ABSTRACT This article explores the concept of a successful, or convincing, forgery. What makes a forgery successful and why? Drawing from a range of high-profile and lesser-known cases of forgery from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, this article examines the dominant notions of success in forgery and challenges the assumptions that uphold them. It demonstrates that although the conditions that enable the creation of a successful forgery are multifaceted and vary considerably, what exactly constitutes a successful forgery is inextricably linked with its capacity to deceive. However, by decentring the importance of deception in the makings of a successful forgery, this article makes space for thinking about the bad, childish fakes that occupy the lower ends of the antiquities market in particular as successful and in what capacity. It concludes by arguing that bad fakes, much like bad art or bad movies, can simultaneously embody multiple and at times radically divergent notions of success unrelated to their ability (or inability) to deceive.

ABSTRACT This article re-examines Tipu Sultan beyond colonial and nationalist representations that hyper-masculinize him as either predatory or benevolent. I use the term hyper-masculinization to describe a representational stratagem in which Indian rulers are depicted in lopsided extremes: either as excessively violent and aggressive or conversely as overly compassionate and weak. Such single-dimensional representations sideline the wider cultural meanings of masculinity associated with the traditional Indian conception of androgyny. This study fills this gap by arguing that Tipu’s personality is far more profound and many sided and can be better apprehended through the hitherto overlooked conception of androgyny, understood in Ashis Nandy’s work as a marker of masculinity in pre-colonial India. Here androgyny is not a form of gender ambiguity but a culturally bounded ideal of balance that sacralizes political agency, controlled violence, and creativity. Drawing on Ashis Nandy’s conceptualization of Indian masculinity as well as Hindu and Islamic metaphysical worldviews, I argue that Indian fictional writings such as Girish Karnad’s The Dreams of Tipu Sultan and Bhawan S. Gidwani’s The Sword of Tipu Sultan can be read as presenting Tipu as an androgynous sovereign. In doing so, these texts stand in sharp contrast to the colonial demonization and nationalist romanticization of Tipu as a hypermasculine individual. While neither Karnad nor Gidwani may have explicitly set out to recover the medieval Indian ideal of androgyny, my reading illustrates that their representations lend themselves to an interpretation of Tipu as an androgynous figure whose rulership sits at the intersection of south Indian Islam and Hindu ksatriyahood reflecting a balance of protection and force, benevolence and wrath. While existing corrective scholarship is valuable, it does not engage with Tipu’s symbolic and gendered self-fashioning or read his struggles against the British through the lens of androgynous kingship. This study extends the discussion on the sultan by introducing a perspective that illuminates alternative modes of kingship rooted in the religious and cultural imagination of eighteenth-century India.

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the structuring role of metaphors in contemporary historiography by engaging in dialogue with three key works: Key Metaphors for History by Javier Fernández Sebastián, Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change by Elías José Palti and History and Identity by Stefan Berger. Across three sections, it reconstructs the convergences among these proposals concerning the epistemic function of metaphors, understood not as stylistic embellishments but as figurative matrices that mediate between experience, language and historical interpretation. First, it examines how metaphors shape forms of historical reasoning and grammars of temporality. Second, it analyzes their role as catalysts of conceptual change, particularly in contexts of semantic crisis or epistemic dislocation. Finally, it explores the potential of a historical metaphorology to foster interdisciplinary dialogue among history, philosophy, political theory, visual studies and material culture. What is thus advocated is a critical renewal of historical theory – one capable of training historians who are aware of the tropological substratum of their practice and equipped with tools to intervene in public debates on memory, identity and the uses of the past. Metaphors, in this framework, not only serve to weave historical narratives, but they also make them possible.

ABSTRACT This article examines how the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (RTK) video game series transforms history into a source of gameplay enjoyment. Moving beyond debates over historical accuracy and authenticity, it asks how history functions for video games rather than how video games serve history. The article analyzes RTK through two interconnected dimensions: the rule-based reconfiguration of historical materials and resonance between the game and players, understood as a twofold mechanism for generating enjoyment. The article argues that RTK reorganizes historiographical records, literary narratives, and modern media representations into a calculable game system structured through quantified character attributes, turn-based temporality, restricted historical agency, and conquest-oriented goals. Through these rule structures, historical complexity is translated into a framework that enables prediction, planning, and strategic decision-making. The gameplay experience is further recontextualized through resonance, as players relate emergent in-game narratives to their prior knowledge of the Three Kingdoms. By foregrounding the interplay between systemic abstraction, which constructs a generalized rule-based framework, and resonance, which reconfigures gameplay through individualized meaning-making, this article argues that historical video games do not simply represent the past but generate historically grounded enjoyment through the interaction among rules, players, and culturally circulating historical narratives.

