Project MUSE®: History Workshop Journal - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in History Workshop Journal.daily12026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USIssue 57 (2004) through current issue
Latest Articles: History Workshop JournalTWOProject MUSE®History Workshop Journal1477-45691363-3554Latest articles in History Workshop Journal. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Up the Workers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982077
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I just can’t remember; there’s so much I can’t recall; all my dates are off kilter. It was a very long time ago. I have made inquiries about when I joined the HWJ editorial collective, and according to Anna Davin it was in 1986, and I left it in 1994. But is this true? (I just can’t remember…) I have very clear memories of the first History Workshop I attended – HW 13, ‘People’s History and Socialist Theory’, held at Ruskin College, Oxford, in November 1979. I’d met Raphael Samuel earlier in 1979, also in Oxford, which being so easy to get to from where I lived (and live) is an important part of this story-I-can’t-remember. Raphael had written to me about my PhD thesis on the policing of Victorian provincial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallUp the Workers2026-01-29text/htmlen-USUp the Workers2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®207092026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Reconsidering Violence Against Women through the History of a Refuge for Trans Women
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982078
<p></p>
In 1983 Tiresias House, the first refuge for trans people in Australia, opened in a modest three-bedroom house in the Sydney suburb of Petersham. The official opening was held on a brilliant summer day in December of that year. In the photos Roberta Perkins – refuge founder, sociologist and activist for trans and sex-worker rights – smiles at a besuited Frank Walker, the Minister for Youth and Community Services under the New South Wales (NSW) Labor government, who grins back. Perkins holds a cheque – the funding for the refuge – high above her head in one hand, a glass of champagne in the other. They are surrounded by supporters. She wears a white dress and has the gleam of victory in her eye. [Fig. 1]The name of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallReconsidering Violence Against Women through the History of a Refuge for Trans Women2026-01-29text/htmlen-USReconsidering Violence Against Women through the History of a Refuge for Trans Women2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®806012026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Bernard Canavan: Art, Histories, Memories
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982079
<p></p>
The artist Bernard Canavan was at Ruskin from 1971–73. Since 1982 (issue 13) he has designed the covers of History Workshop Journal, usually drawing on images from the journal contents, creating an extraordinary archive of nearly ninety artist-designed covers across more than four decades. Here he reflects on his childhood in Ireland and his life in Oxford and London in the 1960s and 1970s, accompanied by his selection of cover designs.
I sometimes fancy that pictures and text were fused together at my conception, not because my images are particularly inspired, but because all through my long life (I’m eighty-one now) the two have gone together down the years like a horse and carriage, even though I
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallBernard Canavan: Art, Histories, Memories2026-01-29text/htmlen-USBernard Canavan: Art, Histories, Memories2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®286702026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Rescuing the UNRWA Archive: Saving Palestinian History amidst the Gaza Genocide
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982080
<p></p>
In October 2023 a small team of Palestinian staff working for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) drove from south to north Gaza. It was an exceedingly dangerous journey. North Gaza, where the UNRWA headquarters were located in Gaza City, was under an Israeli military evacuation order.1 Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been forcibly displaced from the region, which was under constant bombardment by the Israeli military. In driving north, the aid workers were moving in the opposite direction to most of the Strip’s population. But what makes the workers’ journey all the more remarkable is its purpose: rescuing an archive.The UNRWA staffers drove back and forth three times between the southern
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallRescuing the UNRWA Archive: Saving Palestinian History amidst the Gaza Genocide2026-01-29text/htmlen-USRescuing the UNRWA Archive: Saving Palestinian History amidst the Gaza Genocide2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®721202026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29The Present as History: Gay Liberation and History Workshop Journal
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982081
<p></p>
Jeffrey Weeks selling copies of Gay Left in 1979. Author’s photograph.I was drawn into the History Workshop movement in the early 1970s through my involvement in Gay Liberation. The emergence of the Gay Liberation Front in London in 1970 followed the explosive American lead symbolized by Stonewall in 1969, and kickstarted a surge of mobilization of queer people in Britain that continues to shape sexual and gendered ways of being to this day. I was involved in this new movement from the beginning.1 As a historian by inclination and training I became especially interested in tracing the history of the gay politics I was so intensely involved in. I began researching, speaking about and writing this new history. The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallThe Present as History: Gay Liberation and History Workshop Journal2026-01-29text/htmlen-USThe Present as History: Gay Liberation and History Workshop Journal2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®355212026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Turbulence and the German Peasants’ War of 1524–6
