Shorts

By Contingent Magazine | 6 hours ago

As a companion to our list of books published by non-tenure-track historians in 2025, here is a list of journal articles (and a few book chapters) published by the same sorts of scholars. Unlike the book list, however, this is not a list you should use to go purchase access to these articles. If you click on a link below, encounter a charge for access, and pay it, none of that money will go to the author. Scholars are not paid for journal articles, nor do they earn royalties. Some of the pieces are freely accessible. Those ones are marked ***OA ***for open access.1 You can also contact the author directly; they may have a copy of their piece they are allowed to share.

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Whitney Barlow Robles, “The Anonymous Animal: (Not) Naming and (Not) Knowing in the Anthropocene,” Animal History 1, no. 3 (2025): 136–161.

Scientific nomenclature has a rich historiography. But what about the history of not naming species? Using the Comte de Buffon’s 18th-century description of an “anonymous animal” as a jumping-off point, this article tracks the history of leaving animals unnamed—often through the multifarious moniker of the nondescript. It does so by considering the relationship between naming animals and killing them to generate so-called type specimens. I argue that type specimens, although a genuine innovation (in the 19th century), did not solve the muddy underlying ontological problems tied to naming. As a result, the anonymous animal never disappeared. I draw throughlines between present-day systematics and earlier eras of natural history, with a particular focus on Buffon and the work of 19th-century marine zoologist John Vaughan Thompson. Current debates over specimens and naming show a reprise of the Buffonian struggle to slot ever-shifting species into discrete labeled categories.

Kristin Brig-Ortiz, “Crafting Uneven Waterscapes: The Well, the Tank, and the Racialised Contestation of Early Water Infrastructure in Colonial Durban, 1854-1898,” *South African Historical Journal *76, no. 4 (October 2025): 503-521.

Following borough incorporation in 1854, Durban took control of and built on the existing spiderwebbed networks of wells and tanks to maintain a clean water supply until the introduction of piped water. As Durban grew in size and racial make-up during the second half of the nineteenth century, the borough paid increasing attention to the state of the stand-alone water supply system and the public health threats it generated. It implemented racialised restrictions and policies around wells and tanks that depended on blurring the lines between publicly and privately owned water infrastructure. Although scholars have investigated the construction and use of piped waterworks in colonial sites, few have explored the importance of autonomous infrastructure and its persistence in the urban environment even after piped infrastructure is implemented, particularly in a significant British imperial port town like Durban. The examination of urban relationships to autonomous infrastructures like wells and tanks exposes how a racial capitalistic logic and social norming influenced who received access to water supplies and the kinds of technologies available to them.

Melissa Coles, “Prayer Pilgrimage for Peace: Reimagining el Santuario de Chimayó,” U.S. Catholic Historian 43, no. 2 (2025): 99-123.

For generations, devotees have gathered at the place today known as el Santuario de Chimayó, a shrine in New Mexico, for healing, renewal, and connection to the divine. In 1983, pilgrim activists began a new pilgrimage tradition—one that centered on carrying the famous healing dirt from the Santuario de Chimayó to Los Alamos, a site associated with the U.S. nuclear weapons program since 1943. This pro-peace, antinuclear Prayer Pilgrimage for Peace emerged during the late-twentieth-century Santuario pilgrimage movement. It aligned with Pax Christi actions across the U.S., sought to address communal and environmental harms, and represented a new kind of Santuario pilgrimage, one sustained by interethnic and interfaith coalition-building.

Alicia J. M. Colson, “Rock Paintings in the ‘Wilderness’ — ‘Savaged and Shared’,” Anthropos: International Review of Anthropology and Linguistics 120, no. 1 (2025): 157-82.

The contrast between the experiences of those who are not indigenous but live in Canada and the Indigenous experiences is often missing from the literature on pictograph sites, red ochre images, found throughout the Boreal Forest, in the Precambrian Shield. These places, when one reads the academic literature predominately written by those who are not Indigenous, appear “stuck in time,” in voids of their own: impassive witnesses to the transformation of a landscape. Archaeologists, usually with a Western European worldview, working with rock paintings, pictographs are on the horns of a dilemma. At least two or more world views are in operation. This landscape, the Boreal Forest, has at least two different groups of meanings: to largely former European settlers, and to the Indigenous peoples, hunter-gatherers/foragers.

