Indonesia's volcanoes are places of recreation, aesthetic production, and scientific knowledge-gathering, as well as sites of pilgrimage, spirituality, and natural disasters for locals as well as international travellers. In this article, I focus on volcanoes as historic sites of labour to demonstrate the entanglement of colonial tourism and science with local forms of work and knowledge, and to reveal the origins of the porting and guiding work that takes place on Indonesia's volcanoes to this day. Using Tina Campt's method of “listening to images,” I show how colonial photographs, albeit partial sources, make modes of subaltern labour visible that written sources routinely minimised, restoring porters, guides, and what I call “camp domestics” to histories of service, science and geotourism in Indonesia. Recognising the homosocial setting of the colonial scientific expedition and the peculiar physical challenges of the volcano environment, I also examine the negotiation of Indonesian and European masculinities and their intersection with class and racial hierarchies on the volcano. The article thus reflects on how Javanese workers’ spatial and social mobility entailed the negotiation of opportunity as well as exploitation on tour.

Entre 1949 y 1952, funcionarios del Ministerio de Educación Pública del Perú, encabezados por el intelectual peruano José María Arguedas, grabaron alrededor de doscientas piezas musicales vernáculas con miras a formar el primer archivo peruano de música tradicional. Esta iniciativa no logró sobrevivir a las adversas condiciones materiales e institucionales del sector cultural público a pesar de los esfuerzos de sus gestores. Este artículo estudia el proceso a través del cual folkloristas adscritos al Ministerio de Educación Pública construyeron el primer archivo nacional sonoro en el contexto de la temprana gestión cultural pública en el Perú. Tales esfuerzos incluyeron intercambios transnacionales de alto nivel y cooperación entre diversas instituciones culturales peruanas. Nuestro análisis abarca el periodo de 1945 a 1952 y se basa en fuentes administrativas, epistolares y hemerográficas revisadas en archivos institucionales del Perú y Estados Unidos. Argumentamos que la constitución de este archivo musical folklórico estuvo marcada por la precariedad del sector cultural estatal y por el anhelo de los folkloristas/funcionarios del ministerio por construir un repositorio sonoro a pesar de las condiciones adversas. Esta investigación ofrece significativos hallazgos históricos sobre las tempranas iniciativas oficiales de registro de música tradicional y sobre la gestión pública del folklore en el Perú de mediados del siglo XX.

In recent years, social scientists have “(re)discovered history” by visiting archives, collecting documents, and analyzing their findings to address concerns about the causes and consequences of violence. Nevertheless, social scientists frequently appear at their archives with little to no training on the methods and ethics of archival research as they increasingly rush to examine primary historical records. This has resulted in a dearth of discourse on how the practice of historical research influences the outcomes of our analyses. Our article, as a result, employs findings from research on political violence in sociology and political science, as well as insights from history and archival studies, to introduce three broad ethical concerns related to politics, interpretation, and harms and benefits that, we argue, have methodological implications for historical social science. These methodological implications are too often ignored in historical social science, but we contend they are necessary to consider prior to and during archival research, as well as afterward when analyzing data, in order to ensure that the results of that research are valid, reliable, and ethical despite the constraints involved in working with historical evidence. We also discuss contemporary conflicts and how data collection on violence influences our understanding of the past. The objective of this article is to identify and address the primary challenges that social scientists who work with archives encounter, as well as to advocate for increased transparency in archival research.

World-renowned New Theatre Quarterly celebrates its fifty years of publication and its 200th issue, this being the last under the editorship of Maria Shevtsova. Simon Trussler, founder of Theatre Quarterly in 1971 (which closed for lack of funding in 1981) always considered New Theatre Quarterly, established with Cambridge University Press in 1985 – and with Clive Barker as co-editor – to be simply a continuation of TQ. Maria Shevtsova fully agreed. Forty issues of TQ, combined with one hundred and sixty editions of NTQ, gives the magic figure 200. The logistics of things, however, means that the number 160 appears on the cover of the present issue (the ‘New’ in New Theatre Quarterly standing for the newly resurgent journal on the back of its predecessor). This present issue also celebrates Maria Shevtsova’s twenty years of co-editorship with Simon Trussler, together with five more years of sole editorship of the journal following his death in 2019 (commemorated in NTQ 142, May 2020; see also their respective editorials, ‘One Hundred Issues and After’, in NTQ 100, November 2009).

