History: Christine Ekholst's new book is here!
Our own Dr. Christine Ekholst has just published a monograph, A Punishment for Each Criminal: Gender and Crime in Swedish Medieval Law, with Brill.
from the dust jacket: A Punishment for Each Criminal is the first in-depth analysis of how gender influenced Swedish medieval law. Christine Ekholst demonstrates how the law codes gradually and unevenly introduced women as possible perpetrators for all serious crimes. The laws reveal that legislators not only expected men and women to commit different types of crimes; they also punished men and women in different ways if they were convicted. The laws consistently stipulated different methods of executions for men and women; while men were hanged or broken on the wheel, women were buried alive, stoned, or burned at the stake. A Punishment for Each Criminal explores the background to the important legislative changes that took place when women were made personally responsible for their own crimes.
A journalist asked me recently ‘what were you doing when the Berlin Wall fell?’ I was fourteen years old in 1989; I wasn’t thinking about the collapse of communism, but about scoring goals in my next football match. Football, not politics, was the centre of my world. And I wasn’t the only one. Andy Meyer, a teammate of the future German goalkeeper Robert Enke, recalled how their team in the East German town of Jena barely noticed the momentous events of 1989 and 1990. ‘There was nothing crucial about it for us kids. The football training just went on.’ Football can be appropriated by mighty organisations. It can also resist them. The journalist’s question got me thinking again about the title of my new book on East German football, The People’s Game.
When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, Alan McDougall was thinking about what was often on his 14-year-old mind: soccer. The end of the Cold War registered only as a backdrop to the coming weekend’s contest on the pitch in southern England. “I do remember playing football that weekend, and somehow having an association of my regular life going on while these events were occurring that were world-changing,” says McDougall, now a U of G history professor. 
Prof. Kevin James has just published a new book: 
History post-doc Cathryn Spence has been studying the Scottish burgh records (essentially town records) from 1560 to the mid-1600s with a focus on court cases involving debt and credit. She found that about one-third of the cases involved married women, sometimes with their husbands, but sometimes on their own. “I think that shows us that at any time in history, people’s lives are not as cut and dried as the laws might suggest,” says Spence. “Life is a bit more complicated.”