Elizabeth Della Zazzera, “The Illumination of Restoration Paris,” French Historical Studies 48, no. 2 (May 2025): 251-276.

Around 1816 French industrialists began debating gaslight, with concerns ranging from how the new technology would affect France’s seed oil industry to the role that coal should play in plans for French industrialization. In 1823 the debate spilled into the public consciousness when the construction of a new gasometer provoked worries about the risk of explosion. By examining the gaslight controversy in the broader cultural context of the Restoration, and by exploring its intersections and parallels with other conflicts of the era, this article shows how illumination became about more than technology, visibility, or industrialization and highlights the fluidity of the meanings of gaslight. The debate went beyond a simple opposition of pro-technology liberals and antimodern reactionaries; gaslight took on many changing meanings throughout the conflict. Opposing gas could be prudent and rational, while supporting it could be unpatriotic and reckless. Gaslight could be seen as an aesthetic affront or a spectacular innovation; it could be imagined as a threat to French sovereignty or as a tool of the state.

Natalie Donnell, “Networks of Affection and Alliance: Catherine de Medici and Female Political Practice during the Minority of Charles IX,” Sixteenth Century Journal 56, no. 4 (Winter 2025): 833-851.

Upon the death of Francis II in late 1560, Queen Mother Catherine de Medici sought to gain control of the French government on behalf of her ten-year-old son, Charles IX. Through a series of negotiations amid the Estates General meetings of 1560 and 1561, Catherine established a minority government with herself at its center. Catherine employed gendered political strategies to achieve her aims, citing precedents of French women in power to justify her own authority and relying on trusted noblewomen of her household as political advisors and mediators to gain the cooperation of her political rivals. Jacqueline de Longwy, Duchess of Montpensier and Louise de Clermont, Duchess d’Uzés were central to her success, as they provided Catherine access to their contacts in the Huguenot party through female-dominated spaces of negotiation. Jacqueline de Longwy and Louise de Clermont’s support facilitated Catherine’s development of a strategy of female political engagement that she maintained throughout her long career at French court.

Donna J. Drucker, “‘Wonders for the Health of Women’: Marketing Contraceptives in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” in Commercial Intimacy: Affinity and the Marketplace, ed. Richard K. Popp, Brenton J. Malin, and Wendy A. Woloson, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), 214-234.

Andrew J. B. Fagal, “The United States v. The Young Ralph (1802): Initial Attempts by the Jefferson Administration to Suppress the Slave Trade,” Journal of the Early Republic 45, no. 1 (2025): 27-49.

This article examines previously unstudied federal prosecutions during the first years of the nineteenth century which concerned the transatlantic slave trade. A 1794 law prohibited Americans from fitting out ships to engage in the slave trade between foreign ports, i.e. ships departing the U.S. for Africa, and then landing their human cargo in the West Indies. Far from ignoring this law as previous historians have suggested, the Jefferson administration took active steps in late 1801 and early 1802 to prosecute slavers engaged in this commerce. Even as these legal cases may have deterred certain slave voyages, the prosecutors were unsuccessful due to the precise wording of the law. Thus, despite real executive interest in suppressing the slave trade, judicial decisions hampered the federal government’s early attempts to enforce its anti-slave trading statue.

Kristin Franseen, “‘Some Strange Temptation to Evil’: Salieri as Literary Type and the Queerness of Musical Crime in 19th-Century Fiction,” Journal of Musicological Research 44, no. 1 (2025): 44-71.

Walter Thornbury’s “The Old Chapel-Master” (1873) and Edward Prime-Stevenson’s “When Art Was Young: A Romance in Two Parts”/“Aquæ multæ non—” (1883/1913) both grapple with acts of musical crime in ways that invite potential queer readings and unexpected reflections on the strange afterlives of the myths surrounding W.A. Mozart and Antonio Salieri. This article explores the dimensions that lurk underneath the surfaces of both works, drawing on literary theories of nineteenth-century artistic forgery and plagiarism as forms of masculine betrayal, representations of Salieri as a villain in 19th-century musical fictions, and musicological scholarship on disputed or dubious authorship.

Lynne Gerber, “Between the Vatican and the Castro: Archbishop John Quinn and the Catholic Response to AIDS in 1980s San Francisco,” U.S. Catholic Historian 43, no. 4 (2025): 89-107.

