The COVID-19 outbreak at the beginning of the 2020s not only marked a dramatic moment in world health, but also the start of manifold and entangled global crises that seem to define a watershed moment with severe effects on education. Pandemics we know are recurrent events. Faced with COVID-19 some historians have looked to previous pandemics to…

This conjectural essay was originally written for a symposium "Historiography of the future: Looking back to the future" held at the International Standing Conference for History of Education (ISCHE) 33, July 2011, San Luis Potosi, Mexico organised by Kate Rousmaniere and Frank Simon. Participants were asked to envision future challenges for the…

In recent years sensory history has emerged as a research topic of growing interest to historians and has been accompanied by a call to incorporate the senses into our understanding of the past. Under modernity, social direction and control were built into the infrastructure of modern life as specialist institutions emerged and multiplied in the…

David Reeder was one of the most important conservers of the traditions of urban history scholarship established during the 1960s at the University of Leicester under the leadership of Professor H. J. Dyos. Among Reeder's major achievements were the application of the skills and objectives of such scholarship to the history of education, and in…

This article looks at two modern institutions designed to discipline and control urban bodies--the school and the asylum--and the records they produced and the young people whose moral and cognitive capacities they tended. Both institutions are the sites of past childhood stories, yet the lives experienced in them are essentially anonymous. The…

This paper has several concerns. It is about both the stories we tell and the images we place with those stories; it is also about historical practice and the power of the image to generate new research approaches. The paper is organized into three sections: the "eye of history" and historians and the visual archive; histories of black…