Transcription is a key part of oral history practice. Transcribed text is often the main way in which a wider audience engages with an oral history interview, and even as the possibilities for digital and multimedia presentation become wider, text remains an important component of how interviews are received and understood. Drawing on examples from our research on memories of the Troubles in Ireland, we argue that oral historians need to think creatively and conceptually about the effects of transcription, particularly in terms of how complex narratives are received and understood. We offer some examples of how creative forms of transcription can shape engagement with these narratives and with ideas of composure, coherence and memory.

This Comment considers the role of detail in historical writing, inflected through my own experience of writing ‘trade’ books for a general rather than specialist readership. I argue for the value of the detail that is slightly recalcitrant, that is more than just flesh on the bones of an argument or evidence marshalled to make a point. Detail is itself a kind of argument and thus, since beauty and elegance in writing derive from economy, a way of making a point without belabouring it. The gratuitous fact can be seductive, suggesting that the world has a randomness and overabundance that can't easily be rounded up into a dataset. Details, in their singularity and idiosyncrasy, point to the capaciousness of human experience. They correct our tendency to fixate on one story, to focus on the eventful at the expense of the marginal, and to invent a false unity of experience that erases social differences. With their obdurate specificity, they can shatter our presumptions about the past. I explore these ideas with reference to modern literature (Flaubert, Chekhov), the Mass-Observation archive and examples from my own work in contemporary cultural history and family history.

Robert Colls was Professor of English History at the University of Leicester before moving to the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University, also in Leicester, where he is Professor Emeritus. He is the author of many highly regarded works examining English identity, culture and class. His most recent book is George Orwell: Life and Legacy (Oxford, 2026). Colls’s writing has consistently stood out for being both scholarly and accessible, engaging general audiences as well as professional historians. The Editors of Transactions asked him to reflect on the craft of historical research and – especially – writing, and this piece is the end result. Further reflections on this theme would be very welcome. Colleagues interested in contributing to the Common Room should contact the Editors in advance.

This comment examines the shifting landscape of student engagement in UK history departments, drawing on research conducted at the universities of Bristol and Warwick. Moving beyond narrow definitions of engagement as attendance, the study explores the complex interplay of workload pressures, relationships and community, and the cultures and environments of learning that shape students’ everyday experiences. Student testimony highlights how financial precarity, mental‑health challenges and competing demands on their time profoundly influence how (and indeed if) they engage. At the same time, factors – ranging from staff/student interactions to seminar atmosphere and assessment design – are powerful determinants of whether students feel able and motivated to participate fully. While acknowledging the broader socio‑economic forces that constrain both staff and students, the comment proposes a set of principled, discipline‑specific approaches centred on reflection, communication, adaptability and compassion. It argues that, although no single solution can resolve the problem of engagement, history departments can meaningfully support students by cultivating inclusive, responsive and relational learning environments.

The Imjin War resulted in numerous Koreans being captured and transported to Japan as captives. This study examines the experiences of these captives, including scholars, potters, farmers and artisans, focusing on their transition from ordinary to war captives, and their subsequent lives in Japan, mainly in Kyushu and western Japan. Drawing on diverse sources such as Korean envoys’ diaries, captives’ memoirs and local Japanese records, this research investigates the allocation processes and living conditions of captives in Japan. The study identifies three primary transportation routes significantly influencing captives’ fates: sale to Japanese slave merchants, selective transfers by samurai and daimyo, and large-scale wartime relocations. Furthermore, it reveals that wartime mobilisation in Japan led to a shortage of administrative personnel, unexpectedly affording some captives relative freedom of movement. This freedom enabled them to establish social networks and integrate more effectively into Japanese society, offering new insights into captives’ adaptation to alien environments.