Homosexuality was a complex issue for John R. Quinn when he became Archbishop of San Francisco in 1977. The church’s moral teaching on homosexuality put him at odds with a gay community that was influential in his new city. It was further complicated in the early 1980s when Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) emerged as a fatal disease that disproportionally impacted gay men. Quinn attempted to navigate the tension between the church’s position on homosexuality and its call to minister to the sick by trying to de-emphasize moral issues and emphasize pastoral ones. That attempt was made more difficult by the Vatican with its release of the 1986 Letter on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons. It was also made difficult by gay/lesbian activists who, over the course of the epidemic, developed a critique of the position taken by Quinn and other religious leaders, a critique summarized by the phrase “if you won’t marry us, you can’t bury us.”

Mark Hudson, James M. Harland, and Alison Crowther, “Archaeology and Language Dynamics in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras,” in The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language, ed. Martine Robbeets and Mark Hudson (Oxford University Press, 2025), 304-323.

Medieval and early modern economies continued to be dominated by agriculture, meaning that farming/language dispersals remained important. ‘Supra-agrarian’ modes of production (or predation) such as nomadic pastoralism and commercial exchange also took on a new importance. Textual records provide us with a new level of detail about long-distance medieval migrations, though these often remain contested due to debates over ethnicity. It is now widely accepted by historians that language, culture, territory, political organization and self-identification did not—necessarily—overlap. The chapter concludes that Renfrew’s élite dominance model was not by itself a major cause of language change in the medieval and early modern periods. By 1800, however, states had become more powerful. Language took on an increasingly important role as part of the cultural unification of early modern states, a process which derived not only from direct political control but was supported by agrarian and commercial expansion as well as growing literacy.

James M. Harland, “Julian’s Batavian campaign, an embezzlement trial in Britain, and barbarian access to the annona militaris,” Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought and Religion 80 (2025): 1-36. OA

Sabrina M. S. Harper,“Remembered by Bishops, Legislators, and Labor Leaders: Sister Margaret Cafferty, PBVM, 1968-1997,” *U.S. Catholic Historian *43, no. 4 (2025): 63-88.

Sister Margaret Cafferty, PBVM, began her religious life as a semi-cloistered nun who firmly believed in social justice principles and felt a duty and obligation to advocate for those who faced systemic disadvantages. This article traces Sister Margaret’s trajectory, through the fundamental changes of the Second Vatican Council and cultural upheaval of the mid-twentieth century, from local community organizer as a member of the Sacred Heart Urban Team in San Francisco, to state-wide organizer for Father Eugene Boyle’s bid for California Assembly, to the national stage organizing the A Call to Action conference, then later as a prophetic voice and executive director of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

Annie Huey, “A Portrait of a Lady: Cultured Catholic Womanhood in Katherine Burton’s Biographies, 1937-1949,” U.S. Catholic Historian 43, no. 3 (Fall 2025): 79-97.

Through dozens of biographies of Catholic figures as well as her long-running column “Woman to Woman,” American Catholic author Katherine Burton (1887–1969) helped shape public perceptions of Catholic womanhood in the mid-twentieth century. She emphasized her subjects’ intellectualism, patriotism, refinement, and poise to counter anti-Catholic biases and demonstrated that Catholic women could be both devout and fully integrated into American society. By highlighting the literary and artistic interests of her subjects, their deep connections to American history, and their graceful demeanor, she constructed an image of cultured Catholicism that aligned with contemporary ideals of sophistication. However, this emphasis on culture and refinement also reflected a class bias that may have excluded working-class Catholic experiences. Ultimately, Katherine’s biographies served both as a means of recognition for Catholic readers and as aspirational models of faith and identity. Through her work, she sought to redefine Catholic womanhood in a way that was both traditionally religious and distinctly American.

Stephan T. Lenik, “Bricks and Tiles as Lived Objects at Jesuit Missions,” U.S. Catholic Historian 43, no. 1 (Spring 2025): 53-76.

