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The Challenges of Writing ‘Vernacular’ Histories
By Rebecca Goldsmith (@rebeccagold123) The desire to recover ‘lost voices’ in the archives is by no means a new impulse. It has underpinned entire fields and ‘turns’ in the historical discipline. Nevertheless, there is something new in the recent attempts made by scholars in modern British history to recover the ‘vernacular’. Historians spanning Jon Lawrence,…
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Helen Sunderland – Historian Highlight
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‘In Defense of Clara’: Contestation of the Female Body in the Spanish Anarchist Press
By Sophie Turbutt (@Sophie_Turbutt) When twenty-year-old Federica Montseny advertised her first full-length novel, La Victoria, in her parents’ Spanish anarchist journal La Revista Blanca in 1925, she hardly could have imagined the drama that would unfold in its wake. Certainly, La Victoria was a deliberately provocative book. Its romantic plotlines flew in the face of expectation – even by some…
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Mentalités and Body Politics: Aspects of Our Pandemic Global Microhistory
By Weiao Xing (@WeiaoX) In early January 2020, a newsletter disclosed an unknown pneumonia spreading through Wuhan, China.[i] This understated report failed to lade me with extreme anxiety on an otherwise ordinary day in Cambridge. Many of my peers did not anticipate any interruption to our annual schedule of international trips, but lockdowns and travel…
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Book Review – The Night Trains by Charles van Onselen
Nicole Sithole reviews Charles van Onselen’s The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican Miners to and from South Africa, 1902-1955 (Jonathan Ball, 2019), £25.00. The Night Trains is a riveting account of the gruesome experiences of black men from the Sul du Save in Mozambique, on board ghostly night trains which transported them back and forth to…
