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.

Many historians continue to regard the killing of prisoners and potential prisoners on the battlefield as having been an absolute exception during the Great War, something that was ‘episodic’ and happened only ‘in isolated cases’. One reason for this assessment might be the fact that the subject has rarely been examined empirically. This article is the first study directly to compare the actions of the British and the Canadians, the Empire’s two largest armies on the western front. Drawing on a wide range of primary source material, including, for the first time, unit war diaries and after-action reports, this article reveals that documentary evidence exists for scores of separate instances of prisoner killing by British and Canadian troops deployed against German forces between August 1914 and November 1918, with the number of dead ranging from individual enemy soldiers to several hundred victims at once. Examples are recorded of prisoner killing by enlisted men, NCOs and officers, acting either in groups or alone, and furthermore of officers at platoon, battalion, regimental and even corps level either encouraging prisoner killing or issuing explicit ‘take no prisoners’ orders. The level of acceptance that commanders showed for these practices, the openness with which soldiers discussed them in their letters home to mothers, sisters and wives, and the almost complete absence of any disciplinary action against the perpetrators indicate that – on some level – they were regarded as legitimate.

Black Power and existentialism were mutually reinforcing movements in the late 1960s. Stokely Carmichael used French existentialism to shape some Black Power principles, which demonstrated existentialism's continued relevance to racial equality. Existentialism reinforced values, such as moral purpose and self-definition, which supported positive appraisals of Black Power revolt on campuses. Carmichael's adoption of French existentialism illuminates transnational influences on Black Power dating to the 1940s, as well as how important French existentialist texts amplified Black perspectives. The meeting of French existentialism and Black Power assisted increased representation of Black perspectives on campuses, and popular awareness that representation was as important as desegregation to equality.

The recovery of soldiers’ remains has been a major concern of the US military since the mid-nineteenth century. However, military defeats during the Cold War left the remains of US soldiers unattended for decades, which diminished the odds of their identification and created ambiguities about their fates. After the Vietnam War, some statespersons and soldiers’ families alleged that many missing soldiers had not been killed, but rather detained by the enemy and abandoned by US authorities. The US military strove to recover and identify as many missing soldiers as possible to debunk these allegations. Existing forensic methods failed to provide definitive conclusions, straining the relationship between the military and the American public. Consequently, the military turned to DNA profiling to identify missing personnel. Technical limitations and US society’s lingering distrust of authorities turned DNA profiling into a new battleground between the US military and prisoners of war/missing in action (POW/MIA) families. Despite the promise DNA technology seemed to offer for remains’ identification, this article argues that its success was reliant on POW/MIA families’ attitudes towards the military and politics, who demanded much more than identified remains as a means of achieving closure.

The merchant and art agent Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647) is best known for his extraordinary art cabinets. Collaborating closely with neighbouring Augsburg artisans, Hainhofer worked to compile, collate, and market these visually and materially astounding collections to a range of elite patrons. His first commission, the Pomeranian Cabinet, was for Duke Philipp of Pomerania-Stettin in 1610, and took around seven years to complete. This article adopts a body-centred approach, arguing that in doing so, new light is shed on the ways period actors enacted their relationships with materials, objects, and other bodies. It uncovers the process through which the body of the art-lover was constructed, convening with those engaged in a shared material community through the lens of health and bodily entanglements. Hainhofer, as a merchant, diplomat, and secret agent, occupied a dubious position. Through the staging of the shared, art-loving body, he was able to create and sustain friendships, while simultaneously raising the status of the merchant through his material identification with these practices.

This article explores the hitherto understudied development of long-distance telephony in early 20th century China. It first explores the development of long-distance telephony before 1927 when it first appeared in China and was developed by foreign actors, the Qing government and various warlord regimes. The article then turns to the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937) and compares the efforts of the Nationalist government in building long-distance telephone infrastructure with those of the Guangdong provincial government and other regional regimes. The article uses the case of long-distance telephony to make two larger arguments about state-building in Republican China (1912-1949). First, it brings in telecommunications development as a major element of state-building of both central and regional regimes. Second, building on recent work by scholars of Chinese Republican-era state-building, it emphasizes the importance of studying state-building from the vantage point of both central and regional regimes in Republican China. Additionally, the article demonstrates the value of an infrastructural approach to the study of political competition and formation in China during the Republican era.