Material culture and architecture have played an important role in sustaining Catholic communities in the United States and globally. Archaeologists’ discussions of institutions emphasize how material objects contribute to institutions across time and space by providing the permanence and simplicity of message which can work across cultures. The material manifestations of the Catholic Church can be divided into sacred “inscribed” objects and common, everyday “lived” objects. This paper considers the role of “lived” objects in maintaining social control at missions by looking to archaeological evidence of ceramic architectural materials, specifically bricks and tiles, from English Jesuit missions in Maryland and French Jesuit missions in the Caribbean and South America from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Bricks and tiles typically occur in repeatable forms with subtle variations in appearance, color, and texture and are preserved in the archaeological record. Approaching these material culture types through a comparative study in two regions considers how architectural materials contributed to the durability of the Church as these objects enabled both commonality and variation across Catholic mission properties.

Rory MacLellan, “The Good Lancastrian? Remembering Henry V in Yorkist England,” *The *Court Historian, 30, no. 1 (2025): 23-33.

The Yorkist rhetoric of the Wars of the Roses is full of invective against their Lancastrian rival Henry VI and his grandfather Henry IV. The former was cast as incompetent, the latter as a usurper who perverted the course of the succession. But Henry VI’s father, Henry V, was more difficult to attack due to his success as a warrior, conquering the French territories the Yorkists condemned Henry VI for losing. Yet, Henry V was still the son of a usurper and had executed the grandfather of Edward IV and Richard III. This paper is the first to examine the complex memorialisation of Henry V under the Yorkists. It shows that the Yorkist regime did not just write off or ignore Henry V but made careful use of the King as a chivalric figure and in their arguments for war with France.

U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Special House Study, Black History at the Vassall Estate, by Caitlin DeAngelis, Carla Martin, Rayshauna Gray, Aabid Allibhai, Eshe Sherley, 2025. OA

Nicole Martin, “Reconstructing the American Home: Western Boardinghouses on the Comstock Lode,” *Journal of American History *112, no. 2 (September 2025): 281-306.

From the day he set sail for the California gold rush from Plymouth, Massachusetts, in early 1849, until the day he died in Carson City, Nevada, in late 1903, Alfred Doten dutifully kept a journal. The life trajectory Doten recorded in the seventy-nine volumes typified that of many migrants to the far West. In pursuit of adventure and manly independence, the Mayflower descendent started in San Francisco, and after years spent trying his luck in various gold diggings, turned to California’s more respectable economic sector: agriculture. First working as a paid farmhand, he eventually secured two ranches of his own that became entangled in Spanish land grant disputes. Tiring of farm life, he decided in 1863 to seek a quick fortune once more and mined his way toward Nevada’s Comstock silver boom. Along the way, he lived in a number of lodging houses and boardinghouses. Rather than embracing the model western home ideal once he achieved it, he moved back and forth between mining and farming, wage and independent labor, bachelorhood and marriage, boardinghouses and homeownership until his death in 1903.

Laura Moncion, “Sanctity, Solitude, and Society in Early Canada: The Life of Jeanne LeBer, Recluse of Ville-Marie (1662-1714),” The Catholic Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2025): 478-504.

As a religious recluse in Ville-Marie (today’s Montréal), Jeanne LeBer pursued a devout life voluntarily confined to her dwelling. After her death, the Sulpician priest François Vachon de Belmont wrote her hagiography, or saint’s Life, in a report sent to the Sulpicians in France. Belmont describes LeBer’s early life as a gradual retreat from the secular world, culminating in reclusion. As a recluse, however, LeBer received visitors, made pious donations, and was sought out for protective prayers in times of need. Belmont’s Life presents LeBer as at once separate from the world and intimately involved in the aims and anxieties of her colonial society.

Olga Prokopis, “Un-Disabling the King: Richard III and the ‘New Evidence’,” Rethinking History 29, no. 4 (April 2025): 705-735. OA

This article examines an information cascade surrounding King Richard III of England that was created by a chain of communicative events in popular media. The discovery of his lost grave in 2012 and the subsequent identification of his scoliosis subjected Richard III to sustained media scrutiny in the years between the discovery and the reinterment of his remains. Channel 4’s 2014 Richard III: The New Evidence (TNE) proposed that Richard III’s physical fitness was impacted by an extravagant diet and excessive alcohol consumption in the last years of his life, misrepresenting studies undertaken by the University of Leicester to create a sensationalist narrative. The press then communicated TNE’s narrative through colloquial discourse, labelling Richard III a ‘drunk’ and a ‘glutton’. Using the historical reputation model, this paper reconstructs the information cascade and discusses its epistemological impact: the dissemination of stereotypes and misinformation, and the harmful denial of disability.

