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This article explores how Spanish women formed grassroots groups to fight for the transformation of their neighbourhoods in the late 1950s and 1960s — the latter years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. In contrast to most histories of feminism, which focus on literate, secular groups in universities or the centres of cities, its subjects are activists based on the outskirts of Madrid and in the industrial areas of Asturias, many of whom were Catholic, came from rural areas and left school before the age of 14. Histories of feminism have tended to overlook completely movements in the southern European dictatorships, while accounts of modern Spain often see male politicians and experts as the driving forces shaping the built environment under Franco. But photographs, archival material and oral history interviews show that women demanded ‘cosas básicas’ (basic resources) on a widespread scale in Asturias and Madrid. They made these claims in the context of unprecedented internal migration, industrial unrest and the spread of social Catholic movements: factors often neglected in studies of social movements. The women involved have sometimes struggled, however, to take pride in their actions in later life. Patterns in their life stories suggest why, and offer insight into what agitating under Franco has meant for how they understand their lives, identities and relationships.

While in recent decades historians have, to some degree, engaged with anthropological debates over the nature of ‘religion’, they have tended still to take the key term ‘belief’ somewhat for granted. This article suggests that we have inherited an Enlightenment legacy of thought on ‘belief’ that tends to treat it as credulity when applied to the general masses (taking Edward Gibbon as an important exemplar of that legacy). More recently, the theorist Bruno Latour has written about belief in terms of J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, a useful theoretical move, despite the fact that Latour himself in some ways mirrors Gibbon’s perspective, particularly as it applies to the pre-modern. Using a range of examples to discuss change over time, via a case study of southern France about 1000 to 1300, this article argues that social historians may find it useful to consider these issues in terms of performative ‘belief acts’, where the contextual setting — the ‘conditions of felicity’, to use Latour’s and Austin’s phrase — are amenable to historical analysis.

Following the abolition of the transatlantic trade in African captives, slave traders from France, Spain and Cuba devised strategies of concealment to perpetuate and even expand their enterprise. A close reading of the unexpurgated logbooks and business correspondence of the Jeune Louis, a French ship that transported more than three hundred captives from the Bight of Biafra to Havana in 1825, identifies three decisive innovations in the Franco-Cuban branch of the illegal slave trade. Transnational business structure, risk management through honour-based marine insurance policies, and redacted record keeping transformed the wider Atlantic slave-trading sector into one capable of eluding attempts at international suppression. The clandestine techniques that this transnational slaving network developed to skirt the law also distorted the archival record of that traffic. Accounting for the resulting distortions and disappearances will enable future researchers to better navigate them.

In Asia, pangolins have generated a rich set of indigenous oral traditions. These contrast with the often confused, or failed, colonial and Western scientific practices of classifying, domesticating and collecting the pangolin. More recently this long-standing encounter between the pangolin and human has shifted into exponential killing. The pangolin has become the mammal which is most trafficked by humans. This trade has been a global one, a fact that is important to remember given the racist ideas and inequalities that have been highlighted through the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The changing relationship between the pangolin and the human in modern history is used here as a window onto the interlinked histories of the pandemic and environmental crisis, both of which arose partly from human encroachment into biodiverse and forested areas, including pangolin habitats. The phases of the pangolin–human relationship can be read for the preconditions of these interlinked crises that face the planet and its historians in 2020. It is vital that historians respond confidently and fully to causation at the interspecies frontier without using the pandemic to mount theoretically naive ‘compare and contrast’ exercises with past disease events to provide lessons for the present. A post-pandemic historiography will surely be interdisciplinary, with critical, philosophical and collaborative engagement with scientists.

In 1971 Natalie Zemon Davis published a seminal article in the pages of Past and Present, entitled ‘The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France’. A study of the carnivalesque rituals of mockery through which communities displayed disapproval of moral and social infractions, the essay opened a revealing window onto the festive customs through which unmarried young men publicly humiliated and regulated the sexual and marital behaviour of their neighbours. It also demonstrated the transmutation of these ludic rites into vehicles for social and political protest in urban environments. A year later, a piece on the English counterpart of charivari commonly known as rough music or the skimmington ride appeared in the pages of Annales . Written by Edward Thompson, the leading left-wing historian and founding member of this journal, this too examined the social function of the practice of parading offenders accompanied by cacophonous banging of pots and pans. It illuminated the role of this form of plebeian street theatre in publicising scandal, compelling compliance with accepted norms, and criticising unpopular authority figures and underlined its quasi-judicial character. Frequently reprinted and constantly cited, both of these essays have become classics of twentieth-century historical writing. They stand alongside two other equally famous Past and Present articles written by these scholars during the same interval of years: Thompson’s ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’ and Davis’s ‘The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France’. Providing compelling new templates for the study of symbolic action and collective behaviour, they are among the most widely read and downloaded essays in the journal’s archive.