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982082
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When contemporaries talked about the Peasants’ War, the word they all used was Aufruhr, one core meaning of which is ‘turbulence’.1 Indeed, the revolt itself was in a sense nameless, described by many at the time simply as ‘the Aufruhr’. It is worth pausing on this word turbulence, not just, I shall suggest, because it was such a feature of contemporary discourse about the Peasants’ War, but because it reveals something of the nature of the Peasants’ War itself, the patterns of the rebellion, and the importance of turbulent movement. In what follows, I shall suggest how thinking about turbulence might enable us to understand rebellions in a new way.Turbulence is a concept which plays an important role in fluid
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallTurbulence and the German Peasants’ War of 1524–62026-01-29text/htmlen-USTurbulence and the German Peasants’ War of 1524–62026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®815362026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29History Workshop in the United States
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982083
<p></p>
Daniel: In January 1972 we arrived in London on sabbatical after our first semester in new positions at Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey. Judith was beginning research for her dissertation; I was studying European labour history for a new Rutgers graduate programme in comparative labour history. My research soon brought me to Eric Hobsbawm’s seminar at the University of London’s Institute for Research in History.The presenter at my initial visit to the Hobsbawm seminar was a striking figure. Seated behind a pile of papers that scattered about him as he spoke was a dishevelled man some ten years older than me. Raphael Samuel’s precise subject and analysis resonated with my own interests
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallHistory Workshop in the United States2026-01-29text/htmlen-USHistory Workshop in the United States2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®291632026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Locating Geological Agency in a ‘Small’ Early Modern Anthropocene
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982084
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In December 1628 severe flooding inundated the Yorkshire villages of Fishlake and Sykehouse, drowning 1,300 acres of land on which their houses were built and crops cultivated. Fringing a channel called Turnbridge Dyke, these fluvial communities were situated in a large wetland region at the head of the Humber estuary in eastern England. This was undoubtedly a risky environment. But the flood was not understood as part of the seasonal flux of wetlands, nor as a freak natural disaster or divine act. Local people were instead unequivocal that it had anthropogenic origins, pointing to dramatic acts of human intervention that had fundamentally altered the direction of flow and the politics of risk. Earlier that summer
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallLocating Geological Agency in a ‘Small’ Early Modern Anthropocene2026-01-29text/htmlen-USLocating Geological Agency in a ‘Small’ Early Modern Anthropocene2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®940752026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Culture War: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982085
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Despite its current ubiquity in the Anglophone media, only about a fifth of British voters think that they could explain what the term ‘culture war’ means.1 Whether that figure is higher or lower among historians is an open question. Plenty of academics certainly think they are implicated, or even that ‘universities are on the frontlines of the new culture war’.2 At one time some may even have found that prospect validating. Amid public clashes over the literary canon in the early 1990s Henry Louis Gates, Jr, asked: ‘When, to put the matter bluntly, have literary studies so engaged the attention of American society at large?’3 Few today see any silver linings. Even those who use the term culture wars as a serious
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallCulture War: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?2026-01-29text/htmlen-USCulture War: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®1041622026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29The Rebirth of the Wollemi Pine: Plant Lives in Histories of Extinction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982086
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Just before the new millennium, one man’s chance encounter with an unknown tree sparked worldwide botanical interest. As botanists realized the tree’s origins stretched back into a world still inhabited by dinosaurs, they hoped for new insights into earth’s past climate and biodiversity. Promoted as the botanical find of the century, the tree’s journey from wild endangerment to global celebrity and domesticated treasure is a rare tale of an endangered plant attracting global conservation efforts. It also helps illustrate how trees finally became embedded within new mechanisms of postwar conservation.Plants rarely feature in histories of extinction. In recent decades, the animal turn has reshaped the question of who
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallThe Rebirth of the Wollemi Pine: Plant Lives in Histories of Extinction2026-01-29text/htmlen-USThe Rebirth of the Wollemi Pine: Plant Lives in Histories of Extinction2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®550282026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Editorial: History Workshop Journal Issue 100
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982087