Olga Prokopis, “Presence and Presentism: Bringing Our Selves to Historical Research,” Axon: Creative Explorations 15, no. 1 (July 2025): 1-13. OA

This paper argues that writers can and should bring their personal experiences to historical research, and that ‘motivational presentism’ can strengthen our understanding of and connection to history. While historians often view presentism as anachronistic, living with disability has shaped my research on how stereotypes are perpetuated by popular history and within historical cultures. The tabloid media coverage of King Richard III of England’s lost grave being discovered last decade inspired my current research on how William Shakespeare’s Richard III has informed the reputation of the historical King Richard III. This paper will discuss the relationship between history and fiction, the affective space in which our motivations dwell, and how my experiences with ableism brought about a new understanding of the latent prejudices in the construction of Richard III’s reputation.

Darby Ratliff, “Transnational Fort Totten: Negotiating Relationships between Indigenous Nations, the Grey Nuns, and the U.S. Government,” U.S. Catholic Historian 43, no. 3 (2025): 33-55.

This article examines the complex relationships between the Sisters of Charity of Montreal (“Grey Nuns”), the Dakota nation, and Indian agents at Fort Totten in North Dakota, applying a transnational perspective that recognizes Indigenous sovereignty while acknowledging the European origins of the Catholic religious orders that operated schools for Native Americans. While many stories of Catholic education have been framed through a narrative of an “immigrant church,” I consider the same debate over the relationship between church and state in schools while using empire as a tool of analysis. Ultimately, the sisters’ and the Dakota’s respective (and sometimes aligned) interests and actions illustrate the limits of the U.S. state’s control over both groups by considering how the Grey Nuns and the Dakota negotiated and used their relationships with the federal government.

Jacob Saliba, “The History behind Henri de Lubac’s Concept of the Supernatural: Nouvelle théologie between Maurice Blondel and Étienne Gilson,” The Catholic Historical Review 111, no. 1 (2025): 24-50.

One of Henri de Lubac’s longest-lasting concepts in his career, “the supernatural” was part of a decades-long attempt by the French Jesuit to creatively understand how discussions on nature and grace from the Church Fathers and Scholastics shaped unfolding political and intellectual tensions within the twentieth-century Church. From the 1920s to the 1960s, de Lubac explored and debated the concept of the supernatural within leading modernist, Neo-Scholastic, and Neo-Thomist circles. I argue that this concept was greatly influenced by de Lubac’s close association with French Catholic philosophers Maurice Blondel and Étienne Gilson. Ultimately, this article not only explains how and why the supernatural occupied a central place in de Lubac’s career but also furnishes an empirically rich case in which history and theology were used together during one of the most far-reaching Catholic movements in the last century.

Zara Saunders, “Rape, law and stories of trauma: representations of sexual violence in The Australian Women’s Weekly, 1970-82,” History Australia 22, no. 1 (2025): 121-142. OA

The 1970s ushered in a period of significant feminist activism, public debate and judicial reform on issues of rape and child sexual abuse. In this article, I examine how The Australian Women’s Weekly raised and navigated the issue of rape from its commercial position as a conservative-leaning publication between 1970 and 1982. It seeks to understand mainstream Australian women’s attitudes towards sexual assault and how they evolved under emerging feminist critique.

Brad Scott, “A family moss craze: Learning, reading and skill development in a botanical and domestic network in early nineteenth-century England and Wales,” British Journal for the History of Science (2025): 1-17. OA

Between 1814 and 1826 four members of the family of Jane Talbot and her cousin William Henry Fox Talbot had an active and varied interest in the study of mosses, which included the collecting, drawing and naming of specimens. This article explores the textures of their developing practice of learning natural history, and considers their activities within the framework of the circulation of knowledge, their reading and skill development, and the networks that supported them. Their social status and connections provided access to the expertise of numerous British botanists, including Lewis Weston Dillwyn, William Jackson Hooker, and James Dalton, placing the family as a locus of knowledge (re)production and transmission. This work illustrates the pedagogical practices of an elite group as they engaged with botany in a domestic setting, and makes suggestions as to their motivations and stimulations, as well as the conditions that maintained or diminished their interest. At a time when mosses were little-studied even by professed botanists, it demonstrates how a family group including many young women filled their leisure pursuits with these small plants, and reveals how an extended family with no previous expertise in formal botany could be actors in early nineteenth-century knowledge exchange.