This article explores the reinterpretation of Ming porcelain inscribed with ‘Great Ming’ (大明) in Chosŏn Korea following the Imjin War and the collapse of the Ming dynasty. Utilising archaeological findings, writings from Chosŏn literati and contemporary fieldwork, it argues that these objects transformed significantly – from luxury goods exchanged through tribute and wartime interactions to ritual vessels laden with ideological significance. As formal diplomatic relations weakened and Qing forces exerted political and cultural pressure on Chosŏn, Ming-marked ceramics emerged as powerful symbols of commemoration, moral sentiment and anti-Qing loyalty. Employed in westward-facing rituals honouring Ming emperors, they allowed Chosŏn elites to assert their claims to Ming cultural heritage and articulate a distinct Confucian identity in early modern East Asia. This study demonstrates how imported objects can acquire new meanings, highlighting the role of material culture in shaping Chosŏn’s self-identity as the guardian of a fallen civilisation.

The Imjin War (1592–8), precipitated by Japan’s invasion of the Korean peninsula, was the largest armed conflict in the world in the later sixteenth century and saw the mobilisation of vast human, natural and commodity resources. Yet despite its dwarfing contemporary conflicts in scale, there has been little attention paid to the war’s impact on the technological priorities of the three combatant East Asian states, as well as its influence on resource allocation, the circulation of knowledge and the formation of collective memory. Moreover, the conflict’s reverberating impact on Iberian actors in East Asia and on European perceptions of East Asia has only been given scant attention. This special section puts into conversation diverse – yet intersecting – fields through a consciously eclectic lineup of scholars to explore the material construction and deconstruction of memory, the emergence of new lifeways and pathways of knowledge circulation, and the personal and political responses to violence and the prospect of further conflict within and well beyond East Asia. Collectively, these articles map an atypical geography, tracing the reverberations of the conflict beyond the combatant countries and into the Hispanic Caribbean and beyond.

In the early 1590s, the relative backwater of Hizen Nagoya in Kyushu was transformed into the launch pad for Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s East Asian War with the construction of a large castle and over 150 daimyo encampments. Hizen Nagoya was a relatively short-lived, dynamic, military-civil hybrid settlement. It thrived for a mere seven years before defeat in Korea led to its virtual abandonment. After the war, the castle was deconstructed and partly recycled, the encampments dismantled and the merchants dispersed, leaving behind few physical remnants but powerful memories. Unlike other symbolically important Toyotomi castles, it was never reconstructed. During the Edo period, Hizen Nagoya lost its strategic significance, political influence and economic dynamism. It was a melting pot that brought together cultural practices from distant Japanese regions (and beyond), before disseminating them across the archipelago via the returning soldiers. The East Asian War left not only a legacy of death and destruction, but also one of cultural creation, refinement and diffusion. The castle ruins are now a museum dedicated to historical understanding and Japan–Korea reconciliation. Its legacy has been overshadowed by that of the East Asian War and Toyotomi Hideyoshi but Hizen Nagoya’s contribution to the war and modern reconciliation efforts should not be overlooked.

This article examines the circulation of expertise and armaments across and beyond the Hispanic world as a result of the Imjin War. Fear of an invasion from Hideyoshi’s Japan prompted the viceroyalty of New Spain – responsible for the Philippine Islands – to transport Hispanic foundries to Manila. These foundries made use of the labour and expertise of Chinese and Filipino artisans, further mediated by Catholic religious orders, to cast new bronze cannons combining American and Asian metals. Chinese craftsmen then brought this technical experience to Beijing in 1615 to make artillery pieces for the Wanli emperor modelled on those produced at the Manila foundry. These weapons were used to defend the Ming Empire’s northern borders. The Manila cannons also made their way eastward to the American continent and were installed at the important port of Veracruz to aid in the defence of the waterways linking the Hispanic Atlantic and Caribbean.

