Merze Tate (1905–1996) was a prolific academic who taught in the fields of diplomatic history and International Relations (IR) at Howard University in Washington D.C. After training as a teacher, Tate acquired graduate degrees from Oxford (1935) and Harvard (1941) and became one of the few African American female professors of her generation. She published widely, not only on disarmament, but also on IR as a field and discipline, and the history of imperialism in the Pacific region. Her ideas and interests were as wide-ranging as the influences that shaped her thought, including but not limited to the long tradition of Black political thought on race, war, and empire. In this forum, we discuss Barbara D. Savage’s recently published intellectual biography of Tate and what her thought, properly contextualized, has to offer to IR scholars invested in a “Howard School” of international thought, as well as to scholars of African American intellectual history.

Digital platforms produce bias and inequality that have a significant impact on peoples’ sense of self, agency and life chances. Wikipedia has largely evaded the criticism of other algorithmic systems like Google search and training databases like ImageNet, but Wikipedia is a critical source of representation in our current era – not only because it is one of the world's most popular websites, but because its data are being used as training data for the AI systems that are increasingly used for decision-making. We conducted an analysis of Wikipedia biographies in a national context, comparing the temporality and subjects of notability between English Wikipedia and the Australian Honours system in order to understand Wikipedia's unique role in the production of notability over the site's 20-year history. Framing Wikipedia as an active producer (rather than a reflection) of notability, we demonstrate that women are more likely to be awarded a Wikipedia page after the award announcements or not at all if their contribution is for labour relating to the caring professions than if their service is for sports, arts and films, politics or the judiciary. We argue that Wikipedia's inability to recognise gendered care work as noteworthy is mirrored in its own practices.

Purpose The purpose of this article is to introduce the themed section of History of Education Review on “The History of Knowledge and the History of Education”, comprising four empirical articles that together seek to bring the history of education into fuller dialogue with the approaches and methods of the nascent field of the history of knowledge. Design/methodology/approach This introductory article provides a broad overview of the history of knowledge for the benefit of historians of education, introduces the four themed section articles that follow, and draws out some of their overarching themes and concepts. Findings The history of knowledge concept of “arenas of knowledge” emerges as generative across the themed section. Authors also engage with problems of the legitimacy of knowledges, and with pedagogy as practice. In addition, focusing on colonial and postcolonial contexts raises reflexive questions about history of knowledge approaches that have so far largely been developed in European and North American scholarship. Originality/value The history of education has not previously been strongly represented among the fields that have gone into the formation of the history of knowledge as a synthetic, interdisciplinary approach to historical studies. Nor have historians of education much engaged with its distinguishing concepts and methodologies. The themed section also extends the history of knowledge itself through its strong focus on colonial and postcolonial histories.

In 1926 New York University’s Professor of Psychology, James Edwin Lough, led 500 American university students on an eight-month voyage around the world. Stopping at 47 ports and visiting foreign dignitaries including the King of Siam, the Sultan of Jodhpur, Mussolini, and the Pope, Lough’s ‘pedagogical experiment’ promised a ‘world education’ to its students. Influenced by progressive education and new developments in educational psychology, he believed that ‘Floating University’ students could learn from the shifting conditions around them. This chapter examines the attempt to put this educational philosophy into effect, exploring some of the reading, writing, performing, and drawing that took place during the eight-month cruise around the world. Using published curricula, newspaper reports, and the letters of students and staff, it considers the relationship between experience and education in Professor Lough’s 1926 floating educational experiment.

Women's International Thought: A New History is the first cross-disciplinary history of women's international thought. Bringing together some of the foremost historians and scholars of international relations working today, this book recovers and analyses the path-breaking work of eighteen leading thinkers of international politics from the early to mid-twentieth century. Recovering and analyzing this important work, the essays offer revisionist accounts of IR's intellectual and disciplinary history and expand the locations, genres, and practices of international thinking. Systematically structured, and focusing in particular on Black diasporic, Anglo-American, and European historical women, it does more than 'add women' to the existing intellectual and disciplinary histories from which they were erased. Instead, it raises fundamental questions about which kinds of subjects and what kind of thinking constitutes international thought, opening new vistas to scholars and students of international history and theory, intellectual history and women's and gender studies.

This article examines the “new professions” as alternative settings where women thought and wrote about the international. Presenting the case studies of Fannie Fern Andrews, Mary Parker Follett and Florence Wilson, it shows that, in emerging professional and disciplinary contexts that have hitherto lain beyond the purview of historians of international thought, these women developed their thinking about the international. The insights they derived from their practical work in schools, immigrant communities and libraries led them to emphasize the mechanics of participation in international affairs and caused them to think across the scales of the individual, the local group and relations between nations. By moving beyond the history of organizations and networks and instead looking for the professional settings and audiences which enabled women to theorize, this article shifts both established understandings of what counts as international thought and traditional conceptions of who counts as an international thinker.