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Fifty years ago, History Workshop Journal entered the world. Part of a wider international movement to democratize historical knowledge that had emerged in the 1960s, it was edited by a collective which identified itself at the outset as socialist (and within a few years feminist). From the beginning, the aim was for the journal to stand as a forum to record and communicate the multitude of historical perspectives, research and activities proliferating outside as well as inside the universities. It aimed to speak to a wider audience, and in doing so, as one strand of a chorus of challenging voices in the expanding university sector of the 1960s, to counter the prevailing commonsense of the historical profession
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallEditorial: History Workshop Journal Issue 1002026-01-29text/htmlen-USEditorial: History Workshop Journal Issue 1002026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®396852026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Radical History as Collective Endeavour: Joining History Workshop Journal in the Present Crisis
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982088
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This roundtable records a conversation among a group of current History Workshop Journal editors, held initially over Zoom, with some remarks added later to the online transcript. With longtime editor Marybeth Hamilton serving as interviewer, the discussion brought together the seven historians who were then the most recent additions to the HWJ editorial collective: Elly Robson Dezateux, Meleisa Ono-George, Kennetta Hammond Perry, Rob Priest, Hannah Skoda, T.J. Tallie, and Imaobong Umoren, all of whom joined in spring 2021. The aim of the roundtable was to explore the perspectives of a new generation of editors on the impact and the legacy of HWJ and the history workshop movement – and on where the journal and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallRadical History as Collective Endeavour: Joining History Workshop Journal in the Present Crisis2026-01-29text/htmlen-USRadical History as Collective Endeavour: Joining History Workshop Journal in the Present Crisis2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®506782026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Making Histories: Anna Davin talks with Becky Taylor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982089
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I turned up to interview Anna at her basement flat in a quiet street in North London on a sunny afternoon in September 2024. She’d not long moved there from a house round the corner that had held a lifetime’s worth of books, decades of memories, and she was still in the process of working out what to put where. Tasked with drawing out from Anna, as one of the founding editors of History Workshop Journal (HWJ), the intersection of her life as historian with that of the journal, I felt it entirely right to be surrounded by piles of research notes, books and, of course, old copies of History Workshop and article offprints. The books she could no longer keep she’d taken to Housman’s bookshop or charity shops or
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallMaking Histories: Anna Davin talks with Becky Taylor2026-01-29text/htmlen-USMaking Histories: Anna Davin talks with Becky Taylor2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®701642026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Teaching Public History in Britain Today: A Roundtable Discussion
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982090
<p></p>
Julia Laite
: Sometimes the best questions have no firm answers, and this is what I had in mind when I asked, ‘What is Public History Now?’ in an AHRC networking grant application in 2021.1 The successful network grant brought together academics who found themselves (either by design or by circumstance) working within what is called ‘Public History’ in UK higher education, and took the form of a series of workshops and a final conference at Birkbeck, University of London in 2022. Participants came from a range of backgrounds and included three newly appointed lecturers in Public History in the UK. The reflections from these now-established lecturers show how important asking that unanswerable
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallTeaching Public History in Britain Today: A Roundtable Discussion2026-01-29text/htmlen-USTeaching Public History in Britain Today: A Roundtable Discussion2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®699332026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Robinson Crusoe Counsels Against Solitude
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982091
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In Britain loneliness is said to have reached epidemic proportions, with over nine million Britons, nearly a fifth of the population, describing themselves as lonely. Loneliness on this scale is unprecedented, though throughout recorded history people have suffered from unwanted solitude. ‘Solitude,’ the poet John Donne wrote in 1623 after a period of confinement with serious illness, ‘is a torment which is not threatened in hell itselfe’.1 But Donne’s use of ‘solitude’ here rather than ‘loneliness’ points to an important historical shift. ‘Loneliness’ as we know it today is a modern concept, dating from the nineteenth century, and the terms in which it is described it are very different from how solitude was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallRobinson Crusoe Counsels Against Solitude2026-01-29text/htmlen-USRobinson Crusoe Counsels Against Solitude2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®470152026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Feminism, Artistry, Madness, and the Ghost of Valerie Solanas
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982092
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Sometime in 1974, from a phone booth somewhere in lower Manhattan, Valerie Solanas made her first call to the feminist writer Vivian Gornick. Four years earlier, Gornick had written an introduction to the second Olympia Press edition of the SCUM Manifesto, a tract in which Solanas offered a ‘rationale and program of action…[to] eliminate – through sabotage – all aspects of society not relevant to women (everything), bring about a complete female take-over, eliminate the male sex, and begin to create a swinging, groovy, out-of-sight female world’.1 When Gornick wrote the introduction, Solanas was locked away in upstate New York in Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, serving a three-year sentence for