While travellers, merchants and missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continuously enriched the European epistemic framework with ethnographic knowledge about China and Japan, Korea remained an exception. The inaccessibility of the peninsula led Europeans to perceive it as an obscure and uncharted land, in stark contrast to its neighbouring countries. This situation changed to some extent, first with the outbreak of the Imjin War (1592–8), which – beyond being a pivotal event in East Asian history – also served as a catalyst for European knowledge by bringing Korea to the attention of the Western world; and second, with the development of the Catholic mission in Ming China, which, drawing on knowledge accumulated from native sources, enabled missionaries to contribute to a more precise spatial placement of the peninsula. Nevertheless, the geographical and cultural information that circulated among European learned circles remained fragmented, vague and inconsistent. This study explores the mechanisms of knowledge transmission, the discrepancies between textual and cartographic sources, and the role of Jesuit missionary networks in shaping European perceptions of Korea. By analysing key textual and cartographic sources – from missionary writings to commercial atlases – this research highlights the epistemic challenges and asymmetries that defined early modern European understandings of the Korean peninsula.

The GCSE syllabus changes from 2014 introduced an element of medieval history across all examination boards. The content and structure of these new topics largely reinforces the traditional stereotypes of Key Stage 2 and 3 school history. Pressures of external examinations combined with insecure teacher specialist knowledge and few opportunities for training do not create a rich pupil experience. The government National Curriculum review (2025) includes recommendations for further use of oracy and Drama in schools as well as reducing content in the GCSE History syllabus. This article shows how the famous Old English poem Beowulf can be used as a teaching tool in History lessons to better inform pupil learning of early medieval England in relation to Key Stage 3 and to specific GCSE papers. It finds that using Beowulf in the classroom would draw upon the emotions and senses to connect landscape and memory, artefacts and conventional historic narratives in an innovative and creative way to deepen the hinterland of pupil knowledge and build upon those government recommendations. It suggests that we should reflect on how ‘history’ itself is constructed and how we could reimagine the past as scholars, teachers and students.

This comment examines the rapidly evolving ecosystem of historical research data in the United Kingdom, where cultural heritage collections are increasingly digitised, commercialised and fragmented. Historians face growing challenges in discovering, accessing and reusing data as resources move behind paywalls, and repositories remain scattered, without a national infrastructure to ensure long-term preservation or discoverability. Drawing on examples from major digital initiatives, we analyse the life cycle of historical research data and highlight the complex interplay of commercial, institutional and scholarly interests that shape access. We distinguish three types of data that emerge from historians’ typical engagements with digitised collections: derived, enhanced and aggregated data. We argue that historians must actively participate in the practices relating to the creation, maintenance and reuse of such data. This will involve new forms of citation, favouring open datasets, improving digital skills and building communities around shared resources. The comment concludes with proposals to improve discoverability, sustainability and reuse, urging the discipline to establish common standards and infrastructures to secure an equitable data commons for future research.

This series of comments brings together four historians of neoliberalism, each of whom focuses on a different part of the world but whose work has implications that are transnational if not global. Quinn Slobodian reconstructs the rise of the category of neoliberalism among historians and identifies the different paths of inquiry it is generating. Priya Lal, offering an Africanist’s perspective, moves beyond the reduction of the neoliberal narrative of the continent to one of linear declension and abjection by way of structural adjustment to show continuities from the colonial era to early independence. Gary Gerstle, an Americanist by training, offers a macro take on the move from a Keynesian and social democratic order to a neoliberal one while insisting we attend to the diverse ways policies and elite neoliberal ideas are taken up by populations for whom promises of freedom may mean something different from what intellectuals intended. Finally, Tehila Sasson, a historian of modern Britain and the world, explores the left-wing features of what has come to be called neoliberalism, insisting we keep a keen eye out for unintended consequences and unlikely origins. Together, the comment offers a satellite’s eye view of a subfield reaching maturity.

The Royal Historical Society’s June 2024 Update to the ‘Race Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change’ notes some important progress in terms of increased ethnic and racial diversity amongst history students and staff but acknowledges that more work is needed to both sustain and further advance these changes. In this Comment we argue that colleagues and the RHS should prioritise the development of critical pedagogies in history university education and evidence their impact on student outcomes. We share reflections on and data from our collaborative work between September 2021 and August 2024 developing an innovative module with the highly diverse history student cohort at SOAS, University of London, to help colleagues consider how they might undertake related projects in their own institutions.

