As I write this introduction we are just a short distance away from the end of the year, which inclines me to reflect on the last 12 months. Then again, have we had enough of that for now? There is something to be said for gaining some distance before making judgements about a period of time. That’s why we continue to study and write about history. Sometimes our distance from an event, while removing us from the fine details, might offer us new insight through a different lens.
There’s been a lot of discussion on the outer edges of the history debate about rewriting history this year. In these pages I hope we’ve shown how new perspectives and revealing lost stories can offer us revelatory new understandings of the past. Just because an event wasn’t heavily discussed before, doesn’t make it any less true or impactful than those events that’ve had volumes penned about them.