This article examines the origins of the ‘Parry Report’ (1965), the implementation of which led to the massive expansion of Latin American Studies in the United Kingdom. Drawing on material from several archives, the article argues that the Report was the product of a peculiar geopolitical conjuncture – decolonization, the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Britain's rejection from the European Economic Community – that prompted the Foreign Office to convene a group of academics (and selected others) from institutions then in the process of formalizing links with US-based private foundations. It seeks to show how extramural and intramural factors, geopolitics and academic politics, combined to generate an interdisciplinary area study that survived long after the conditions that had given rise to its genesis had disappeared.

This essay presents a critical overview of recent literature in English on the modern cultural history of death. In order to locate new developments, it charts the evolution of the field from the 1970s until today and distinguishes between French and Anglophone strands in the historiography. A selection of studies published between 2005 and 2015 exemplifies a revival in recent scholarship that hangs on four main innovations: the abandonment of grand narratives of modernization and secularization; an interdisciplinary integration of political, cultural, and intellectual history; greater attention to the individual; and the expansion of the field beyond Europe and North America. Thus, today, the history of death is both local and global, public and private, personal and universal.

Recent scholarship discussing the ‘federal moment’ in world history after 1945 has re-examined alternatives to the nation-state in the years of decolonization, arguing against any inevitable transition from empire to nation. This article focuses on the case of East Africa, where federation seemed an attractive and likely prospect by 1963, yet never came to pass. Here, the politics of federation should be understood as a constitutive part of the contested nation-state-making process, rather than a viable alternative to it. For the leaders who initiated the politics of federation in the 1960s, regional unity promised the further centralization of power and a means of defeating ‘tribalist’ opposition. For their opponents, federation was seized on as a means of promoting the autonomy of provinces or kingdoms within a larger federal unit. Ultimately, regionalist aspiration was inseparable from national politics, and negotiations among the leaders of East African states demanded the definition of national interests which divided states rather than united them. Such conclusions suggest that historians of the federal moment might more productively focus on the functions of federalist discourse in the making of nation-states rather than debating the viability of federalist projects.

The following Communication presents a newly discovered manuscript by John Locke. The manuscript dates from 1667–8 and it deserves notice as the most significant example of Locke's thought on the toleration of Catholics prior to the Epistola de tolerantia (1689). The manuscript, entitled Reasons for tolerateing Papists equally with others, reveals Locke's engagement with Sir Charles Wolseley's Liberty of conscience, the magistrates interest (1668) and significantly informs the compositional history of Locke's Essay concerning toleration (1667–8).

The emergence of London as a major site of political murder caught the British state by surprise in the early 1970s. Assumptions about assassination – as an event linked to the British empire – built up over seven decades – had to be abandoned in under a decade. The change in Britain's understanding of its vulnerability within the international system was traumatic. This change took place in three stages, beginning in 1971, 1978, and 1984. There were strong elements of continuity between the Callaghan government and the first Thatcher government. It was the second Thatcher government that made a more radical break with the past. A new understanding of assassination conspiracies altered fundamentally the state's approach to security.

These newly discovered letters help to reconstruct the close association between two seemingly disparate eighteenth-century Britons in India. Moreover, they suggest that a fixation on clashes of ‘cultural attitudes’ has distorted modern assessments of the politics of scholarly patronage in that era. The long-lauded William Jones and the long-dismissed John Macpherson were not so different after all. The views of each ranged from the sublime heights of Enlightened philosophy to the grubby depths of imperial politics.

This review surveys recent developments in the historiography of the politics of alcohol in twentieth-century Britain. The ‘drink question’ has undergone a set of tumultuous shifts, beginning with the decline of the temperance movement after the First World War, diminished conflict in the interwar and post-1945 periods, and the revived concerns over consumption and harm in the late twentieth century. Historians have traditionally presented the drink question as a binary conflict between advocates and opponents of the liberal distribution of drink. Newer narratives question the assumed ‘rationality’ of modern approaches to alcohol, especially concerning the post-1970s public health model which has been increasingly understood as an indirect manifestation of the temperance movement. The concept of ‘moral panics’ has been frequently employed to frame the formation of public attitudes towards drink. The article argues that these multifarious developments illustrate how alcohol offers a unique vantage point into various social developments in modern Britain, including that of the changing role of the state, the contested nature of scientific knowledge, and the formation of public opinion. It also suggests that the historiography should overcome its narrow focus on alcohol in modern Britain by juxtaposing it with other substances, regions, and periods.

Recent scholarship across a range of historical sub-disciplines shows that uplands are where many forms of modernity are both crafted and overwhelmed. Maintaining multiple tensions – between assimilation and distinction, between projections of power and material and human resistance, and between knowledge and elusiveness – is essential to the modernities crafted in mountain spaces. This review highlights a number of common threads running through recent writings on modern mountains. These include heightened attention to the importance of mountains as arenas for the performance of gendered, racial, national, and class-based subjectivities, and the persistence of earlier attitudes and activities in avowedly disenchanted modern visions of uplands. For all of the successes of recent scholarship, more work remains in order to consider mountains in global contexts and to come to terms with our continued entanglement in modern ways of understanding and acting in high places. Looking ahead, it is vital that historians think with and about mountains in order to contribute positively and persuasively to discussions on the human and environmental impacts of global change.