New book on Penguin Books from Dr. Dean Blackburn

The author writes: Penguin Books and Political Change traces the social and political thought of those intellectuals and policy-makers who helped to shape post-war. In doing so, it tells a story about the rise and fall of what we might call Britain’s ‘meritocratic moment’. From the 1930s, I argue, thinkers from across the political spectrum began …

New book by Anna Greenwood and Richard Bates

Florence Nightingale at Home by Paul Crawford, Anna Greenwood, Richard Bates & Jonathan Memel This co-authored monograph, released in the year of Florence Nightingale’s bicentenary, proposes a new understanding of Nightingale’s life, work, and ideas by considering them through the prism of the concept of ‘home’. This was a key notion in the nineteenth century, …

Dr. Arun Kumar’s new article in Past & Present

This article examines the emergence of mass letter-writing in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial north India, a region marked by the growth of an unprecedented labour mobility, postal expansion, vernacular print, and workers’ literacy. It narrates how workers’ and their family members’ abilities and failures to read and write letters shaped their experiences …