In the second half of the twentieth century, West Germany was one of the largest pesticide producers and exporters worldwide. Among these exports were substances that were unpopular, obsolete, or entirely banned due to their health risks. The country case adds to our knowledge of global pesticide politics in three ways: First, politicians and industry used hunger in the Global South as an argument to justify export practices in the 1970s. Second, public criticism against this export was only successful when the health of German citizens was perceived to be under threat. Third, industry arguments led to creative and legal ways to export substances that have been problematised in the Global North. In view of this, the current EU initiative to regulate banned pesticide trade, though important, appears to remain tentative or ineffective.

The origin of modern financial economics can be traced to early discounted expected value solutions for the price of life annuities. In contrast to the single life annuity valuations attributed to Jan de Witt and Edmond Halley, the computational complexity of joint life annuity valuation posed difficulties. Following a brief review of various joint life annuity specifications, a history of joint life annuity issuance and valuation in northern Europe from the thirteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries is provided. With this background, the 1671 correspondence from de Witt to Jan Hudde on possible methods for valuing joint life annuities is detailed. These methods are contrasted with the geometric method described in Halley (1693), providing impetus for examination of the analytical approximations developed by Abraham de Moivre and Thomas Simpson.

Due to severe shortages of volunteer labor for repairing the damage immediately after World War II, the provisional Austrian federal government decided in September 1945 to make work compulsory, primarily for former National Socialists. As a result, these individuals were forced to perform a wide variety of reconstruction work over a period of two years. These workers subsequently sued the Republic of Austria for compensation payments and received a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court in 1951. The work of these conscripted former National Socialists was increasingly forgotten as the years went on, and, therefore, toward the end of the twentieth century, a form of “Trümmerfrauen” myth emerged in Austria. According to this myth, the immediate repair of war damage was mainly carried out by volunteer women. This article examines for the first time the people that worked in the removal of rubble in 1945 and 1946, how they described their work afterward, and how this compulsory labor gave rise to a positive reconstruction myth of voluntary women’s work.

This article examines the neglected war crimes trials of Holocaust perpetrators that took place at the People's Tribunal in early postwar Romania, focusing especially on the first trial (the “Macici group”). The article shows that in spite of the political interferences by the new pro-communist regime and the USSR, the Macici group trial in particular, and the first war crimes trials in general, were not Stalinist show trials or fake trials and they sentenced real war criminals and accurately captured Romania's participation in the Holocaust. Unlike the Antonescu group trial – that indicted the former pro-Nazi dictator and his closest collaborators – the first war crimes trial was not a typical political trial. In general, it respected the rule of law of the era. Resembling the cases of other trials of Nazi perpetrators and collaborators in postwar Europe, the Romanian perpetrators invoked superior orders as their main line of defense. In spite of the public perception and the communist regime's propaganda, the primary sources show that the People's Tribunal proved rather lenient and inefficient. Additionally, these trials had an important political-social role in postwar Romania and helped the communist regime discredit political adversaries, purge the judiciary, gain legitimacy, and increase its control of local society.

This article studies public amusement in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Gothenburg, Sweden, and argues that historians of urban and popular culture need to take the hybrid character of modernity more seriously. The case of the small peripheral port city of Gothenburg, more clearly than large metropoles or rapidly growing urban centres, showcases how turn-of-the-century urban culture was negotiated through the confrontation of traditional and innovative forms of popular amusement. Hence, insights from Gothenburg can prompt a more critical, nuanced view of ‘urban modernity’, marked not only by the emergence of commercial mass entertainment but also by the resilience of itinerant performers, for example. The article draws on different types of source material that from different perspectives embrace the co-constitutive character of practices and representations of pleasure through which people in Gothenburg negotiated urban change.

Bob Morris first influenced social historians in Hungary through personal contacts, but these contacts were later strengthened by institutional networks. The post-transition historiography of Eastern Europe found concepts in Morris’ work that dovetailed with the rise of interest in researching the history of the public sphere and the understanding of structural changes in society. However, because of the different historical traditions of the region, these concepts could not be easily transposed. Nevertheless, the work of Bob Morris is often cited in research on modern urban forms of associational life. His work on urban history is systematically being introduced to younger generations through one of the principal handbooks for teaching social history at the university level. Most importantly, Bob Morris’ approach to research and his enthusiasm for conversation with scholars at all stages of their careers will long be remembered, and his work guides urban historians across the continent.

