The prevalence of boy gangs on London streets has been famously preserved for us in literature by Daniel Defoe’s 1722 depiction of bands of roving boys and by Charles Dickens’s 1838 creation of Fagin’s network of pickpockets in Oliver Twist. But what of the real boy gangs from the period that caught the attention of these novelists?  Where are they childlike?  Or hardened adult-like criminals?  This is the story of one such gang operating in eighteenth-century London.

The Warrior Women Project (WWP) is an open-access digital home for the 113 “warrior women” ballads originally cataloged by Dianne Dugaw, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, University of Oregon, for the index of her dissertation, The Female Warrior Heroine in Anglo-American Balladry (1982). 

The seventeenth century faced cultural division and a concern over the erosion of truth and authority. What can we learn from Pierre Bayle and his call for tolerance?

Guess where else Bernie Sanders showed up: in Jane Austen’s Regency England.

During the Covid19 lockdown, opera singer Peter Brathwaite has recreated nearly 70 works of Black portraiture from the 16th century to the present, subversively repicturing for our moment of reckoning images that had once served a racialized hierarchical economy of servitude and enslavement.

Since January 2019, the Scottish Opera has been holding interactive performances of a Jacobite-themed production entitled 1719! in dozens of primary schools across Scotland. Examination of Jacobite ballads printed around 1719 in relation to 1719! reveals shared patterns of thought: both 1719! and Jacobite ballads instrumentalize the past to cultivate a unique Scottish identity and sense of a cyclical history that resonates with contemporary cultural and political aspirations.

Crimes committed by females during the eighteenth century were thoroughly addressed by popular fiction writers to much acclaim. Eliza Haywood’s criminalization of love makes way for a larger examination of patriarchal institutions and interrogates the gendered nature of criminality during this period.

Like many human-made environmental disasters, Mobil Oil Company’s Colocotroni oil spill in 1973 is remembered today as a freak accident aggravated by human error; an exception rather than the rule of oceanic commerce.  It would be more appropriate, however, to locate in this incident something emblematic about maritime trade in the Anthropocene.