• Profile half-length photograph of a man facing to the left wearing a dark jacket and tie, holding a cigarette in his hand, with a white handkerchief in his jacket breast pocket. The man has a prominent straight nose, slicked back hair and his tie forms a slight arch from the knot. In the background, on the left side of the image, there is another half-length frontal portrait of a man. He has white hair, also wears a jacket and tie, is looking to the right, and is smiling.

Don’t Just Build It, They Probably Won’t Come

By Ruth Mostern Here, Ruth Mostern gives some background to her article, “Don’t Just Build It, They Probably Won’t Come: Data Sharing and the Social Life of Data in the Historical Quantitative Social Sciences”. Her article appears in the October…

Operation Cue atom bomb test, 1955, Science Photo Library

Death Drive

Here, Matt Ffytche introduces a special issue of Psychoanalysis and History, Afterlives of the Death Drive. The death drive has proved relevant to so many different intellectual contexts in part because of the extravagance, or allusiveness of Freud’s original gesture…

Pioneers in Roman Archaeology

“Pioneers in Roman Archaeology: The Antonine Wall Committee” by Lawrence Keppie at The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, appears in the Scottish Archaeological Journal, Volume 38 Issue 1, Page 1-31, ISSN 1471-5767. The paper considers the origins of a Committee established…

St. William of Stratford?

By Sean McEvoy William Shakespeare died four hundred years ago. We know he departed this life on 23 April 1616 because the parish register at Holy Trinity Church Stratford-upon-Avon records the fact. But we don’t have the same proof that…

Shakespeare’s Questions

By Kevin Curran, University of Lausanne What is it about Shakespeare’s writing that makes it endure? Why do his plays and poems continue to entertain, engage, and instruct more than 400 years on? I think it might have something to do with…

Human Rights Language in the 1890s

By Anna Clark It is widely assumed that the concept of human rights only emerged after 1945. However, I have found that the concept of human rights was deployed in Britain in the 1890s. For instance, in 1898 Hypatia Bradlaugh-Bonner…

Alfred North Whitehead and the Edinburgh Connection

By Leemon B. McHenry. 15 February is the birthday of British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, born in 1841 – he would have been 155 today. Whitehead delivered his masterpiece of metaphysics, Process and Reality, at the Gifford Lectures…