What place does ‘presentism’ have in modern historical scholarship? Can students of the past avoid seeing it through the prism of the present? Should our research be undertaken with an eye to its current relevance and with the aim of transforming the future? Past and Present invited seven historians to reflect critically on these questions with reference to their own periods and specialisms. The results of this experiment are published below. It is hoped that this collection of short viewpoints will help to stimulate discussion and debate about the state of the discipline and the practice of history both within and beyond the academy.

John Bossy, who died on 23 October 2015 at the age of 82, had a long association with Past and Present. He became a member of the Editorial Board in 1973 and during the course of his career published a number of seminal articles and incisive reviews in the pages of the journal. He was one of the most original and distinctive historians of his generation, whose many publications on the religious and political history of early modern England and Europe shifted paradigms and set fresh agendas during his lifetime. Defiantly refusing to be categorized or constrained within conventional generic moulds and boundaries, his work is always stimulating and provocative. Less a tidy finished product than a set of hypotheses for further investigation, it reads as part of the ongoing dialogue and open ended conversation which John Bossy conducted with himself. He made an enduring mark on the field of early modern history and he leaves behind a powerful intellectual legacy.

The normalization of married women’s employment was one of the major social changes taking place in western societies in the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on Britain, this article explores the role played by the emerging discipline of sociology in fostering this change between 1940 and 1970. It argues that a group of social researchers active in this period helped to reshape popular understandings of married women’s work, which they presented as a permanent feature of ‘modern’ societies rooted in irreversible demographic and socio-economic trends. By framing paid work as an activity which met women’s new psychic needs and material aspirations across social classes, this sociological narrative dampened much of the moral fervour which accompanied popular debates about working wives and mothers. But whilst sociological research into women had a cultural throw which reached far beyond professional social science, its authors could not always control the meanings it acquired in the hands of others. It could, for instance, be deployed by professional women’s bodies to advance demands for flexible working, or by civil servants to legitimize inaction on day care provision for the children of working mothers. This analysis reconstructs the professional lives and collective contribution of Pearl Jephcott, Viola Klein, Alva Myrdal, Judith Hubback, Nancy Seear, Hannah Gavron and Ferdynand Zweig in order to argue for the importance of taking ideas seriously in accounts of women’s changing post-war lives. It demonstrates how the shifting conceptualisation of women’s paid work, traceable through social-scientific ideas and their effects, offers an illuminating lens through which to write the history of gender in the twentieth century.

In October 1659 a Quaker from Lancashire, William Caton, found himself ‘moved of the Lord’ to travel to Leith and Edinburgh. While he was there he reported ‘good service, sometimes Among the souldiers, sometimes among the Scots and often among friendes’, and he hoped that his ministry had done some good in this ‘time of tryall’. Caton’s visit to Edinburgh was undertaken at a moment of high political drama, as General George Monck was preparing to march his troops to London in the final unravelling of the British republic. Caton noted the significance of these events, commenting that the Lord was ‘ariseing in his almighty power, to breake his enemies to peeces like a potters vessel’. But this apocalyptic vision was underpinned by a more worldly assessment of the political crisis, which, as Caton stated, was ‘not the Lords doeing’. Caton's letter, indeed, epitomized a remarkable commitment to human political intervention. Since his arrival in Edinburgh, Caton had ‘endeavoured to speake’ on a number of occasions with General Monck, but because he ‘could not have accesse’ to him, had spoken instead to his secretary, William Clarke, who promised to pass on Caton’s concerns, not only to Monck, but also to his officers. Caton was so encouraged by William Clarke and his colleagues, whom he found ‘prettie moderate and civill towardes mee’, that he arranged to have his address to Monck printed in Newcastle for wider distribution among officers and soldiers. Yet, despite the apparent cordiality of William Clarke, Caton knew that these were dangerous times, and recommended that a fuller account should be had verbally from the bearer of his letter, George Collison: ‘Many thinges I might write of but not knowing in whose handes this may come I shall therefore be spareing’.