In 1413 Jean Aubert, resident of Dijon faced what many would consider to be their worst nightmare: both the untimely death of his spouse and a fiscal evaluation of his marital household. Then, as now, any emotional upheaval had to give way to an impersonal process, the drawing up of an inventory cataloguing and valuing household objects. Such a process may well have been made all the more distressing by the presence of witnesses in the form of heritors and neighbours and from watching objects with emotional attachments being reduced to mere numbers. The only trace of this sensitive moment lies in a rather dog eared, terse, and at first glance, potentially dull document which is but one of hundreds of inventories held in the archives of Dijon that describe objects room by room.
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Vinayak Chaturvedi is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India (2007) and the editor of Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (2013). His book on the intellectual history of Hindu nationalism is forthcoming. Here he discusses his latest research project on tennis and its imperial connections. Continue reading
In the second part of Social History’s interview with Andrew Scull, the author of Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Madness (London, Thames & Hudson) discusses the treatment and care of the mentally ill in the 19th and 20th century and the impact of that history on attitudes towards mental health today. 
Social History interviewed Andrew Scull about his new book, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Madness (London, Thames & Hudson) at the 2015 Edinburgh International Book Festival. In Part I of a two-part discussion he reflects on a cultural history of insanity and the influences on his scholarship. 
The study of crime and justice has long since stood amongst the principal sub-fields of social history. Crime history has produced some of the truly seminal work in social history at large, and innovative and exciting research is still pursued today. Yet in one respect, the social history of crime has never quite established itself – it has not gained recognition as a really vital sister discipline to contemporary criminology. 
Inequality has recently emerged as a central preoccupation in public policy debate. What has driven this is the mounting evidence that in the last three decades there has been a decisive shift towards greater inequality after a period in which inequality was declining. This ‘Inequality Turn’ in the 1980s is one of the most distinctive aspects of contemporary political economy. It was not predicted. The consensus amongst economists and economic historians in the 1950s was that the sharp falls in inequality which had occurred as a result of two world wars and the 1930s slump were permanent and irreversible. Lower inequality was associated with full employment, high rates of growth and productivity, and societies which were both much more prosperous and more socially cohesive than in the past. 
At the annual Economic History Society conference at the end of March 2015 four economic historians (Martin Daunton, Avner Offer, Jim Tomlinson and Keith Tribe) offered perspectives on Piketty’s (2013) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. All of the contributors welcomed the book’s focus on inequality as one of the key issues of our time. 
Samuel Cohn is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow, where his research interests include the history of medicine and histories of popular protest in medieval and early modern Europe. He is the author of eleven monographs, most recently Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns (CUP, 2013) and Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance (OUP, 2010). He is currently working on a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust to complete a project on ‘Epidemics: Waves of disease, waves of hate, from the Plague of Athens to AIDS’. In this blog post he discusses that project and the research he has been conducting recently. 
My recent article in Social History 40:1, which explored the introduction of 'All-In' Wrestling in North America, Europe and the Antipodes brought to light some of the benefits of adopting a transnational approach to historical inquiry. I would like to explain in this post why I chose to explore this ‘sport’ and why I think it is of significance.