th and 20th Centuries
To what extent are mental illnesses the product of human culture? Western practices have ensured that psychiatrists are now able to...
Japneet Hayer
- Nov 22, 2023
- 12 min
To What Extent is Ethnicity Important When Considering Englishness in the Twentieth Century?
During the twentieth century, England saw a dramatic increase in rates of immigration from parts of the Commonwealth, primarily due to...
Callum Tilley
- Sep 9, 2023
- 9 min
Why Historians Should Study the Explosion of Vernacular Literature in the Late Middle Ages
Studying the explosion of vernacular literature is fundamentally important to historians of the Middle Ages because it informs them about...
Rebecca Colyer
- Sep 2, 2023
- 9 min
The Influence of Gender Stereotypes on Crime in Early Modern Europe
During the early modern period, gender issues within society caused the criminal justice system and its authorities to target those who...
Callum Tilley
- Sep 1, 2023
- 17 min
Historiographical Debates About Nazi Repression and Ordinary Complicity in the Third Reich
Note: all underlines or italics within quotes are the authors’ own unless otherwise stated Nazi Germany is often thought of as the...
Jessica Hoar
- Jul 20, 2023
- 8 min
How helpful is Foucault's history of sexuality for understanding homoeroticism in Classical Greece?
Foucault’s volumes on the history of sexuality have been immensely influential in modern understandings of sexuality in the ancient...
Sean Paterson
- May 24, 2023
- 19 min
Dreams of Empire: British travellers on the fringes of the Chinese world, 1688-1826
Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries British merchants, diplomats and soldiers attempted to break into China by a number of...
Emilė Petravičiūtė
- May 24, 2023
- 21 min
Relating Global and Local: Historical Perspective on Inequality
Introduction Leading scholars of inequality today, such as Branko Milanovic[1] or Frank Stilwell[2] amongst others, tend to structure...
Xenofon Kalogeropoulos
- Apr 28, 2023
- 16 min
Enemy of my Enemy: King Mithradates VI of Pontos and his alternative model of Hellenistic kingship
Introduction In 168 BC, the Seleukid king, Antiokhos IV, stood victorious at the head of an army which had breached Ptolemaic defences,...
Will Kingston-Cox
- Apr 15, 2023
- 17 min
To what extent did Stalin’s nationality policy in the South Caucasus differ by ethnic group?
Upon the collapse of the Tsarist regime in Russia in 1917, the Bolsheviks were tasked with confronting the ‘national question’ - that is,...
Dorothy Greene
- Apr 15, 2023
- 10 min
'Shari'a and Kanun: A Study of the Ottoman Empire's Legal System
In the period between the conquest of Constantinople and the end of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire rapidly increased in...
Japneet Hayer
- Apr 15, 2023
- 11 min
The Effects of Mercantilism and Capitalism on the systemic violence imposed on Enslaved Africans
It is an undisputable fact that enslaved Africans were put through violent, horrific practices in all areas of enslavement. Some...
Ally Addison
- Mar 26, 2023
- 9 min
The Impact of the Napoleonic Wars on Russian Society
No one can deny that the Napoleonic Wars represented a turning point for the Russian Empire. Not only did the so-called Great Patriotic...
Sean Paterson
- Mar 26, 2023
- 13 min
‘Yet doe the Chinoyse much exceede us’: images of China in an early modern English atlas
Early modern English perceptions of China, as expressed in surviving print materials, occupy a liminal intellectual zone, suspended...
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