Once the disorderly output from the mainframe was pushed to one side, R.J. Morris was quick to realize the potential of the early Apple Mac personal computer to enhance how he taught the historical method. In this article, I reflect on Morris’ pedagogy in the fields of urban history and middle-class formation, and in his approach to nominal record linkage. These insights come from my experience as both an undergraduate and postgraduate student under his guidance and then later as collaborator in the classroom and in research. When teaching the power of the computer to advance the historian’s craft, Bob Morris never lost sight of the ‘concept’ as his favoured means of exploring and understanding historical transformation.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. newspapers began to address women specifically in separate sections, hoping to gather a female audience for advertisers. Scholarship on early twentieth-century women consumers tends to emphasize possibility and self-expression. Women’s reactions to the first women’s pages, by contrast, indicate that they could feel constrained and condescended to when welcomed into the public sphere on the basis of being consumers. Readers and journalists aired their grievances about the women’s page in its first decades, and sometimes found ways to use the page to their own ends. But publishers carried on designing women’s features with advertisers in mind. By the 1920s, the women’s page had become visually seductive, didactic, domestic, and relentlessly consumerist. This article uses the women’s page to investigate the rise of ad-subsidized media in the twentieth century and to weigh up the opportunities and costs of this media system.

This paper explores the modernisation of rural Southern Italy between 1950 and 1962, focusing on the role of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, a public entity created to address the socio-economic divide between the North and South of Italy. The Cassa was central to the restructuring of rural areas, promoting land reclamation, infrastructure development, and the electrification of agricultural regions. The study examines how the ‘agrarian question’ intersected with the broader ‘Southern question’, reflecting persistent economic disparities within Italy. By analysing the early stages (1950–1962) of extraordinary intervention, this article demonstrates that modernisation efforts were aimed not only at reducing regional imbalances but also at addressing structural deficiencies that hindered agricultural productivity. While significant progress was made in modernising rural Southern Italy, this paper argues that the foundational agricultural reforms, although vital, needed to be complemented by broader industrial policies to ensure long-term socio-economic convergence with the more developed North.

This article explores how the editors and contributors of Revista de Avance formulated an idiosyncratic version of visual modern art and how that discernment shaped their idea of a nationalist and regional culture. Their artistic disquisitions were influenced by complicated political agendas and funding. After the collapse of the Cuban economy in the early 1920s, the magazine’s editors, who held socialist and anti-American imperialist beliefs, looked to Spain as a cultural model. In its pages, the magazine privileged Spanish civilization and conflated it with both European modernist culture and Cuban art and literature. At the same time, Revista de Avance voiced the ideas of the Institución Hispano-Cubana de Cultura, led by Fernando Ortiz.

We present findings from historical microdata that suggest former rural elites effectively preserved their socio-economic advantages into the early People's Republic of China (PRC, circa 1949–1965) by exploiting urban–rural differences in government policies. In particular, former rural elites were three to four times more likely than poor peasants to move to a nearby town, and this urbanization was highly associated with socio-economic privileges in a rapidly developing economy, including both income and educational opportunities. We also find evidence that after 1949, former rural elites who did urbanize were more likely than their poor peasant counterparts to find industrial jobs.

Earth System Science stands as the future operating framework to monitor the pulse of the Earth, and to diagnose and address the challenges of global change. Magmatism and volcanism are primary processes connecting the solid Earth to the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. In addition to regulating the Earth system, they are both an unavoidable source of hazards and a tremendous resource of energy and raw materials. Accessing magma is the necessary next step in the exploration of our planet. It will enable us to develop next-generation geothermal energy (magma energy), to transform volcano monitoring strategies, and perhaps even to alleviate volcanic activity. Recent exploratory geothermal drilling activities around the world have serendipitously encountered shallow magma bodies in the Earth. Following these remarkable magma drilling occurrences, the Krafla Magma Testbed (KMT) has been established in Iceland in order to create the first magma observatory – a world-class international in situ magma laboratory with access to the magma-rock-hydrothermal boundary through wells suitable for advanced studies and experiments. Here we review the importance of magma in the Earth system, present the multifaceted need for magma observatories and introduce the benefits of KMT as we enter a new generation of energy demands and resilience strategies.