Low turnout in the 2024 General Election and other signs of voter disengagement from politics pose serious challenges for the UK’s democratic system. To meet these, this policy paper argues, we need a better understanding of the emotional atmospheres in which politics is lived. It suggests that Mass Observation, founded in the 1930s, offers both the ethos and the tools to provide this.

Introduction: the context The Greek adoption flow with destination ‘rich America’ had been negotiated since 1948 and was well underway by 1950. The first half of the 1950s saw adoptions that addressed the needs of children, typically called ‘orphans’ or ‘war orphans’ (in the aftermath of World War II and the ensuing Greek Civil War of 1946-1949—a first and deadly proxy conflict of the global Cold War). Thus, the first wave of Greece’s history of ‘adopting out’ to the United States built on WWII relief efforts, post-war family migration or reunification, and the common goal to resettle stateless and ‘displaced…

There has been much discussion over the impact since 2010 of austerity and in particular the two-child limit on child poverty and health. Historians have now measured the health effects of the first Westminster-imposed austerity programme of severe cuts to child allowances. This was when the New Poor Law of the workhouse was launched in 1834. The impact on child mortality is revealed and it is shocking.

At a time of crisis for the History departments across the UK, the Institute of Historical Research has made available a unique archive of interviews with some of the profession’s leading post-war British scholars. Their reflections provide valuable evidence for importance of the discipline and the urgent need not only to defend it but to disseminate its values across society.

Over the previous year, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (Campop) has been publishing a series of blog articles to mark the 60th anniversary of its foundation in 1964. They illustrate the rich legacy of Campop’s work and the urgent relevance of history to the policy process.

Dame Judith Hackitt, who chaired the Health & Safety Executive from 2007 to 2016, reflects on the conference History and Policy’s Trades Union and Employment Forum will be hosting on 25 November on the history of health and safety at work.