This essay considers recent, contemporary 'mad studies,' in their activist, academic and museological dimensions, especially in the 2000s. It attends to mad histories in relation to Global North/Global South borders and other decolonizing aspects, and the emergence since the 1980s of mad/asylum museums in European and African manifestations. The notion of 'working borders' is engaged in relation to disciplinary academic borders but also as working in scholarly or public elements and strands. It especially contextualizes such working of borders in activist historical work, thus beyond psychiatric historiography and since the 1960s.
In a major critical article about UK official history written in 1949, Herbert Butterfield, highlighted what he viewed as the inherent weaknesses of government-sponsored history and argued that all such histories should be subjected to 'unremitting scrutiny'. Despite the resurgence of interest in analysing the wide range of UK official histories in recent years one important subject has been neglected: UK policy on nuclear weapons. This article seeks to remedy this gap in the historiography of UK official history by focusing attention on the work of the three main official nuclear historians. A number of key questions are considered: are the official nuclear histories simply attempts by governments to 'control the past'?; are they 'honest' histories, reflecting the highest professional standards?; did the historians have unimpeded access to all the documents?; were the historians 'institutionalized'?; and are there significant gaps in their coverage of important areas of nuclear policy? The article argues that while they provide significant and important contributions to knowledge, not available to those without privileged access, these histories do require cautious, constant scrutiny and challenge. Even with such scrutiny, however, it is argued that they should be regarded as 'foundational' studies.
Juxtaposing recent advances in Historical Game Studies with historical research on the commercialisation of the Third Reich in contemporary culture, this article treats the board game Secret Hitler (2016) as a case study in 'Hitlersploitation'. It argues that analysing this popular social deduction game and its fraught reception in depth can shed light on highly significant historical themes, including Western cultural obsessions with Nazism; the use of 'Weimar analogies' to frame the threat of fascism in the present day, and the ways in which cultures around games and gaming can have an impact on politicised memory cultures (and vice versa). Contrasting the game's emplotment of the fall of the Weimar Republic with more recent historiographical approaches to this period, we can also interpret Secret Hitler and the discourse surrounding it as a manifestation of what Daniel Bessner has termed the 'Ghosts of Weimar' - highlighting the 'doomed' Republic's capacity to haunt us in the present. Finally, the article argues that not only digital games, but also modern analogue games - even those of an ostensibly trivial or 'light-weight' nature - need to be taken seriously as cultural artefacts of potential historical and historiographical importance.
In the late 1970s, Reinhart Koselleck argued that expectations of the future are historically shaped by the relationship between experience and anticipation, a perspective later expanded by Fredric Jameson and others through analyses of literary and cinematic productions. While such studies illuminate cultural hopes, fears, and anxieties, they largely overlook one of the world's most influential sites for imagining the future: Olympic Opening Ceremonies. Broadcast to billions of viewers, their hour-long artistic performances are collectively produced through collaborations involving governments, organising committees, artists, and cultural institutions, making them distinct from literary and cinematic works as nationally curated representations of the future. Through teleological narratives that connect a nation's past, present, and future, Olympic ceremonies articulate national aspirations while positioning host countries within broader global imaginaries. Drawing on video recordings, official reports, media guides, and newspaper coverage, this article examines how the Summer Olympic Opening Ceremonies between 2008 and 2024 represented the future in response to the Anthropocene, particularly climate change and, later, the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that, while Olympic futures remained embedded in national historical narratives, they increasingly reflected a shared horizon of expectation shaped by planetary crises, marking a shift away from earlier imaginaries centred on progress, technological mastery, and human control. In doing so, the article establishes Olympic ceremonies as a distinctive source for understanding how nations publicly imagine and negotiate the future.
