This essay is part of a larger research project on the intersection of music, animals, and social class dynamics in Egypt. It draws on a fieldwork encounter that I had in Cairo in April 2022 with Salih, a horse-carriage driver, and his horse Ziko (Fig. 1). Together, they operate what is known in Egypt as ḥanṭūr (pl. ḥanāṭīr), a lightweight four-wheeled horse-carriage, which, designed with a front seat for the coachman, one or two double passenger seats in the back, and a foldable leather hood, is often rendered as the Egyptian version of the English Victoria or the Italian Botticelle. Indeed, the ḥanṭūr is widely believed to have first been introduced to Alexandria in the mid-19th century by Italian immigrants, who constituted the city’s second largest European population at that time.

Scholars have debated Esteban Montejo ever since the publication of Biografía de un cimarrón (1966). This article analyses hitherto unexamined documentary records of Montejo’s participation in Cuban cinema, which illustrate how Montejo and cinematographers mutually constructed narratives of slavery, revolution and African-inspired death. Studies of Cuban revolutionary cinema have barely investigated the role of ‘informants’ in the process of film production, as most scholars continue to place film directors centre stage. This article shows how social actors engaged in memory work to shape the structures of Cuban history within an ‘audiovisual interface’. It takes its cue from scholars who have highlighted how Black Caribbean subjects engaged with the means of historical production, arguing that Montejo historicised his experiences with the archival tools of the revolutionary state but beyond a politics of national liberation.

Beginning in the late 1820s, gymnastics for adults and children became a noted phenomenon within some Irish cities. Predominantly led by foreign gymnastic instructors, the gymnastics wave marked a specific movement of transnationalism within Irish health and education. This article considers Dublin-based gymnastic instructors and physicians, weaving together histories of medicine, gender and transnationalism. Irish children’s bodies became a site of intense focus in the early nineteenth century, and medical and health tracts concerning children’s gymnastics reveal broader fears around the impact of modernity, the deficiencies of education and the socialisation of young people. Increasingly, children’s exercise became viewed as being of utmost importance to both the development of the individual and, more importantly, to the vitality of the nation itself. This contributes significantly to the historiography of Irish childhood by focusing not just on discourses, but on the bodies they sought to mould.

Nearly all US Black children born before 1910 were born in the American South. We use a mixed-methods design to examine Black children’s survival disadvantage over the twentieth century’s turn under the rising regime of Jim Crow. We focus on 1910 Arkansas, taking advantage of within-state heterogeneity in agriculture (plantation vs. subsistence farming), disease environments, and geographic racial concentration (macro-segregation). This one-state focus allows purposive sampling of Works Progress Administration and Behind the Veil oral interviews of Arkansan Black Americans who were born or lived under the state’s Jim Crow regime. We also use the 1910 complete-count Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) linked to US Decennial and 1916 Plantation Censuses to examine race-related differences in child mortality rates among ever-married, parous Arkansas women (n=234,811). Count regression models find the Black-White child mortality gap widest among Arkansas mothers economically tied to plantation vs. subsistence agriculture; exposed to worse health environments; living in tenant farm vs. owned-farm households; and with limited individual resources such as literacy. Oral accounts illustrate how Black children’s lives reflected contextual, living standard, psychosocial, and other health risks associated with the racialized policies and practices of the Jim Crow South; they capture otherwise hidden historical processes that linked the era’s institutional racism and child mortality.

This article offers a forensic analysis of one key archive of sexual violence: The official record of a congressional investigation of the Ku Klux Klan and federal trials of Klan members in the years immediately after the American Civil War. The 13 volumes constitute the single most important source of victim testimony on white supremacist violence and are used widely by historians. It also presents daunting problems of interpretation particularly with respect to sexual violence. This analysis challenges historians’ traditional accounts of the Klan as overly reliant on the Republican party narrative that it constituted the terrorist arm of the Democratic party intent on suppressing black men’s new constitutional right to vote.

As I argue here, the Klan’s campaign of terror aimed at something far more, as the routine deployment of sexual violence against women reveals. Sexual regulation was the very core of white supremacy. The representation of the Klan in the official record—its signature acts, motives, and victims—was shaped not by the patterns of the violence itself but by the objectives of the investigation in the battle over public opinion and political strategy. In time and place, I argue, the narrow framing of Klan violence around electoral politics involved real costs to black women victims of the Klan with respect to the protection of their civil and political—or human—rights.

Published in 2009, the edited volume Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia represents one of the most important English-language resources for the study of music’s entanglement in the workings of power and power struggles in the modern Middle East and beyond. In the introduction, the editing author and British Iranian ethnomusicologist Laudan Nooshin identifies three “axes of difference” that organize the production of social divisions and hierarchies in the region: (1) gender, (2) religion, and (3) nationhood.1 Class, although stated as intersecting with these categories, is not explicitly listed. This absence is illustrative of a tendency that can be observed across much of contemporary scholarship on musical cultures in Egypt and the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA)/Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region, in which class is regularly mentioned but, in contrast to questions of gender, religion, and nationhood, has remained underexplored.

As part of the seventeenth colonial conflagration, known as “Wars of the Three Kingdoms,” incidents of sexual violence—stripping, castration, mutilation, rape, gang rape, and reproductive violations—occurred against women and some men across Ireland. The historical and legal evidence for this violence was recorded in witness statements that form part of an archive, known as the “1641 Depositions.” This article examines this extraordinary archive, now housed in Trinity College Dublin and published online, especially the witness testimony provided by Protestant women. It explores how sexual violence was reported and then politicized. Though testimony that related to sexual violence was rarely used in the courtroom, Protestant propagandists—from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries—manipulated these accounts to instill fear and justify retribution.