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallFeminism, Artistry, Madness, and the Ghost of Valerie Solanas2026-01-29text/htmlen-USFeminism, Artistry, Madness, and the Ghost of Valerie Solanas2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®1197282026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Questions of Race and Repair: Then and Now
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982093
<p></p>
The killing of George Floyd in May 2020 and the scale of the worldwide response mobilized around Black Lives Matter decisively shifted the debates about race and history. In Britain, the Bristol drama of the dumping of the statue of the slave-trader Edward Colston’s statue into the docks where slave ships had once been moored welded together different historical times: the time of unabashed enslavement and the time of now. Statues have a weight and solidity. They stand on plinths, looking down at us. They conserve the past in the present, telling us what we should remember and what we should forget. They act as a continual reminder that White Britons could imagine themselves as both ‘a master race’ and ‘a race of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallQuestions of Race and Repair: Then and Now2026-01-29text/htmlen-USQuestions of Race and Repair: Then and Now2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®912352026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Walking Backwards
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982094
<p></p>
Since we are constantly pushed forward in order to perform multiple tasks, I am pleased to be invited to reflect on the past with no particular obligation. I find inspiration in the Māori proverb: ‘Ka mua, ka muri’, which means ‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past’. As a guide for this walk, I am going to follow the involuntary strings of my thoughts and images, anticipating that this piece of writing will be full of digressions and free memory associations. It may include repetitions with articles of mine with a similarly self-reflective approach written for History Workshop Journal in the past.1 I must also warn readers that my relationship with HWJ has been closely intertwined with my
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallWalking Backwards2026-01-29text/htmlen-USWalking Backwards2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®293532026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Working-Class History in a Populist Age
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982095
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Over the last decade right-wing populism has gained significant ground across large swathes of the globe, from India, to Hungary, to the United States. Even in countries where its parties have been defeated at the ballot box, it continues to frame much political debate. The defining characteristic of populism is a Manichaean division of society into ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’, and even its right-wing manifestations promote a crude class politics.1 In the Anglophone sphere and Britain in particular ‘the working class’ is often deployed interchangeably with, if not more frequently than, the term ‘the people’.2 In 2016 Nigel Farage called for a vote to leave the European Union to defend the British working class
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallWorking-Class History in a Populist Age2026-01-29text/htmlen-USWorking-Class History in a Populist Age2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®720612026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Oral Histories of the Environmental Movement: Making an Activist Archive
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982096
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On 30 September 2024 Britain’s last coal-fired power station, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, ceased operations. This event was reported widely in the UK and internationally, including in the Washington Post, whose story was illustrated with sublime monochrome photographs by artist Gabriella Demczuk, under the headline ‘UK, Home of the Industrial Revolution, shuts its last coal-fired power plant’. Portrayed as marking the latest phase in the inexorable history of energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, the demise of coal was hastened by strategic shifts in government policy: as the Post put it, ‘Britain was a country powered by coal. Now it’s the first G-7 nation to quit it’.1 Meanwhile
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallOral Histories of the Environmental Movement: Making an Activist Archive2026-01-29text/htmlen-USOral Histories of the Environmental Movement: Making an Activist Archive2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®1134482026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29History Workshop: A South African Movement
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982097
<p></p>
Founded in 1977, the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits HW) was the product of intersecting impulses that coursed through society and the academy globally and in South Africa from the late 1960s. Internationally, emancipatory politics were resurgent, shaped by the anti-colonial movements that swept across the African continent from the 1950s, the Civil Rights struggles in the United States, the anti-war movements and the emergence of New Left politics, among other new political forces. From the early 1970s South Africa experienced a revival of black resistance, after a period of relative quiescence following the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. Echoing events elsewhere in the world, the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallHistory Workshop: A South African Movement2026-01-29text/htmlen-USHistory Workshop: A South African Movement2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®488382026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Historic Failures, Failures of History: ‘Necessitous Gentlewomen’ Reconsidered
