Modern British history

01 8 January 2026

DOI 10.1093/tcbh/hwag043

National service life stories: masculinity, class, and the memory of conscription in Britain. Peter Gurney, Matthew Grant, and Joel Morley

Open DOI

Andrew Jamison

02 8 January 2026

DOI 10.1093/tcbh/hwag041

Sexual heresies: religion, science, and sexuality in modern Britain Joy Dixon

Open DOI

Lesley A Hall

03 8 January 2026

DOI 10.1093/tcbh/hwag040

The deportation of two hoteliers: a microhistory of brothel keepers in interwar Britain

Open DOI

Vivian Kong

In 1937, the Home Office deported two residents of Chinese descent, Amy and George Doo, for running hotels that sex workers frequently used to sell sex. As the British state intensified its criminalization of the sex trade in the interwa...

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04 8 January 2026

DOI 10.1093/tcbh/hwag039

How warm should the welfare state be? The evolution of Britain’s heating benefit and the challenge of defining adequate heat, 1948–1988

Open DOI

Rebecca Wright

This article examines how warmth has been a central, but previously overlooked feature of the welfare state. Mapping the internal debates that surrounded the development, extension, and application of the Heating Addition (HA), the forem...

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05 8 January 2026

DOI 10.1093/tcbh/hwag037

‘Stop this horror’: protest imagery, exposure tactics, and the media campaign to end British counterinsurgency violence in Malaya, 1948–53

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Rio Creech-Nowagiel

This article examines how leftist writers and editors in Britain employed photography as a tool for challenging the legitimacy of the so-called Malayan ‘Emergency’, which was a twelve-year counterinsurgency campaign engineered to counter...

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06 8 January 2026

DOI 10.1093/tcbh/hwag038

‘I felt like I just belonged’: urban multiculture and black Irish migrants in post-war Britain

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Jack Crangle

This article reevaluates historians’ understanding of the Irish in post-war Britain from the perspective of a previously unresearched population, black and mixed-race Irish migrants. Writing on the Irish in Britain has lingered on themes...

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07 8 January 2026

DOI 10.1093/tcbh/hwag036

The management of psychological casualties from large-scale attritional combat: shell shock, British military doctors and generals in the First World War

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Edgar Jones

A significant challenge faced by the British Army during the First World War was how to manage large-scale psychological casualties in a context of increasing manpower shortages. The high numbers threatened to undermine the fighting stre...

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08 8 January 2026

DOI 10.1093/tcbh/hwag029

Nine days in May: the general strike of 1926 . Jonathan Schneer

Open DOI

David Vessey

09 8 January 2026

DOI 10.1093/tcbh/hwag035

Beauty and the business: staff beauty contests in a time of ‘Equal Opportunities’

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Brett Theodore Morritt

Late twentieth-century feminism challenged a core pillar of the profit maximization efforts of corporate capitalism: reinforcement of systemic unearned inequalities as a form of compensation to employees. This article explores how employ...

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10 8 January 2026

DOI 10.1093/tcbh/hwag034

Local heroes? Activism against North Sea oil developments and the conceptual ambiguity of the term ‘environment’ in Scotland, 1973–4

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Maya Ström

Described as the ‘cause célèbre’ of North Sea oil developments, this article focuses on the unexpected alliance provoked by a proposal for a concrete platform construction yard at Drumbuie, Wester Ross, on the Scottish northwest coast. T...

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