ABSTRACT This article examines historians’ multifaceted engagement with the concept of presentism. Traditionally associated with distortive historical practice, presentism has, in recent decades, been increasingly subjected to a more ambivalent discourse – one attentive not only to its shortcomings and fallacies but also to its merits and productive potential. The article argues that fully accommodating this polyvalent discourse requires framing presentism through the lens of present-centeredness, enabling a reading across both ‘vicious’ and ‘virtuous’ conceptualizations of the term. By elaborating on four iterations – motivational, narrative, strategic and pluralist presentism – the article brings to light the stakes of reassessing the long-standing hostility toward presentism. In addition to justifying historians’ use of conceptual and analytical resources not rooted in the past, exploring legitimate forms of presentism helps articulate history’s value and contribution amid present-day concerns and predicaments. However, within a broader historical culture, these efforts remain contested and constrained by alternative historical engagements not bound by the strict present–past dichotomy characteristic of professional history. Therefore, a proper assessment of historians’ preoccupation with presentism requires a dialogue with contemporary theories of historical time and temporality, as developed in this article through the discussion of two illustrative examples.

ABSTRACT In the past years, there has been growing attention, in Europe and beyond, for issues related to accountability for, and recognition of, (post-)colonial violence and its enduring effects, as well as more fundamental debates about the need for societal change. As former colonial powers are increasingly facing pressures to redress enduring injustices related to their colonial legacies, an oft-used response to these demands has been the creation of the creation of a range of initiatives dealing with the ramifications of colonial legacies aimed at truth-seeking and at fostering broader forms of accountability. The contributors to this Special Issue were part of a symposium organized in September 2022, in which the participants discussed whether and through which mechanisms historical truth-seeking processes and accountability initiatives can contribute to the objective of social change. Through six empirical case studies of truth and accountability initiatives related to colonial legacies in the European context (Belgium, Germany, Greenland, Sweden, Portugal and Spain), a conceptual introduction and one reflective piece, the Special Issue explores the ways in which the pursuit of historical truth can contribute to accountability for (post-)colonial harm and eventually social change. This empirical exercise is the basis for exploring, destabilizing and reconstructing the relationship between these notions at a conceptual level.

ABSTRACT This article explores the rise and fall of Hebrew gymnastics in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine as a lens through which to reconsider the experiential dimensions of Zionism during the early twentieth century. At the turn of the century, gymnastics enjoyed global popularity and occupied a prominent place in Zionist discourse, most notably through Max Nordau’s ideal of ‘Muscular Judaism’. In Ottoman Palestine, this language of bodily renewal was taken up by the newly founded Maccabi movement, which sought to position gymnastics at the center of Jewish life and revolutionary aspiration. Yet despite these ambitions, Hebrew gymnastics gradually lost its appeal and faded from both collective memory and scholarly attention. Addressing this historical and historiographical gap, I reconstruct Hebrew gymnastics not simply as an institution or cultural practice, but as radical attempt to generate a new Jewish mode of being. Drawing on the history of experience and a postcritical, receptive reading of sources, it traces the spatial, linguistic and embodied difficulties involved in producing a sustained ontological horizon of the ‘new Jew’. By foregrounding embodiment, affect and memory, the article offers an alternative framework for thinking about Zionism: one that moves beyond structural or discursive explanations to ask how revolutionary projects endure, or disappear, at the level of lived experience.

ABSTRACT This article highlights how digital games and digital game scholarship can contribute to ongoing theoretical debates about more-than-human agency in history. Inspired by ecological theory, the more-than-human is a level of analysis in which objects – and historical actors – are neither fully natural nor human-made, but rather assemblages of mutually influential human and non-human elements. Decentering human agency in this fashion is not easily accomplished by mainstream history. In this article, I will argue that digital games may help historians make sense of this expanded framework of perception. Game scholars have long highlighted the scholarly potential of such systems, be it by fostering agential flexibility in players, or acting as mesocosms with which to study real-world systems by proxy. In the first part of this paper, I will provide a literature overview showing some points of convergence between scholars of the Anthropocene and game experts. In the second part, I will discuss some examples of more-than-human historical agencies in games. Finally, I will introduce my upcoming game Galar, a historiography simulator which intends to discuss how written sources and scholarly history writing struggle with – and, ultimately, hinder – our appreciation of the more-than-human.

ABSTRACT This article examines the layered meanings and evolving functions of public history in both academic scholarship and wider societal practice. It explores how the various components of public history intersect and how these entanglements reshape the conditions under which historical knowledge is produced, circulated, and authorized. As a subfield of historical studies, public history investigates representations and uses of the past, including ephemeral, embodied or performative practices that restage historical events. To research such representations public historians employ inter- and transdisciplinary methods, thereby expanding the conceptual and methodological repertoire of historical inquiry. At the same time, public history operates as a transdisciplinary mode of knowledge co-production that extends beyond academic peer communities. Through collaborations with society actors, it generates historical meaning in socially engaged contexts and thus reconfigures the boundaries between scholarly expertise and public participation.

ABSTRACT Against the background of how interdisciplinary Memory Studies emancipated itself from academic History over the last century, we examine current research trends through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the two main journals of the field, namely Memory Studies and History and Memory. On this basis, we discuss how the relationship between Memory Studies and History operates in the interdisciplinary practice of today’s humanities and social sciences, and what intellectual and practical challenges these encounters pose for historians.