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982098
<p></p>
Writing the history of human beings presupposes their agency. Real life is more complicated, but it is difficult to write a history of inactivity, of non-achievement, of un-heroic failure. In that sense historians, to use the language of the courtroom, can tell the truth but not the whole truth. Think for a moment, dear Reader, of your own personal history as embodied in your Curriculum Vitae. It lists your appointments; does it list the interviews you failed? If it lists your publications, does it list the papers rejected for publication? Is your CV, then, merely ‘not the whole truth’, or is it, to use everyday language, a lie?Lady Mary Feilding, founder of the Working Ladies’ Guild, n.d. (1880s). HLSI WLG
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallHistoric Failures, Failures of History: ‘Necessitous Gentlewomen’ Reconsidered2026-01-29text/htmlen-USHistoric Failures, Failures of History: ‘Necessitous Gentlewomen’ Reconsidered2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®640492026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Dig Where You Stand and International History from Below Movements
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982099
<p></p>
The 1960s and 1970s witnessed the emergence of several often interconnected and influential international movements characterized by a ‘history from below’ approach. Among these was the Swedish ‘Dig Movement’, guided by the important and influential book Dig Where You Stand: How to Research a Job (Gräv där du står: Hur man utforskar ett jobb) which was published in 1978 by the renowned Swedish author, researcher and activist Sven Lindqvist. The book, ‘a research handbook for non-professional researchers’, offered a detailed step-by-step and source-by-source account of how workers could research their own jobs, using the example of an industrial worker employed in the Swedish concrete industry, but intended as a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallDig Where You Stand and International History from Below Movements2026-01-29text/htmlen-USDig Where You Stand and International History from Below Movements2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®445772026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Raphael Samuel and History at Ruskin College 1968–70
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982100
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I met Raphael Samuel (Fig. 1) in September 1968 when I went to Ruskin College, Oxford – a residential adult education college for the labour movement founded in 1899. Ruskin students were miners, post office workers, seamen, lorry drivers, engineers, clerks, who worked in factories, workshops, offices, transport depots, hospitals, local authorities in towns and villages throughout the British Isles. Their profile mirrored the economic and cultural profile of Britain’s masculine working class in the 1960s.1 Three or four students in my time at Ruskin came from overseas, Commonwealth nations – Matabeleland, Rhodesia, South Africa – freedom fighters or exiles from their regimes, men who were respected by the student
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallRaphael Samuel and History at Ruskin College 1968–702026-01-29text/htmlen-USRaphael Samuel and History at Ruskin College 1968–702026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®542552026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Rekiken – Let History Flow: a Public History Experiment
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982101
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Are we relevant to people today? While many historians may not explicitly ask themselves this question, it remains an underlying concern in Japan. As in many other countries, academic positions in history are dwindling, and it is increasingly difficult to attract prospective graduate students to historical studies. Moreover, the general readership for historical research has declined compared to the last century.In response to these challenges, in December 2023, the Historical Science Society of Japan (Rekishigaku Kenkyukai, or Rekiken), one of the largest academic associations of historians in Japan, launched an initiative aimed at engaging a broad range of historians in these pressing issues. Instead of the usual
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallRekiken – Let History Flow: a Public History Experiment2026-01-29text/htmlen-USRekiken – Let History Flow: a Public History Experiment2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®250082026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29Befriending the Dead: History, Friendship, and Talking Across Time
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982102
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We are living through a loneliness epidemic. According to the Campaign to End Loneliness, drawing on data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in 2022, ‘49.63% of adults (25.99 million people) in the UK reported feeling lonely occasionally, sometimes, often or always’, while ‘7.1% of people in Great Britain (3.83 million) experience chronic loneliness’, a sustained increase on levels prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.1 Britain is also one of the most age-segregated countries in the world.2 This startling and increasing generational divide, coupled with a British media that has spent the last twenty years doggedly pitting the retired against students; millennials and gen Z-ers against boomers; and older cis
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/277/image/coversmallBefriending the Dead: History, Friendship, and Talking Across Time2026-01-29text/htmlen-USBefriending the Dead: History, Friendship, and Talking Across Time2026-01-292026TWOProject MUSE®532322026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-01-29