Margaret K. Smith and Laura Milsk Fowler, “Small Data for Maximal Effect: Integrating Digital Humanities, Digital Ethics, and Pedagogy across a College Curriculum,” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy no. 27 (December 2025) OA

Alicia Spencer-Hall and Alexandra R. A. Lee, “Making Medieval Conferences More Accessible,” in Towards an Accessible Academy: Perspectives from Disabled Medievalists, ed. Alexandra R. A. Lee, Hope Doherty-Harrison, E. R. P. Champion (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Press, 2025), 189-206. OA

Alicia Spencer-Hall, “Stopping the Clock(s): Precarious Times in the Academy” in Towards an Accessible Academy: Perspectives from Disabled Medievalists, ed. Alexandra R. A. Lee, Hope Doherty-Harrison, and E. R. P. Champion ( Medieval Institute Press, 2025), 71-113.

Clare Stainthorp, “Recording Secularist Lives: Multiplicity and Collectivity in J.M. Wheeler’s A Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of All Ages and Nations (1889),” Secular Studies 7, no. 1 (2025): 58-80.

This article argues that the biographical dictionary was a crucial form through which nineteenth-century secularists conceptualised their own history as a movement that spanned time, place, and class, and envision themselves as part of this multitude. By illuminating how J.M. Wheeler negotiated gender, nationality, and contemporaneity in A Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of All Ages and Nations (1889), it identifies how biographical compilation—a form commonly associated with nation building—was co-opted for radical ends. In contrast to longer-form secularist (auto)biographies that privileged the individual over the collective, the biographical dictionary did not impose a singular narrative and so enabled freethinkers to navigate a tension at the heart of the secular movement: the desire to work together to effect social change while upholding the right to draw their own conclusions about what constituted freethinking principles and exemplary lives.

Ana Stevenson, “‘Workin’ 9 to 9, 24/7’: political humour about Australian politicians and ministerial staffers during the Rudd-Gillard era,” *History Australia *22, no. 2 (2025): 301-318. OA

In the decade before Kate Jenkins’ landmark Set the Standard report into parliamentary workplaces, small screen political humour in Australia challenged the sustainability of industriousness in government work. Historians have paid little attention to the Rudd-Gillard era’s popular culture. This article will historicise the process whereby political humour anticipated how Set the Standard and feminist political scientists would, by the 2020s, conceptually unite longstanding concerns about expectations that parliamentary staff work excessive hours with exposés about a sexualised work culture that is particularly unsafe for women. Beginning with an overview of scholarly and media perspectives towards parliamentary workplaces, this article will focus on two influential television series: firstly, the skit comedy series Double Take (Seven Network, 2009), featuring musical sketches about Australia’s parliamentary work cultures at the federal level; and secondly, the comedy series At Home with Julia (Australian Broadcasting Commission, 2011), featuring the same actors portraying the Australian Labor Party prime ministers.

Claire Brennan and Ana Stevenson, “Monumentally Kitsch: The Decommissioned Captain Cook Statues of Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia,” Radical History Review 2025, no. 152 (2025): 32-52.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and global reignition of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 reorientated activists, the media, and scholars worldwide toward the meanings associated with colonial statutory. In Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia, this reorientation coincided with the 250th anniversary of navigator Captain James Cook’s first Pacific voyage. The number of Cook monuments in these settler-colonial nations evinces that Cook is an historical figure with an outsized legacy. This article examines the histories and fates of two particularly unusual Cook statues, one in Tūranga (Gisborne), Aotearoa, and one in Cairns, Australia. Amid so many Cook monuments, why have these two statues alone been taken down? This article argues that statues celebrating colonial figures can be seen as falling within the genre of kitsch, but that these two statues are extreme examples of kitsch aesthetics. Their obvious embodiment of kitsch and provocation of mirth in viewers proved pivotal in the decommissioning of these antipodean statues in 2019 and 2022. The fates of the statues called “Crook Cook” and “Nazi Captain Cook” analyzed in this article indicate that the aesthetics of colonial statues can be as significant a factor in their removal as the historical behavior of their subjects.

