HistoryPub Date : 2026-09-25Epub Date: 2026-01-16DOI: 10.1111/1468-229x.70083
DONAL Ó DRISCEOIL
{"title":"‘A Sort of Armed Argument’: Ireland's Civil War of Words","authors":"DONAL Ó DRISCEOIL","doi":"10.1111/1468-229x.70083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229x.70083","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article sets out to contribute to the study of the languages of European civil wars through outlining and analysing the deployment of language as a weapon by the opposing sides of the Irish independence movement that split over the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. The war of words (and images) preceded the shooting war that broke out in June 1922 and accompanied it to its end and far beyond. The propaganda produced and censorship applied by both the pro-treaty Free State side and its anti-treaty opponents is examined in the context of the evolving conflict and its aftermath. The increasingly rancorous discourse hardened attitudes on both sides and fuelled the intimate violence and destructiveness that characterized the second phase of the conflict. It also coloured the nature of political competition in the Irish Free State and the historiography of the conflict. The article argues in conclusion that the moral and political censorship that blighted Irish culture and democracy from the 1920s to the 1990s also had its roots in the civil war of words of 1922–3.</p>","PeriodicalId":13162,"journal":{"name":"History","volume":"111 397","pages":"556-576"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-229x.70083","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149029014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HistoryPub Date : 2026-09-25Epub Date: 2026-08-21DOI: 10.1111/1468-229x.70147
Konstantin Tarasov
{"title":"Languages and Concepts of European Civil Wars, 1917–39: An Introduction","authors":"Konstantin Tarasov","doi":"10.1111/1468-229x.70147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229x.70147","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This introduction opens a special issue on ‘Languages and Concepts of European Civil Wars, 1917–39’. Drawing on case studies of Russia, Finland, Ireland, Austria and Spain, the issue examines civil war as a struggle over language and political identity. Its articles consider how historical actors used, contested or avoided terms such as ‘civil war’, ‘rebellion’ and ‘intervention’. From the perspective of language, civil wars appear as conflicts in which a ‘war of words’ could enable armed confrontation. Taken together, the articles show how language shaped the legitimization of violence, the construction of enemy images, the mobilization of emotions and the later memory of conflict. The special issue thus places language at the centre of the analysis, as a way of understanding how internal conflicts acquired political meaning.</p>","PeriodicalId":13162,"journal":{"name":"History","volume":"111 397","pages":"495-502"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-229x.70147","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149029191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HistoryPub Date : 2026-09-25Epub Date: 2026-03-02DOI: 10.1111/1468-229x.70097
Amy Louise Smith
{"title":"Our Subversive Voice: The History and Politics of English Protest Songs, 1600–2020. By John Street, Oskar Cox Jensen, Alan Finlayson, Angela McShane and Matthew Worley. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025. 292 pp. $32.95.","authors":"Amy Louise Smith","doi":"10.1111/1468-229x.70097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229x.70097","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":13162,"journal":{"name":"History","volume":"111 397","pages":"635-636"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149027779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HistoryPub Date : 2026-09-25Epub Date: 2026-05-06DOI: 10.1111/1468-229x.70121
Alexander V. Reznik
{"title":"Making Civil War Speak: The Political Language of Red Army Commissars, 1918–20","authors":"Alexander V. Reznik","doi":"10.1111/1468-229x.70121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229x.70121","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the agency of Red Army military commissars (<i>voenkoms</i>) in defining and shaping the political meaning of the Russian Civil War between 1918 and 1920. While historiography has traditionally framed the commissar as a tool of top-down ideological enforcement, this study argues that the <i>voenkom</i> functioned as a mediator of political subjectivity, translating abstract Marxist categories into a legible language designed to mobilize predominantly peasant conscripts. The analysis draws on Red Army unit newspapers and supplementary propaganda brochures to reconstruct the language through which Bolshevik political messages were conveyed at the unit level. It traces the vocabulary used to distinguish allies from enemies and follows the emergence of a more sacralized rhetoric that relied on images of sacrifice and martyrdom. Taken together, it shows how political language helped the Bolsheviks secure authority within the Red Army. Ultimately, the study contributes to wider debates on the role of political languages in legitimizing authority and provides a framework for understanding the <i>voenkom </i>model as it was later adapted in twentieth-century civil wars.</p>","PeriodicalId":13162,"journal":{"name":"History","volume":"111 397","pages":"540-555"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149029121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HistoryPub Date : 2026-06-03Epub Date: 2026-01-06DOI: 10.1111/1468-229x.70080
Nicholas Vincent
{"title":"History in Flames: The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts. By Robert Bartlett. ix + 242pp. Cambridge University Press, 2024. £20.","authors":"Nicholas Vincent","doi":"10.1111/1468-229x.70080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229x.70080","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":13162,"journal":{"name":"History","volume":"111 396","pages":"470-471"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2026-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HistoryPub Date : 2026-06-03Epub Date: 2025-12-08DOI: 10.1111/1468-229X.70064
Matthew Grant
{"title":"The Radical Fifties: Activist Politics in Cold War Britain. By Sophie Scott-Brown. Oxford University Press, 2025. 198 pp. £84.","authors":"Matthew Grant","doi":"10.1111/1468-229X.70064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.70064","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":13162,"journal":{"name":"History","volume":"111 396","pages":"485-486"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2026-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HistoryPub Date : 2026-06-03Epub Date: 2026-03-27DOI: 10.1111/1468-229x.70108
