History Workshop Journal : HWJ

This article explores the needs of young people leaving residential care and the provision of aftercare support in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Young people's discharge, aftercare and post-institutional experiences occupy a peripheral position in scholarship on institutional care. This essay broadens interpretations of aftercare, which have been presented as inadequate inspections that monitored employment performance. Examining the formal and informal systems that aimed to enhance care-leavers' welfare and wellbeing, the essay offers new understandings of the ongoing provision of practical and emotional support to young people, and the importance of sustained contact and affective ties between former inmates and institutional staff...

How might creative practices surrounding oral history contribute to public engagement and to historical research itself? These questions are considered here through a reflective account of the making of the audio drama Positive in Prison: HIV Stories from a Dublin Jail . Positive in Prison is based on oral histories of HIV/AIDS in the Republic of Ireland, gathered in 2016-17 as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded project 'Prisons, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000'. This piece reviews the processes and practical considerations behind the making of the audio drama and its associated launch events, alongside a summary of the history of HIV/AIDS and of prisons that was being produced and shared...

Sterilizations of Romani women in socialist Czechoslovakia, either carried out without proper consent, or coerced through substantial financial incentive, were first reported in 1978. Yet these practices did not end with the fall of communism, and it took until 2005 for this to be officially acknowledged by the Czech government. This article draws on published and unpublished documents, as well as oral history interviews, to trace the history of efforts to expose such practices, 'come to terms' with their existence, and change social attitudes in relation to the Romani minority in the Czech lands...

This essay considers the frequent and varied uses of 'denial' in modern political discourse, suggests the specific psychoanalytic meanings the term has acquired and asks how useful this Freudian concept may be for historians. It notes the debates among historians over the uses of psychoanalysis, but argues that concepts such as 'denial', 'disavowal', 'splitting' and 'negation' can help us to understand both individual and group behaviour. The authors dwell, especially, on 'disavowal' and argue it can provide a particularly useful basis for exploring how and why states of knowing and not knowing co-exist...

By examining the longer history of engagement between academics and those outside the academy and reflecting on recent experiences of collaboration, this paper provides a critical perspective on understandings of engagement and the 'impact' of historical research today. Considering in particular the UK higher education landscape and the recent Research Excellence Framework measurement exercise, we argue that the current approach of universities, and understandings of the relationship between them and those outside higher education, promotes a model of one-way dissemination, entails a potentially paternalistic approach to an apparently passive public, and favours easily measurable change...

In autumn 1726, Mary Toft began to deliver rabbits in Godalming, Surrey. The case became a sensation and was reported widely in newspapers, popular pamphlets, poems and caricatures. Toft was attended by at least six different doctors, some members of the Royal College of Physicians or attached to the Royal Court, but no doctor declared the affair a hoax until Toft herself confessed on 7 December 1726. This article focuses on Toft's three surviving confessions in order to explore not the doctors or even wider representations of the affair but instead the person of Mary Toft herself...

This article considers the rise and decline of South Africa's lucrative and controversial skin-lighteners market through examination of the business history of the largest manufacturers, Abraham and Solomon Krok, and their evolving personas as millionaires and philanthropists. Such examination reveals how the country's skin-lighteners trade emerged as part of the broader growth of a black consumer market after the Second World War and how elements of that market became the target of anti-apartheid protests in subsequent decades...

This article suggests how the waging of war in an imperial setting may have reshaped military and civilian relations in India from 1939-45. The number of troops stationed in India had repercussions for society and local politics. The article investigates widespread prostitution as one aspect of the gendered wartime economy. Indian prostitution was closely linked to militarization and to the effects of the 1943 Bengal famine. The article also argues this was symptomatic of a more far-reaching renegotiation of the interactions between men and women in the Indian Empire of the 1940s...

This article tracks the relatively unexamined ways in which ethnographic, travel and medical knowledge interrelated in the construction of fat stereotypes in the nineteenth century, often plotted along a temporal curve from ‘primitive’ corpulence to ‘civilized’ moderation. By showing how the complementary insights of medicine and ethnography circulated in beauty manuals, weight-loss guides and popular ethnographic books – all of which were aimed at middle-class readers and thus crystallize certain bourgeois attitudes of the time – it argues that the pronounced denigration of fat that emerged in Britain and France by the early twentieth century acquired some of its edge through this ongoing tendency to depict desire for and acceptance of fat as fundamentally ‘savage’ or ‘uncivilized’ traits...

When, in June 1921, a clairvoyant informed Christabel Russell, to her great surprise, that she was pregnant, her husband denied paternity and petitioned for divorce on grounds of adultery. The Hon. John Russell claimed that on the very few occasions that they had slept in the same bed in their two and half years of marriage, his method of birth control (which she referred to disapprovingly as "Hunnish scenes") had made pregnancy impossible. What added to the sensational nature of the case was the revelation that whilst pregnant, Christabel's hymen was unbroken – hence the claims of a "virgin birth...

The focus of this article is a single personal narrative – a Shetland woman's telling of a story about two girls on a journey to fetch a cure for a sick relative from a wise woman. The story is treated as a cultural document which offers the historian a conduit to a past that is respectful of indigenous woman-centred interpretations of how that past was experienced and understood. The "story of the bottle of medicine" is more than a skilful telling of a local tale; it is a memory practice that provides a path to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of a culture...

Although one will not find Edward Melcarth (1914-73) in the best recent histories of male homosexuality and American art, he was not always so spectral. Named in Life magazine in 1950 as one of the best young American artists, he exhibited as a painter, draftsman and sculptor and also practised as an illustrator, photographer and designer. His work survives in the Forbes Collection, in the Smithsonian Institution and in the art archives at the Kinsey Institute. We argue that Melcarth’s vision of the erotic was far broader than the traditional categories of sexuality that are perpetuated in art histories of homoeroticism in modern America – and that such a revisioning enables a reinterpretation of some of the better known images of homosexual art...

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