This paper investigates the evolving connotations of the Wehrmacht in post-war German parliamentary politics. By analysing term frequencies and comparing diachronic word embeddings on a corpus of German parliamentary debates, we measure prevalence and context of references to the Wehrmacht over time. The results show that the Wehrmacht went from being a prominent issue of defence and welfare policies to near irrelevance by the 1960s. They also indicate that the resurgent post-reunification controversies on the Wehrmacht’s war crimes did not mark a radical shift in political culture, but followed a decades-long trend of increasingly strong associations between the Wehrmacht, war crimes, and Nazism in political speech, that developed alongside an emerging culture of remembrance.

In the wake of Reinhart Koselleck’s seminal work on temporality (1979), historians studying past futures in Western Europe have argued that our current understanding of the future dates back to the period between 1500 and 1800. The medieval, Christian conception of time was largely cyclical in nature; the future was, above all, in the hands of God. By 1800 however, the future had become open, uncertain and constructible; people were left with the feeling that time had not only been accelerating, it had also become secularised. As recent studies have emphasised the gradual nature of this shift, this paper zooms in on the pluritemporal mindscape of early modern societies by charting secular and religious types of future thought in a large body of English letters written between 1450 and 1700. Did fifteenth century people appeal to God more often than seventeenth century people did? In which domains of their lives was religious future thinking the strongest? Did the secularisation of time proceed at the same pace across all communities, despite their differences in religious practice? We address these questions by querying nearly 5000 early modern letters for divine appeals and systematically annotating them for variables like human and divine agency, temporal orientation and domain of life. Our results indicate that while the more formulaic divine appeals found in the opening and closing sections of letters were growing less popular over time, the ones in the letter bodies fluctuated in particular with the religious denominations of the letter writers. The observed rise in mentions of divine entities in the first half of the seventeenth century is mainly caused by a small group of puritan letter writers whose involvement in the civil wars throughout the 1640 made their lives particularly perilous. The other letter writers in the corpus, by contrast, displayed progressively lower rates of divine appeals as time went by, a finding that is in line with previous research that saw the early modern period as one characterised by the increasing secularisation of future thought as well as a shift from religious practice to religious faith.

This article examines how digital historians can use large language models (LLMs) as research tools while critically assessing their limitations through source criticism of their underlying training data. Case studies of LLM performance on historical knowledge benchmarks, oral history transcriptions, and OCR corrections reveal how these technologies encode patterns of whose history has been digitised and made computationally legible. These variations in performance across linguistic and temporal domains reveal the uneven terrain of knowledge encoded within generative AI systems. By mapping this "jagged frontier" of AI capabilities, historians can evaluate LLMs not just as tools but as historical sources shaped by the scale and diversity of their training. The article concludes by examining how historians can develop new forms of source criticism to navigate generative AI's uneven potential while contributing to broader debates about these technologies' societal impact.

This work aims to explore the relationship between sound archives and historiography, focusing on the Swedish case of mass media archiving from the 1980s. The study investigates the sonic content of public service radio changes during the introduction of commercial broadcasting, using computational methods. In the analysis, two of the most popular public service broadcasting channels, P1 and P3 are compared. By analysing 1,600 hours of radio data, the paper reveals a shift in the number of detected occurrences, with varying sonic sequences that reflect the overall structure of the broadcast. Although the sample sizes are small, the findings show a correlation between object detection and dimension reduction, suggesting and increasing attention to content variation. The paper contributes to the understanding of historical radio data, offering pre-processing and segmentation methods for working with cultural audio data. It also emphasizes the methodological implications of combining dimensionality reduction and object classification approaches, demonstrating the value of using pretrained and untrained algorithms together for a comprehensive understanding of the local and fine-grained aspects of audio data. The necessity of such an approach springs from the oceanic extent of content in the radio archive. Thus, the article suggests new ways to navigate the radio archive

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.