IRENE GARCÍA LOSQUIÑO
{"title":"On the Size and Configuration of Viking Fleets in the Diaspora","authors":"IRENE GARCÍA LOSQUIÑO","doi":"10.1111/1468-229x.70108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229x.70108","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article re-examines the question of viking fleet sizes across the western and southern diaspora, challenging long-standing assumptions of exaggeration in medieval accounts. While fewer scholars today subscribe to such assumptions in relation to some parts of the viking diaspora, the idea that sources exaggerate the size of viking armies still holds sway amongst scholars dealing with other regions, such as medieval Iberia. Through a comparative analysis of texts with varied origins, this article identifies a striking consistency in recorded fleet numbers, suggesting that large fleets were common across Europe. The article also explores fleet composition, highlighting evidence for significant numbers of cargo vessels. By integrating northern and southern historiographical traditions, it proposes a more interconnected understanding of viking activity across the Western Atlantic–Mediterranean world.</p>","PeriodicalId":13162,"journal":{"name":"History","volume":"111 396","pages":"303-321"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2026-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HistoryPub Date : 2026-06-03Epub Date: 2026-02-19DOI: 10.1111/1468-229x.70092
CHRISTOPHER GERTEIS
{"title":"Writing Against the Machine: Computational Authorship and Historical Writing","authors":"CHRISTOPHER GERTEIS","doi":"10.1111/1468-229x.70092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229x.70092","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Historians generate knowledge through the labour of composition – through the friction between interpretation and evidence that makes claims open to scrutiny and challenge. This essay argues that when composition is bypassed, that structure disappears. Generative AI raises this issue in urgent fashion. Current large language models produce what the essay terms ‘stochastic history’: prose that replicates the surface forms of historical explanation without enacting the disciplinary reasoning behind them. Such prose flattens temporal complexity into chronological adjacency, inherits narrative patterns without deliberating over them and reproduces hegemonic framings without the mechanisms – archival friction, peer contestation and historiographical consciousness – through which the discipline revises itself. Recent studies measuring AI's applicability to historical work capture transmissive tasks while remaining blind to the interpretive core; approaches that identify textual markers of historical thinking detect symptoms that can be simulated, not the compositional process producing them. The consequences extend beyond the profession. When stochastic history circulates in classrooms, policy research and public media, non-specialists encounter pasts stripped of contingency and contestability – pasts that naturalize present arrangements rather than rendering them open to challenge. The defence of writing advanced here is methodological rather than nostalgic: It preserves the conditions under which historical claims can be scrutinized and revised.</p>","PeriodicalId":13162,"journal":{"name":"History","volume":"111 396","pages":"442-459"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2026-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-229x.70092","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HistoryPub Date : 2026-06-03Epub Date: 2025-10-16DOI: 10.1111/1468-229X.70063
Meng Yang, Huixin Huo
{"title":"Grey Ships under the Red Flag: China, Poland, the 1952 Chipolbrok Flag Dispute and Maritime Geopolitics during the Early Cold War","authors":"Meng Yang, Huixin Huo","doi":"10.1111/1468-229X.70063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.70063","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the early 1950s, the People's Republic of China established Chipolbrok, its first Sino-foreign joint shipping company, marking Poland as a key partner in the development of China's ocean-going trade and transportation. However, against the backdrop of the trade embargo imposed on China by the US-led bloc, the acquisition of ships and their registration became major obstacles in Chipolbrok's early operations. To circumvent the embargo, the Chinese side transferred three cargo ships from Huaxia, known as the ‘3M’ ships, to Chipolbrok, registering them under the Polish flag and placing them under Polish management. However, since the original Panamanian registration of these three ships had not been legally revoked in accordance with international law, this led to a little-known ship dispute in 1952 – an international conflict involving China, Poland and Panama on the subject of ship procurement and registry alteration. This article examines the differing perceptions and response strategies of China and Poland during this crisis, revealing that ideological consistency was not only an important political resource for both countries to jointly counter external pressure, but also the foundational legitimacy underpinning Sino-Polish maritime cooperation. At the same time, this ship registry dispute serves as a critical lens to examine the diplomatic logic of the New China in the context of the dynamic pressures of the early Cold War and within the dynamics of maritime geopolitics.</p>","PeriodicalId":13162,"journal":{"name":"History","volume":"111 396","pages":"423-441"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2026-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174778","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HistoryPub Date : 2026-06-03Epub Date: 2025-12-07DOI: 10.1111/1468-229X.70072
MATTHEW WOODCOCK
{"title":"The Latin Continuation of William of Tyre. Edited and translated by James H. Kane and Keagan J. Brewer. Routledge, 2025. xviii + 343 pp. £145.","authors":"MATTHEW WOODCOCK","doi":"10.1111/1468-229X.70072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.70072","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":13162,"journal":{"name":"History","volume":"111 396","pages":"472-473"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2026-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}