Twenty-five years of absolute commitment and tireless work call for recognition and thanks. Assistant editor Philippa Burt here discusses with Shevtsova her vision for the journal, and how her scholarship, research, teaching, as well as her numerous academic and outreach activities in multiple media, connected with her editorial commitment. This conversation took place on 19 June 2024.

The range of digital sources available to historians has expanded at an enormous rate over the last fifty years; this has enabled all kinds of innovative scholarship to flourish. However, this process has also shaped recent historical work in ways that have not been fully discussed or documented. This article considers how we might reconcile the digitisation of archival sources with their materiality, with a particular focus on the probate records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC). The article first considers the variety of digital sources available to historians of the United Kingdom, highlighting the particular influence of genealogical companies in shaping what material is available, how it has been digitised and how those sources are accessed. Secondly, we examine the PCC wills’ digitisation, what was gained and what was lost in that process, notably important material aspects of the wills. This article does not seek to champion archival research in opposition to digitally based scholarship; instead, we remind historians of the many ways in which the creation of sources shape their potential use, and call on historians to push for improvements in the United Kingdom’s digital infrastructure to avoid these problems in future.

This article focuses on Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission’s (NRC) archival holdings, which hold enormous value as a source for scholarly research but constitute a target of destructive forces, prompting the government to impose restrictive policies to regulate access to them. This article argues that in spite of the prevailing restrictions, opportunities exist for original enquiry into the NRC and Ghana’s human rights history through the piecemeal and selective access offered by the various repositories to researchers.

Drawing from publications by Swami Achutanand and the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha press between 1916 and 1940, this article examines the role of this north Indian Dalit organization in creating language and categories of liberalism in the Hindi vernacular. The Mahasabha poet-activists published numerous song-booklets in a variety of Hindi song genres to intervene in ongoing discussions on the subjects of representation and equality which they characterized as mulki-haq and unch-niche. Histories of liberties in late colonial India have typically examined its emergence within dominant Hindu and Muslim middle-class groups. This article uncovers the unique contributions of Dalit poet-activists who recognized the value of liberal ideas and institutions in challenging caste and abolishing “Manu’s Kanun” (lawgiver Manu’s Hindu law codes). It highlights the methodological importance of mohalla (neighborhood) sources usually located in Dalit activists’ houses in untouchable quarters. The chapbooks found in mohalla collections have enabled the writing of a new history of the Mahasabha’s activism and of the initiatives taken by poet-activists in founding a new Dalit politics in northern India. I explore the emergence of a Dalit literate public which sustained the activities of the Mahasabha and which responded with enthusiasm to its articulation of the new social identity of Achut (untouched) and a new political identity of Adi-Hindus—original inhabitants of Hindustan (India). Offering a new methodological approach in using mohalla sources and song-booklets composed in praise of liberal institutions, this essay makes a significant contribution to the recovery of a forgotten Dalit public sphere in early twentieth-century India.

The aim of the Isfahan Anthology Project is to create an inventory of, collect, and digitize all extant anthologies produced in seventeenth-century Isfahan. Thousands of majmuʿa were authored and assembled in Isfahan. Presently, we are working together with our graduate students at the University of Isfahan and the University of Michigan in a collaboration that intends to train a new generation of Safavid historians who will continue this digital project into the future. We have begun the vast project of collecting and generating tables of contents for anthologies housed in the capital's most prominent public libraries—Tehran University Library, Majlis Library, Malik Library, and the National (Milli) Library of Iran—to begin our analysis of their anthology collections. Adapting our work to include reconnaissance, we have taken careful account of the content and organization of these anthologies so that we can create a digital and searchable database of Isfahan's anthologies that allows fellow scholars and graduate students across the world to freely have access to these rich Persianate-world sources.