This chapter analyses the ways in which the government sought to respond to the mounting administrative and political pressures on the treason trials in 1946 and 1947 and how the courts adjudicated on a wide range of offences, gradually producing a vast corpus of verdicts against the backdrop of a rapidly changing political climate. By this stage, the legal apparatus was struggling with the workload and the trials were being subjected to increasing social and political scrutiny, with many groups now cautioning that the trials were too harsh. These pressures, coupled with the need for legal consistency, produced an enormous dilemma for the authorities in charge. The complex balancing act between legal consistency and political and societal change, this chapter argues, reflected how the initial consensus around the trials was beginning to collapse.

This chapter analyses the political and social dynamics that unfolded in Norway following the country’s liberation on 8 May 1945 and how these shaped the contours of the treason trials in the long term. At the political level, it demonstrates, the early consensus between the returning exile government and the resistance forces in Norway on the topic of the trials was a key reason as to why they were largely implemented according to plan. At the social level, the swift commencement of the trials satisfied a strong public demand and was deemed a requirement for securing a peaceful transition period. The final section of the chapter details the public pressure felt by representatives of the Norwegian Parliament (Storting) in July 1945 as they debated and passed some of the basic instruments of the trials, most notably an act approving of the use of the death penalty.

In October 1945, the US Marines landed in Qingdao and occupied this former German colony in coastal China until May 1949. During this time, the Marines and the US Seventh Fleet turned Qingdao into another base town in postwar China, and interactions between American military personnel and Chinese civilians there were frequent, multifaceted, and often resulted in clashes, tension, and anti-American sentiments among the Chinese population. Focusing specially on engagement between the US Marines and the Chinese students at Shandong University in Qingdao, this chapter weaves the history of student anti-civil war protest in China with the history of American occupation of China after World War II. It argues that incidents such as Shen Chong Rape Incident in Beiping and Su Mingcheng Incident in Qingdao where Chinese civilians were either physically harmed or killed as a result of American military presence in postwar China added a nationalistic and anti-American dimension to student protests, and that the “American factor” in student protest left a lasting but complex impact on the postwar U.S.-China relations.

For several crucial months after the war that brought the Mansfeld Regiment to Milan ended, its superiors forgot it existed and failed to secure funding for it. In summer 1627, the regiment disintegrated. Although Wolf von Mansfeld wanted the regiment to travel north from Milan to liaise with the forces of Albrecht von Wallenstein, it mutinied on the way through Switzerland and only 600 starving men reached Frankfurt am Main. Because these soldiers proceeded to mistreat civilians in the region, this chapter also analyzes atrocities in a flash-back to October 1625. During that horrific month, the Mansfeld Regiment suffered numerous attacks including an incident in which twenty soldiers were killed and their bodies were never found. They retaliated by sacking two small settlements near Alessandria. This chapter also situates the Mansfeld Regiment within events after it fell apart: The eventual Franco-Spanish War of 1635–1659.

This chapter analyzes the impact of American funds, technology, and expertise on Chinese civil aviation during the 1940s, focusing on the case of the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC). It argues that socioeconomic crisis and disparity both shaped and was intensified by Sino-American aviation projects. Driving forces in cooperation lay in American efforts to establish political, technical, and economic foundations for Pan Am’s planned trans-Pacific routes, as well as Chinese hopes of accessing American technology and funding to support domestic aviation. The resulting programs rarely made concrete progress on this goal. Rather, they reflected the messy entanglement of Chinese and American engineers, businessmen, and officials in a web of quasi-official relationships sharing knowledge, equipment, and financial resources.

This chapter elaborates upon the latter part of the Stockholm Conference preparation period, including key Swedish science diplomacy interventions and the production of three landmark scientific reports on climate change, acid rain, and environmental monitoring. It also recounts the efforts of Maurice Strong and Barbara Ward to reconcile the emerging North–South divide ahead of Stockholm by organizing a meeting of development economists in Founex, Switzerland. The drafting of the Stockholm Declaration, as well as other aspects of the actual Conference, its parallel events, and its final outcomes, are examined. The chapter also explores other important early-1970s developments in Stockholm related to the Conference and the ongoing institutionalization of international climate science. These include the environmental turn at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences embodied by the launch of the journal Ambio in 1972, a large donation to the Academy by a Swedish industrialist that led to the establishment of the influential Beijer Institute, and the convening of another major GARP Conference in Stockholm in 1974.

Three thick descriptions offer detailed accounts of the ongoing squabbles among the Mansfeld Regiment’s third-in-command/regimental quartermaster Wolfgang Winckelman and two officers in his company: flag-bearer Hieronymus Sebastian Schutze and lieutenant Felix Steter. These men’s actions demonstrate the importance of individual agency in addition to structural accounts of history, as well as the history of alcohol and drunkenness, dueling, and masculinity.

The subject of Chapter 2 is the tradition of the apotheosis in Mesoamerica, principally Central Mexico. The chapter opens with the context of indigenous political and social organization, and a summary of Spanish penetration of Mexico from 1519. There follows a fictive reconstruction of dialogue between the Aztec ruler Moctezuma and his counsellors in order to offer one plausible, source-based scenario for how the ruling elite might have interpreted the advent of the Spaniards on the basis of rational, pragmatic considerations. The chapter then analyzes the response of Moctezuma and the Mexica, outlines the lack of evidence for an apotheosis in the Spanish and native chroniclers, and examines the significance of Nahuatl terminology, in particular the concept of teotl, which was the word often translated as “god.” The Quetzalcoatl myth (the notion of the identification of Cortés with the god Quetzalcoatl) is presented as a post-conquest construct, devised retrospectively to make sense of the momentous events. The tradition of pre-conquest omens is discussed. No evidence is found that the emperor Moctezuma treated Cortés as a god at their meetings.