In 2018, the AOC Archaeology Group unearthed a unique Roman figurine in Sandy, Bedfordshire, likely an offering in a domestic shrine or lararium. The figurine features a distinctive Gallic cloak, similar to those found on copper-alloy figurines in Trier and Cambridgeshire and on numerous relief sculptures. It may be related to the hooded garment known as the birrus mentioned in Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices of a.d. 301, including the expensive Birrus Britannicus.

During the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), an unprecedented number of soldiers wrote “military memoirs,” firsthand accounts of the “first total war.” Next to private forms of recording experiences and keeping contact with those at home, such as letters or diaries, these memoirs were part of a larger shift in the relations between the army and civil society: soldiers wrote, at least partly, to change what non-combatants thought about them. As Britain did not see battles on home soil, war was both omnipresent and far away. Moreover, the reputation of the British armed forces was notorious, with common soldiers famously called “the scum of the earth” by Wellington. In conveying the battlefield experience to a sheltered audience, military memoirs, especially those written during or shortly after the wars, aimed at bridging the emotional divide between military and civil life, between the callous soldier and the compassionate citizen. Soldiers, too, these texts argued, were men of feeling, able to preserve a moral sense of respectability despite all the killing, blood, and trauma. Many memoirs communicated viscerally and in graphic detail about the horrors of war, both to make the traumatizing experience understandable and to show the heights of their emotional self-discipline. Bringing together the history of biography, reading, and emotions, this article argues that, by writing frankly about their horrific experiences, British soldiers fighting during the Napoleonic Wars contributed to changing civil society’s feeling rules about the army, reproaching the civilians’ contempt, and soliciting their compassion.

Social media content creation is hugely popular with second-generation Arab immigrants to the UAE who lack a path to naturalized citizenship, particularly as a space to perform their belonging in the nation. This essay analyzes the work of two Arabophone content creators on Instagram and YouTube who use comedy to perform as quintessential “Dubai kids.” While they align with the state mission of presenting the UAE positively on social media, these creators produce ironic content that makes visible practices of belonging by second-generation youth who distance themselves from inherited politics of national and gender identity. The affective communities that form around these satirical content creators offer a model of belonging in which binaries of citizen and noncitizen can be elided, staging performances of immigrant identity uniquely local to the UAE.

Historians have long argued that abolitionism, as a distinct political project, never fully took root in the Ottoman Empire. While anti-slavery measures emerged from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, they are often seen as state-imposed responses to diplomatic pressure. From a state-focused perspective, abolition indeed appears to be the result of actions by the Ottoman state and international community, inevitably so, given its entanglement with the emergence and development of the Congress system in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna. Yet a focus on individuals, organizations, and institutions also suggests a subversive, practical abolitionism concerned with everyday injustices rather than lofty ideals. This paper examines such efforts, reframing abolitionism as a political issue rather than a moral one detached from broader transformations. By situating abolitionist thought within the late Ottoman Empire’s increasingly radical politics, it challenges the conventional state-centered narrative, highlighting the diverse actors who shaped anti-slavery discourse and action.

By examining how Irish racial attitudes intersected with national and cultural identity, this article dismantles the idea that conceptions of race and racism are somehow peripheral or irrelevant to the nation's social history. Outlining a series of racialised incidents perpetrated against overseas students in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, it explains how attitudes to newcomers and ethnic ‘others’ can shed new light on post-independence national identity. By highlighting these distinctive aspects of national discourse, this article begins incorporating Irish understandings of race and diversity into the overwhelmingly white field of Irish history. It also adds an Irish perspective to a growing body of literature on race in predominantly white societies and challenges scholars to consider how conceptions of history, culture and identity fostered social inclusion and exclusion and conditioned attitudes to national and ethnic outsiders.

From 1950 to 1963, a columnist named ‘Kadebona’ (The Experienced One) published regular pieces in Izwi lama Swazi (The Voice of the Swazi), the vernacular newspaper of the British protectorate of Swaziland (now named Eswatini). Although lacking definitive evidence, it is probable that Kadebona was John J. Nquku, a leading political figure of colonial Eswatini. Kadebona’s 300-plus columns positioned themselves as meeting places for the embryonic Swati nation. In contrast to the closed-door discussions of those in power, Kadebona’s columns styled themselves as transparent platforms for a give-and-take debate among emaSwati (as residents of Eswatini were called). Kadebona not only ‘spoke’ via his columns; he also expected replies on the part of the nation. His column was a space available to all, ‘where the rich and the poor, and where leaders and their followers, all meet’. In a period of debate over the future of the independent Swati nation, Kadebona’s columns encouraged all emaSwati to shape their country, and allowed all perspectives audibility via the column and ‘Letters to the Editor’. At the same time, however, there were distinct limits to the egalitarian public summoned through these articles. While Kadebona encouraged all emaSwati regardless of rank or class to speak up, he was far less welcoming towards other voices, including women and youths. This article provides an introduction to these fraught columns, a small sample of which are presented here, both in their isiZulu original and in English translation (siSwati – the language spoken by emaSwati – had no authorized written form well into the 1960s; instead, the South African isiZulu was used for written communication). In what follows, I provide Izwi lama Swazi’s history, discuss the emergence of Kadebona as a columnist in the 1950s, and comment on some of his key concerns.

Since the 1990s, Japan has experienced the rise of a phenomenon known as “lonely death” (kodokushi 孤独死): people who die alone and whose death goes unnoticed for a certain period of time. This has triggered public anxiety and moral panic because lonely death is often perceived as a form of “bad death” and a sign of the breakdown of family ties and neighborly relations. In the 2020s, this “feeling rule,” which associates lonely death with shame and fear, has quietly begun to be challenged by a group of post-mortem cleaning workers. By sharing their work experience and feelings through blogs, artworks, and books, the workers’ accounts of how they deal with the remnants of the deceased have turned the public perception of lonely death from an abstract, totalizing, fearful category into an understanding that such incidents have specific causes that can be faced and even prepared for. The cleaners’ emotional labor, especially their mourning for the dead, creates a sense of relatedness to the deceased, a feeling which is conveyed to the public through the cleaners’ narratives. The cleaners thereby change the feeling rules associated with the labor of dealing with the aftermath of a lonely death, turning it from “dirty work” into meaningful social action. This article contributes to an understanding of feeling rules by highlighting how individuals’ efforts, particularly, their reflections on their emotional labor, can change collective feeling rules.