Computer Histories is an introductory course on the history of computing. It is available at http://www.computerhistories.org under a Creative Commons license.

This short piece reflects on the reception of the reissue of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ in 2016, and serves as an end piece to a collection of articles on ‘Mein Kampf’ curated by the German Historical Institute, London, in 2017. The collection appears in the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute and can be accessed in its entirely on the…[Read more]

During the Thirty Years’ War, John Taylor served at the Habsburg courts in Brussels, Madrid, and Vienna. Although he figured prominently in Charles I’s secret Habsburg foreign policy during the war, published information on Taylor is sparse. His story is especially compelling given his own and his family’s connections with Continental Catho…[Read more]

During the seventeenth century, the expansion of central administration and the confessionalization of court patronage offered able and educated Catholic commoners and lesser nobles increased opportunities for successful careers in the Imperial service and, consequently, for upward mobility. This study will trace the rise of one such man, Clement…[Read more]

This article argues that during World War I, the Syrian and Lebanese periodical press in the American mahjar created new space for transnational political activism. In São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and New York City, diasporic journalists and political activists nurtured a new nationalist narrative and political culture in the press. In a public…[Read more]

Established in 1920, al-Nadi al-Homsi in Sao Paulo, Brazil was a young men’s club devoted to ˜Syrian patriotic activism and culture in the American mahjar (diaspora). Founded by a transnational network of intellectuals from Homs, the fraternity committed itself to what it saw as a crucial aspect of Syrian national independence under Amir Fa…[Read more]

For half a million ‘Syrian’ Ottoman subjects living outside the empire, the First World War initiated a massive political rift with Istanbul. Beginning in 1916, Syrian and Lebanese emigrants from both North and South America sought to enlist, recruit, and conscript immigrant men into the militaries of the Entente. Employing press items, cor…[Read more]

The debate over whether the creation of the New Model Army represented continuity or change in the supply systems of parliamentarian armies has suffered from a lack of detailed research on the Earl of Essex’s army. This article begins to redress the balance by examining the supply of horses and saddles to the armies of Essex, Manchester, Waller, a…[Read more]

Speculation about how the social history of early-modern England could be made more sophisticated by including animals.

This is my Fall 2017 Early American History survey course syllabus.

This is my Fall 2017 Intro to Public History syllabus–am indebted to those who have shared their own syllabi publicly

The use of water as an expressive trope of spiritual hygiene was widespread among monastic writers of the twelfth century, adapted for different uses in different genres. Aqueous imagery was particularly frequent within allegories or didactic figurae exploring the care of the soul as if it were a material body, with a constitution that could be…[Read more]

This paper proposes that we can reimagine insular literatures and medieval islescapes as commodious seas of cultural and intellectual loci that span time, culture, and text alike. By moving beyond the rhetoric of insular separation or connectivity, we can see that islands connect even when medieval minds saw separation. The essay focuses on the…[Read more]

This article explores the representation of hunger and thirst as faculties within medieval spiritual allegory that existed at two forms. In their bodily form, hunger and thirst represented a feeling of lack indicating the need for sustenance. In their figurative moralised form these needs came to represent a longing for that which was missing…[Read more]

Following the voyages of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the New World of the Americas entered the cartographic and moral consciousness of Europe. In the 1500 mappa mundi of Juan de la Cosa, navigator and map-maker, we see Europe as a hybrid moral entity, a…[Read more]

In the context of the global water crisis, we seek an understanding of the histories of water management, their fashioning, and their legacy today. We juxtapose temporally diverse narratives to explore the premodern imaginings that have shaped our inheritance of hydrological thought. Rather than conceptualize their historical influence as a linear…[Read more]

Recent years have seen an infusion of new ideas into material philosophy through the work of the so-called ‘new materialists’. Poignant examples appear within two recent books: the first, Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett (2010), sets out to “enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us” (2010: 4). The second, Element…[Read more]

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of U.S. states adopted a novel code of legal practice for their civil courts. Legal scholars have long recognized the influence of the New York lawyer David Dudley Field on American legal codification, but tracing the influence of Field’s code of civil procedure with precision across s…[Read more]

State of the art article on reading in Antiquity (in German).