ABSTRACT Recognising the often haphazard way in which students’ union records in the UK have been preserved, the article presents new research into the record keeping practices of students’ unions. Drawing on survey data and qualitative interviews, the paper explores the varied record keeping practices across and challenges that students’ unions and archives services face. We argue that faced with limited staff capacity and lack of resources, records appear to be low priority for students’ unions and perceived as low value to their associated HEIs. Yet individual students’ union records should be valued as irreplaceable records of locally rooted student life.

ABSTRACT This article argues that continuity was the key feature of non-elite experiences of leisure in England 1700-1850. It uses a new dataset of leisure activities collected from criminal and coroners’ depositions which fills gaps in existing knowledge, particularly by providing new evidence on rural areas, the north of England, women, and those below the level of the middling sort. For all of these groups, the most popular form of leisure was drinking; distinctively new activities appeared only rarely. This contributes to a broader argument that changes to daily life in this period were less significant than once thought.

ABSTRACT The urban identity recognition of China’s returned sent-down youth is not simply determined by social structures. Instead, it is produced intermittently, driven by events, and characterised by its constructed and uncertain nature. The process of recognising the social roles of returned educated youth occurs through the interaction of internal and external forces. In the self-defining system, institutionalised social roles shape their ‘cognitive social identity’, whereas cultural experiences in the emotional realm influence their ‘affective social identity’. The external-defining system serves as a tool for self-cognition and provides an orientation system to define individuals’ positions within society.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how festival (jidian) and worship (baibai) became objects of state-led modernization in rural Taiwan during the 1950s and 60s. While policies to control folk religion had existed since the Japanese colonial era (1895–1945), the postwar government intensified this campaign by disciplining worship practices with the idea of frugality and productivity. By studying government archives and farm extension journals, this paper analyses state projects to incorporate folk religion into the nexus of improvement project in agricultural production, while delineating the ambivalent responses from the local society.

ABSTRACT Single women were a significant minority in England in the early modern period, though they were overlooked by historians until relatively recently. Wills found in local archives enable us to hear their voices as they approached death, and provide us with a rich source of information about their lived experiences and material circumstances. Using a sample of some eighty wills proved in the Norwich diocese in the seventeenth century, this article shows that they were a diverse but important part of their communities, living outside the constraints of marriage and exercising agency and control.

ABSTRACT The last decade has witnessed a flourishing of research on student lives and student experiences around the world, transforming how we see higher education history within its social and cultural context. This introductory article provides a discussion of recent literature and historiographical trends in student histories outlining key methodological approaches. We explore how historians can grapple with the ephemerality of this material, with the shifting constellation of students involved with developing it, and with the variability of archival practices across institutions.

ABSTRACT Facing an unprecedented crisis, modern China reinterpreted the concept of self-cultivation (xiushen), extending it beyond the traditional moral order of self, family, and state to encompass the imperatives of national salvation, state prosperity, and racial evolution. The body became a key site mediating relations between individual, state, tradition, and modernity. This study examines three dimensions: the modern reconfiguration of self-cultivation, the “sick man” discourse and bodily politics, and racial and medico-scientific transformations under evolutionary thought. Through these analyses, the study seeks to clarify the sociocultural context in which the modern Chinese conception of self-cultivation was reshaped.