Ana Stevenson, Kieran Balloo, and Alana Piper, “How To Do Academic Blogging,” Public Humanities 1 (2025):e68. OA

Academic blogging is a digital platform for “doing” knowledge translation in the humanities. Knowledge translation is the process of communicating research outcomes outside academia so the public can benefit. While science communication is widely recognized as a medium for communicating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics knowledge with the public, formal mechanisms for knowledge facilitation in the humanities are not as well established. Academic blogging is core to the social value and impact of the humanities, representing an important open access entry point into humanistic scholarly debates. Drawing on a developing literature about academic blogging as well as a survey we conducted with readers, authors, and editors of academic blogs, this article shows how doing knowledge translation with academic blogs can support the three core domains of a university’s mission: research, teaching, and public outreach. With your research, you can use academic blogs to facilitate networking and collaborations; with your teaching, you can use academic blogs as tools to introduce students to a new topic; with public outreach, doing academic blogging enables you to connect with diverse readerships. Academic blogs contribute to knowledge translation for and about the humanities, from foundational concepts to new research and the more hidden aspects of academic practice.

Ana Stevenson, “‘Tearing Off the Bonds’: Suffrage Visual Culture in Australia, New Zealand, and the USA, 1890-1920,” Gender & History 37, no. 1 (2025): 234-266. OA

This article will examine how transpacific suffrage visual culture imagined and reimagined an artistic tradition centred around the figure of the bound woman. White suffragists and anti-suffragists in Australia, New Zealand and the United States used the iconography of bonds, chains and whips to mediate the possibility of women’s enfranchisement. Haunted by the legacies of settler colonialism, suffrage cartoons directly and obliquely evoked the spectre of chattel slavery, convict transportation and incarceration alongside the elusive ideals of humanitarian reform. While anti-suffrage cartoons lamented the prospect of women’s enfranchisement, pro-suffrage cartoons appropriated this iconography primarily for the benefit of white women.

Mikko Toivanen, “Water infrastructure as a technology of control and a site of negotiation in nineteenth-century Batavia, Netherlands Indies,” The Historical Journal 68, no. 2 (2025):355-375. OA

This article examines the social and political aspects of late nineteenth-century water management in Batavia (now Jakarta), the capital of the Netherlands Indies. Through a detailed analysis of how a mixture of old and new water technologies featured in the city’s public debates and decision-making, it argues that water infrastructure served as a key site of social control over the city’s diverse population. From the 1870s onwards, deep-bore artesian wells linked to public hydrants were introduced to provide a reliable and hygienic supply of clean water. This was a response to long-standing concerns over the city’s waste-blocked canals and their deleterious health effects. The article shows how these technologies came to be entwined with new, punitive social norms, enforced through both formal regulations on water use and informal complaints over wastefulness; moreover, these norms had a clear racial dimension, being directed primarily against the city’s Asian communities and repurposing long-standing stereotypes. Yet, beyond official discourses, a close reading of these debates shows that Batavia’s canals and hydrants also functioned as grassroots sites of negotiation, where different ideas – not just of water and land but of the very concept of public spaces and the colonial public sphere – met and occasionally clashed.

Dennis J. Wieboldt III “Making Natural Law ‘Useful in the Solution of Practical Problems’: Global Catholicism and Human Rights in The Catholic Lawyer, 1955-1964,” The Catholic Historical Review 111, no. 2 (2025): 334-358.

Responding to a “need for a magazine for Catholic lawyers,” St. John’s University established The Catholic Lawyer in 1955. Featuring the most prominent Catholic legal scholars in the United States, The Catholic Lawyer offered a unique forum for Catholics to reflect on their religious tradition’s relationship to American law. By tracing the history of The Catholic Lawyer‘s first decade of circulation, this article reveals that mid-twentieth-century American Catholic legal scholars consistently employed natural law as their framework for engagement with the American legal tradition, often seeking to reclaim natural law from the abstractions in which it had been shrouded. To illustrate natural law’s pressing practical relevance, these scholars frequently turned to the cause of human rights, even as postwar human rights discourse on both sides of the Atlantic proved to be famously abstract. This notwithstanding, The Catholic Lawyer‘s attentiveness to both high-level philosophical concepts and seemingly practical issues of human rights elucidates a decisive feature of mid-century American Catholic legal thought: its global orientation.

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