Among various efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to collect, catalogue and store – in short, to file – these new masses of data on the most human parts of being human, none was more ambitious than the ‘Database of Dreams’ assembled in 1956. Funded by the National Research Council, run by a cadre of psychologists and anthropologists and accessing decades of ethnographic and documentary research, ‘Primary Records in Culture and Personality’ attempted to map the scope of all such collections and to write a strategy for preserving and circulating them. This pre-digital, Microform-based encyclopaedic device – a database of databases – played a part in the movement to found a post-war. American science of subjectivity, pursued through objectivist methods. The aim of this paper is to reassess the early Cold War targeting of ‘innerness’ within a larger quest to assemble the complete range of possible knowledge.

The secular-nationalist textbooks that were produced in the 1960s and 1970s were immediately attacked by the Hindu right, and for the subsequent three decades history textbooks became the site for a larger battle between secularism and communalism in India. The defence of these textbooks was seen as synonymous with the fight against anti-secular forces, and suggestions for any form of change inevitably provoked suspicion.

Yet over these years, historians in India, as elsewhere, were opening their minds to new ideas, and posing issues in new ways. Gender histories made historians aware that all narratives need to be gendered; ecological histories made them see that that social lives are shaped by environment just as much as nature is transformed through human activity; cultural histories emphasized the importance of cultures in shaping people’s beliefs, perceptions and visions, even as people sought to make their own world of meanings. Histories from below and subaltern studies urged everyone to relocate the subjects of their enquiry, and see how subordinate groups make sense of their experience and constitute their lives. Critical theories stressed the need to rethink the words and terms through which the past was grasped and the tropes within which historical narratives were cast. Yet, till recently, none of these shifts in thinking about history was reflected in the textbooks that children read.

This essay emphasizes that school textbooks need not be insulated from the critical traditions of our times. When conceptions of history change, when the past is looked at in new ways, should these ideas remain the preserve of academics alone? Focusing on the new set of history textbooks recently produced in India, the essay discusses what these new books seek to do, what pedagogic ideas underline their production, and how they differ from earlier textbooks.

Critics of these programmes point to their old-fashioned representation of history and the neglect of new fields of research such as gender history and post-colonial critique. Some critics think the emphasis on Dutch history will alienate students whose backgrounds are not Dutch.

However, a survey of the new textbooks is reassuring. The textbooks turn Dutch history into an instrument for critical discussion of the past, for instance by including source material from different cultures and perspectives, by devising assignments on the history of women and slavery, and by inviting students to reflect on the ways historical canons are constructed.

Moreover teachers have considerable leeway to add topics and perspectives to the curriculum and to create their own instruction material. In this way teachers can provide balanced and stimulating instruction for students of diverging interests and backgrounds.

Looking at numerous oral traditions relating to an apocryphal episode in the larger body of folklore that recalls the French invasion of the West of Ireland in 1798 (popularly known as the ‘Year of the French’) and examining how this particular ‘ahistorical’ story was repeatedly told and retold locally, this article demonstrates the grass-roots dynamics of social memory in rural Ireland. Variation accommodated diverse meanings and served a range of functions in different contexts. The multi-dimensional social memory represented in provincial folk history, which offered regional communities an alternative to the machinations of national collective memory and the overbearing authority of official history, facilitated complex meaningful historical discourses that undermine prevalent assumptions regarding homogeneity, simplicity or inconsequentiality of local folklore.

This inversion can only be understood by relating imperial concerns to nationalist political initiatives. The article discusses four separate moments in a period of transition in the Princely State of Mysore from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, when crucial questions of masculinity and national honour came to be resolved by both colonial authorities and Indian elites in the quest to recast or preserve family honour and racial purity. Throughout the late nineteenth century colonial anxieties about the sexual health of the British subalterns in India gave rise to a series of measures which promoted and regulated Indian prostitutes. In the late nineteenth century, Mysore bureaucrats set about limiting and finally prohibiting the practice of dance in Hindu temples in the name of protecting family and religious honour. In the interwar period, there was an ironic reversal of these positions, as British colonial authorities, hard-pressed to preserve racial honour through the prohibition of white slavery in India, were compelled to defend the ‘trafficking’ of women in India, even as the nationalist elite attempted to cleanse national honour and save the victims of prostitution.

