Andrew Kahrl's The Black Tax is a sweeping and insightful history of the local property tax in the United States from Reconstruction onward that speaks eloquently to urban history, tax history, and histories of capitalism and race in the United States. Kahrl exposes the relentless process of dispossession and exploitation, captive taxpayers and fiscal apartheid within the local property tax that has overtaxed Black Americans by over $275 billion, cost $326 billion in land loss, and created a generational wealth difference compounded into trillions. But Kahrl is not focused only on individual loss or even community dispossession, but on entrenched systems of legalized theft built into the local property tax that have reinforced themselves over time through the most localized bureaucratic subjectivity and bias, such that poor cities are now left with few fiscally sustaining options other than preying on their poorest citizens.

Museums are often considered to be spaces of the authentic, where the real, unique and original is exhibited, and where the accurate past is conveyed. By means of two watercraft, Nydam Boat and Kon-Tiki, it is illustrated how their materiality and authenticity are shaped by processes of musealization, reconstruction, restoration and ways of narrating the past and staging exhibits. While their substances remain present and perceptible, they are also subjected to material changes and changing perceptions over time. From a cultural constructivist perspective, it is illustrated how museum exhibits may be perceived as authentic and how this is related to their materials.

This article explores sumptuary legislation and its enforcement in early modern Genoa. Whereas the sumptuary laws from other early modern Italian city-states partitioned society by social rank, profession, or citizenship, the laws in effect in late sixteenth-century Genoa divided the population only into men and women. Genoa therefore represents a key site for exploring gender difference through dress and adornment. Adopting a gendered, sociological, and material culture framework, this article demonstrates how sumptuary laws informed understandings of gender and gendered practices of dressing. It takes as its point of departure a ledger of sumptuary denouncements for the year 1594, and examines how Genoa’s citizens adhered to, or transgressed the gendered expectations set out by the city’s legislative structures. It argues that while prescriptions for idealized masculine and feminine comportment coloured the content and wording of the law, in daily life a spectrum of gendered identities could be enacted through clothing. This article thus advances discourse on the impact of sumptuary laws on understandings of gender in early modern Italy, and the ways in which masculine and feminine identifications were negotiated through and in dialogue with clothing.

Whether by reevaluating previously underappreciated factors or by uncovering new source material, historical scholarship occasionally makes immediate and simultaneous interventions in both academic and public-facing conversations.1 Andrew Kahrl's The Black Tax is one such work, and actually accomplishes these two tasks admirably. In the last two decades, scholars have investigated African American ownership of real property in land and homes, as well as the ways that governmental and private actors, policies, and practices have impaired Black people's ability to acquire and accumulate wealth in this country.2 This body of scholarship, alongside the work of public intellectuals, has served to jumpstart discussion around the issue of reparations.3 Prior to the release of Kahrl's illustrious book, however, no one had identified property taxes as lying at the very center of race-based structural inequality.4

This article explores the links between anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom and the acceleration of settler colonialism in British North America, and it does so by considering two group migrations from Catholic districts in the North West Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Occurring over 30 years apart, the Glenaladale settlement (1772) in Prince Edward Island and the Glengarry settlement (1803) in Upper Canada offer instructive insight into how anti-Catholicism activated Highland Catholic colonial agency. Not only did significant numbers of Highland Catholics choose to quit Scotland forever, but their settlement in places like Prince Edward Island and Upper Canada accelerated the process of settler colonialism and the establishment of the Catholic Church. The colonies at Glengarry and Glenaladale were peopled by settlers who were doubly motivated to settle in the empire. They stood to prosper economically—certainly—and they also stood to gain the freedom to practice their faith free of obvious interference. To the Indigenous peoples whose ancestral lands they settled, the consequences were not softened by this pretext for settler colonization, and too often the history of anti-Catholic discrimination in the four nations elide the fact that Catholics were enthusiastic colonizers elsewhere, and that the two processes were often related.

This article posits that team sports can provide fresh insights into the place of leisure pursuits in the lives, networks and outlooks of historical literary figures. The social and literary role of the Authors Eleven, a cricket side of London-based writers active between 1899 and 1912, is explored through three case studies. George Ives was a pioneering campaigner for gay rights, who used cricket to bolster his homosexual identity. E. W. Hornung, creator of the famous cricketer-thief Raffles, saw cricket as the ideal training – and analogy – for imperialism. And P. G. Wodehouse, author of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, first made his name writing cricket-filled magazine pieces. All three writers saw their involvement in cricket, particularly the Authors Eleven in-group, as an essential component of their social status. The Authors Eleven thus presents a potent example of embodied sociability, whereby the specific nature of what these individuals were doing together (in this case, playing cricket) has a bearing on their friendships and their intellectual outlooks. As ways of understanding the lives and cultural significance of historical figures, shared physical activity and embodied sociability need to be accorded much more importance than they have been hitherto.

When African-American history is done well, it allows us to see the places where inequality hides. Scholars in the areas of the history of capitalism, African-American history, and urban studies have popularized the language of historical phenomena such as white flight, redlining, and privatization, in the process of explaining the origins of contemporary challenges. A reasonably educated person understands that deindustrialization at mid-century led to job losses. Every May, pundits write essays about the failure to equalize schools as the nation memorializes the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Popular journalists Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nicole Hannah-Jones owe their careers to their study of historical work in order to leverage public-facing conversations from reparations for slavery to the politicization of the teaching of civil rights. Essentially, good history helps us search for the state practices and policies that soften the blow of inequality, assault human dignity, and normalize poverty. In his deeply researched and thoughtfully written book The Black Tax, Andrew Kahrl addresses another obscure mechanism that has historically worked to dispossess and disadvantage African Americans across regions and generations, and has ensnarled both landowners and tenants. Kahrl's book forces readers and scholars to think about the ways that a lack of federal authority and will to protect Black citizens allowed states and municipalities to assess, tax, and place liens on Black property—from vacant plots to farm land to family homes.