This comment interrogates the methods and conclusions of Working with AI, a recent report conducted under the auspices of Microsoft, which identified historians as the profession with the second-highest ‘AI applicability’. It finds that the authors’ conclusions are based on an erroneous simplification and misrepresentation of a historian’s typical professional tasks, which have been publicly amplified by extensive media coverage. This comment then offers a wider provocation about the report’s conception of a professional historian, and whether it is related to the public application of ‘historian’ to a number of different practitioners with varied training and qualifications. In particular, it seeks to highlight a paradox which the report exposes: that we cannot defend the specialist training and expertise of professional historians against the encroachment of AI without also separating the academic skills and qualifications of historians from those engaged in more popular forms of historical writing and communication. The comment questions how we might grapple with this paradox without reverting to academic elitism.

This comment is the personal reflection of an early career historian on the challenges of working on Russian history during a time of geopolitical change and declining access. As libraries and archives in the Russian Federation become increasingly difficult to use following the invasion of Ukraine, early-career and younger historians are being forced to adopt remote or indirect methods of research due to formal and informal barriers. I reflect on some of the ethical, practical and epistemological dilemmas of conducting historical investigations at a distance, drawing chiefly on my own experiences working on the tsarist secret police during the First World War. I argue that this is not a return to Cold War constraints, but a new era that demands fresh strategies and a redefinition of expertise.

‘Us and Them’ is a community history project and artistic collaboration exploring physical and intellectual disability and mental illness, in the past and present. It is part of a broader initiative to open out wider conversations about the history of psychiatric care in Epsom (Surrey, UK) and to explore ways in which medical histories, creative engagement strategies and oral history praxis can illuminate the instability of contemporary understandings of ‘healthy minds’ and ‘normative bodies’. This article charts our recent reuse of asylum photography and the restaging of wet-plate collodion portrait making, opening out key ethical questions about our complicity as consumers of historical sources, the role of re-enactment and empathy, and the place of the haptic and the ludic in exposing the porous and precarious boundaries between ableism and disability. Exploring our own vulnerabilities and solidarities in co-producing a public history project with our disabled artist collaborators, it offers insight into our evolving ‘micro ethics’, foregrounds lived experience perspectives, and offers some initial thoughts on ways to rethink critically some core tenets of oral history methodology.

In this Comment, I reflect on my personal experience in doing research at institutional archives as an early career historian. I discuss how my research has been shaped by encounters with physical and digital sources across Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong SAR and the United Kingdom. In doing so, I draw on the concept of ‘interim archives’ to emphasise the partial nature of primary sources in institutional archives, and the necessity for research to be multi-archival due not only to the realities of access, but also the need to incorporate diverse perspectives.

British left-wing politics does not know what to think about mothers. In left-wing women’s movements, motherhood has been recognised as essential and difficult; necessary for future revolutions, not least in raising future revolutionaries. In less radical circles, it has been understood as a crucial contribution to the functioning of society, often forming the basis of women’s claims to citizenship and maternalist forms of politics. On the other hand, motherhood has been seen as a ‘natural’ function of women and a private responsibility, rather than a public good or a collective act which needs comprehensive state support. The family, in this reading, is a rather conservative force, better left to social reactionaries. Mothering has added additional hurdles to the gendered obstacles women already face in pursuing politics as activists or elected representatives. Perhaps because of this, many mothers in politics have sought to downplay or distance themselves from their roles as mothers, emphasising instead their contributions as workers and activists who can be fully committed to the left cause. Feminist historians have often followed their lead and have tended to write around political mothers’ maternal roles in their scholarship. This roundtable develops themes first explored in our November 2023 workshop, generously supported by the Royal Historical Society.