In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thousands of minors with troublesome behaviour were sent to reform schools. Often, they spent months or even years inside the walls of disciplinary institutions. Did their young age influence how minors experienced their confinement, compared to adult detainees? This blog post discusses the different meanings of time for juvenile delinquents, using case files from Belgian state reform schools between 1900 and 1960. Continue reading
Sailortowns could be found across the globe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These port district neighbourhoods were often characterized by entertainment venues, lodging houses and brothels, where temporary visitors such as seafarers and residents met. However, the vibrant and transient culture of sailortowns symbolised a lifestyle that middle-class observers deemed chaotic and threatening to societal order. In our recent article in Social History 50:4, ‘Port communities on both sides of the Atlantic: neighbourhood life and public festivities in the sailortowns of Antwerp and Buenos Aires, c. 1880–1930’, we challenge this one-dimensional view. By adopting a comparative approach to two port districts with some of the most notorious reputations worldwide, we show that although sailortowns could indeed be dangerous and rowdy places, they equally fostered urban communities defined by civic life and mutual aid, while also highlighting the distinctive features of each district. Continue reading
In the second of Social History’s tributes to John Seed, Edmund Ogawa Hardy explores the intersections of John’s historical and poetical work. Full tributes to John Seed and a selection of his poetry can be found in Social History 50,4.
Historian and poet John Seed (1950-2025) played a vital role in the development of Social History, joining the Editorial Board in 1982 and serving as Reviews Editor (1982-94) and as an Associate Editor (2010-13) following the death of his friend Keith Nield (founding editor with Janet Blackman). John was also a regular contributor to Social History as an author over many years – on religious dissenters and liberal ideology and, through his collaborations with Keith Nield, on the continued salience of Marxism for the practice of a politically engaged social history.
In this reflection, the first of two tributes, historian Simon Gunn reflects on John’s contributions to the journal and to social history more broadly. You can read the tributes together with some of John’s poetry in Social History 50, 4. Continue reading
I would like to respond briefly to Stefan Kirmse’s observations about “revisionism” among historians who wrote about the Soviet Union from the 1970s onward. I found myself in agreement with much of what he wrote but, as someone whose work has been characterized as “revisionist” and who has commented from time to time on these historiographic debates (most recently, in the Introduction and chapter one of Reflections on Stalinism, 2024), I am moved to add a few comments.
J. Arch Getty, 1950-2025
First, to the extent that the term “revisionist” has any utility – and I agree with Kirmse that it has been overloaded with largely abusive allusions – it is to denote the contributions of those who, writing within the framework of political history, revised the master narrative of totalitarian control of society. The arch-revisionist, in my view, was the late J. Arch Getty. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Donald Filtzer, Wendy Goldman, myself and others are better understood as social historians. We did not necessarily analyze Soviet history from the bottom up, but we did not restrict ourselves to top-down analysis. Eventually, we engaged in many different points of entry – from the side, in the middle, regionally, sectorally, and so forth.
Second, the heyday of social historical analysis in our field was somewhat foreshortened by the emergence of the subjectivity school associated with Jochen Hellbeck’s Revolution on My Mind (2006). Hellbeck challenged social history’s animus and conceptual frameworks by focusing not on collective social actors but individuals’ sense of “self” and their relationship to Soviet modernity.
Third and finally, in recent decades, many self-identified social historians have absorbed and been engaged in applying a variety of different perspectives – from subjectivity to gender, ecology, migration, borderland studies, and political economy – while also expanding the chronological scope of their work. These developments have enriched understanding of the Stalin era (the focus of so much earlier work) by adding comparative dimensions with other countries as well as within the span of Soviet history. I thus agree with Stefan Kirmse that “revisionism,” along with “totalitarianism,” should be consigned to the dustbin of historiography.
Lewis H. Siegelbaum is the Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History at Michigan State University. He has published extensively on histories of Russia, Stalinism and life under Soviet rule.
Informing an archivist in the post-Soviet space about your plans to work on the international ties of a Soviet republic often elicits a broadly similar response: raised eyebrows, shrugged shoulders, followed by a laconic comment that “it was all done by Moscow anyway.”
Indeed, the classic narrative posits that the Soviet republics were Moscow’s pawns and had little agency of their own. That national identities were systematically repressed until at last, criticism of the Soviet system became possible under glasnost and perestroika. ‘Naturally’ this criticism came to be couched in national terms, and it was national mobilisation that led to, or at least dramatically accelerated, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Continue reading
In recent years, approximately 72 million Europeans—representing 17% of the European Union’s population—have been classified as living in poverty. However, the current definitions of poverty have only been in use since the early 2000s. What, then, was the situation prior to that? Since when, and by what methods, has poverty been measured? What developments have taken place over the last century since the first conceptual frameworks emerged in Britain? Continue reading
On 14 February 2025, I proudly defended my dissertation. After five years of wrestling with history, I was thrilled to have written a thesis that I could be proud of: The Lodging House and the City. Is this what it feels like to become a parent? Perhaps not entirely. I do not assume that new parents are asked if they perhaps like their baby too much. I was, when one of my jury-members asked if I had deliberately chosen the sacred day of Saint Valentine to declare my love for the lodging house as a bridgeway into questioning me on the rather optimistic narrative I had constructed. Had my “love” for the historical subject made me too blind to critically analyse it? Obviously, I had to disagree – I was there to defend, after all. But afterwards, it did trigger a reflection on how and why my research had pivoted in four years. Continue reading
Out here in Jutland, the mainland peninsula of the Kingdom of Denmark, I live in something approaching a perfectly bureaucratic state. The people of my region, the Jutes, were once known for their non-conformity. Denmark’s national epic, Saxo’s Gesta Danorum from the early 1200s, calls the Jutes gens insolens “an uppity people”.[1] Another medieval chronicle of the late 1300s speaks of the antiquam Iutorum pertinaciam “the ancient obstinacy of the Jutes”.[2] Today, Jutes sometimes revel in their vestigial reputation for slyness and rule-bending. A popular euphemism for “cash-in-hand” in Danish literally means “Jutish dollars”. But for the most part this is an affectation. We are good subjects of the modern Danish welfare state. Like anywhere else in the country, we have a rule and a correct process for nearly every occasion. Francis Fukuyama has made a career out of being awe-inspiringly mistaken about the arc of history, but he was not totally wrong to make “Denmark” a euphemism for a well-ordered society.[3] At the university where I work a sacred (and to me, I admit, impenetrable) website called the studieordning regulates all aspects of assessment, curriculum and examination in minute detail. A two-step authentication app on my smartphone, called MitID, is required for everything from booking dentists’ appointments to paying my credit card bill. Woe betide any member of my local sauna and wild swimming club who has not kept themselves appraised of the thirty-odd vedtægter (rules). You can be naked, but you can never strip off the law. Some of my research into the history of bureaucracy in Denmark has recently been published in Social History – namely, an article on those who lived out my own fantasy of burning piles of paperwork during the Danish Peasants’ Revolt of 1438-1441.
Artist’s reconstruction of The Battle of Skt Jørgensbjerg, 1441 (by Svanike Chr. Nielsen, 1991, public domain)
Pleasure has been the subject of intense debate across history and became a particularly important part of discourse in the eighteenth century. This blog accompanies my recent article in Social History 49/3 ‘Emotional economies of pleasure among the gentry of eighteenth-century England.’ In that article I argue that amidst the many and varied pleasures of the public sphere, elite men and women laid claim to the family and family relations as the most enduring and pleasurable of pleasures. Continue reading