The meeting and the discussions surrounding it had implications for understandings of women's sexuality in Europe and Africa both then and today. Accounts resulting from it formed part of the knowledge constructions of anthropology and psychoanalysis – one discipline was central to both colonial oppression and emancipation, the other to both the consolidation of patriarchy and to movements of sexual liberation. Central themes were the universality of the Oedipus complex and the role of ‘sublimation’ in relation to the development of moral and intellectual capabilities in Europe and Africa. The article describes the meeting and its background in the context of social reform movements and African nationalism, and discusses the interchange between anthropology and psychoanalysis concerning women's sexual experience that surrounded it. A concluding section examines the relevance of historical accounts for present-day understanding of the problem of female genital cutting.

These themes are teased out through a microhistorical examination of a late medieval English marriage case involving two Londoners named Joan Stokton Turnaunt and Richard Turnaunt. In the circumstances surrounding the Turnaunt case, someone manipulated the processes of law, using the authority and perceived truthfulness of the legal record – the power of the archive – to perpetrate a falsity. As historians, we pride ourselves on our empiricism: we derive our arguments from archival, textual, and material evidence. The epistemic problem for a discipline that relies on what can be documented, however, is that what is documentable is sometimes false, and indeed deliberately written and archived so as to deceive. Moreover, the possible scenarios for the Turnaunt marriage that we can derive from the surviving documents remind us that individuals sometimes acted in unpredictable or irrational ways. This creates further difficulties for us as historians, for we often depend upon our assumptions about rational strategies of social negotiation to make narrative connections between the scattered bits of evidence out of which we write our history. How can we account for the emotional and the irrational in our understanding of the past?

In contrast to the historical attention given to the Contagious Diseases Acts, the solicitation laws are seriously under-examined. Yet these laws were put in place prior to the CD Acts, lasted long after their repeal, affected a far greater number of women, and were significantly more important to the police and the state in their control of prostitution than were the short-lived and geographically limited CD Acts. In the context of the CD Acts, historians have looked at the ways in which a prostitute identity was developed and assigned by medical discourse and medical registration. However, the far more common and long-lasting experience of prostitute women in Britain was governed by the solicitation laws and a legal, not medical, process of classification. Through Nellie Johnson's story, we can begin to explore the intricacies of a legal system of prostitution control peculiar to Britain at a crucial point in its development.

This article argues that over the course of the early twentieth century, the criminalization of identity became the grounds upon which the entire system of street- prostitution control in England and Wales rested. The fingerprinting of prostitutes, and Nellie Johnson's personal experiences, fit into a larger story of modernization in early twentieth-century Britain and the early twentieth-century world. This period witnessed the development of particular, and technical, forms of identification which were applied to particular groups of people, an abstraction which turned the body itself into a text that had very real consequences for women like Nellie Johnson.

For many years, we knew next to nothing about the private lives of ordinary Soviet citizens during Stalin's reign. Until very recently, the social history of the Soviet Union written by Soviet and Western historians alike was limited entirely to the public sphere – politics and ideology, and the collective experience of the ‘Soviet masses.’ The individual (insofar as he or she appeared at all) featured mainly as a letter-writer to the Soviet authorities – as a public actor rather than a private person or member of a family.

Sources were the obvious problem. Apart from a few memoirs by great writers, there was practically no reliable evidence about the private sphere of family life. For ordinary people in the Soviet Union, for the tens of millions who suffered from repression, their family history was a forbidden zone of memory – something they would never talk or write about.

This article addresses that difficulty by exploring the results of a large-scale project of historical recovery. With three teams of researchers from various towns in Russia, I have been recovering the family archives of ordinary Russians who lived through the years of Stalin's rule. In all, we collected approximately 250 family archives which had been in private homes across Russia, even more than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet regime. In each family extensive interviews were carried out with the oldest relatives, who were able to explain the context of these private documents and place them in the family's unspoken history. The interviews explore how families reacted to the various pressures of the Soviet regime. How did they preserve their traditions and beliefs, and pass them down to children, if they were in conflict with the public values of the Soviet system? How did living in a system ruled by terror affect intimate relationhips? How could human feelings and emotions retain their force in the moral vacuum of the Stalinist regime? What were the strategies for survival, the silences, the lies, the friendships and betrayals, the moral compromises and accommodations that shaped millions of lives?

This paper offers close readings of two novels – Ian McEwan's Atonement (2002) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) – which both engage with the claims of storytelling as a means to assimilate and even atone for the past. While McEwan recreates in scrupulous detail the experience of British soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk, his treatment of his novelist heroine, Briony, underlines the selfish motives behind any such retelling. For Morrison, writing from and for her own community, the writer's subjective shaping of her material is not a point of entry for self interest but a necessary way of changing our relation to the past, and so creating possibilities for the future.