This article examines the role played by comic books in justifying the Korean War to adolescent readers in the United States. Specifically, it argues that romance comics—perhaps the most widely read youth publications of the early 1950s—helped to prepare teenaged girls for the trials and tribulations that an emerging Cold War would entail. Love-themed comic books dealt with issues like dating and marriage at a time of mass mobilization and international political emergency, and in doing so, attempted to redefine the meaning of courtship and sexual maturity during a new era of permanent national security crisis. By studying this enormously influential literary genre, we gain important insight into both the popular cultural dimension of a “forgotten war,” as well as a richer appreciation of the ways in which girls have been asked to make their own sacrifices on the altar of American military preparedness.

This article examines the significance of mobility and transportation infrastructure in the early development of pan-Americanism and the formation of a vision of global transportation in South America in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the 1880s and 1890s, I explore the connection between transportation and the economic and cultural expansionism of the United States, pan-American debates on intercontinental steamship service and an inter-American railroad, and South American approaches to international transportation, which both included and transcended the Americas. My case study contributes to scholarship on the global history of mobility and transportation by showing how, despite the intention of the United States to establish hemispheric exclusivity and hegemony, transportation became a subject of multilateral cooperation. South American experts and diplomats, I argue, renegotiated and reinterpreted the meaning of pan-American infrastructure, integrating it into a broader vision of global transportation that positioned their countries more prominently in worldwide traffic networks.

This article recovers a lost era of Sino-American constitutional imagination surrounding the drafting of the 1946 Republic of China Constitution. It examines the transnational dynamics that led the Constitution's initial drafter, Zhang Junmai or Carsun Chang, to travel to the U.S. in 1945 to ostensibly study the ideas of Thomas Jefferson then ascendant in New Deal constitutional rhetoric. Recovering this episode recontextualizes Chang's early and late life as one of China's cosmopolitan intellectuals emerging from its contentious post-1911 dynastic politics who shaped China's engagement with evolving institutions of the modern international legal order. This recontextualization broadens and revises extant accounts of Chang's engagement with the 1946 constitutional drafting process by challenging accepted understandings of Chang's personal and intellectual trajectory and illuminating how the geopolitics of the Chinese Civil War intersected with presumptions about the overseas projection of American constitutional values increasingly embedded in twentieth-century American internationalism. Herein, Chang's long-standing interest in Jefferson's constitutional ideals was reshaped by the strategic considerations he faced situated between his consistent criticism of Guomindang leader Chiang-Kai Shek and Chang's suddenly heightened status among American political leaders. His near year-long stay in the U.S. before the 1946 drafting process involved many little known but determinative turns, including the role of a subset of Roosevelt and Truman Administration officials actively enamored with Jefferson's own study of Confucianism. The article also details the telling contours of Chang's post-1949 life as a political exile in the United States. Ultimately, this recovered episode demonstrates the pervasive and impactful nature of transnational dynamics in modern Sino-American relations which blur the line between national and international legal history. Most broadly, the fallout from the 1946 drafting process and the varied Chinese interpretations of thinkers like Jefferson reflect the mid-twentieth century transition of America from a global symbol of constitutional revolution to a global symbol of racialized empire. Recapturing this era thus also has implications for originalist-styled constitutional arguments made in contemporary Taiwan as well as for evaluating the international dimensions of Jefferson's problematic domestic legacy.

This article seeks to compare the policy histories of the legislative term limits in France and the United States. Both nations debated, initially adopted, and then ultimately rejected imposing term limits during the foundational moments of their democracies. Reemerging in the 1990s in America, proposals to refresh government through such limits have been successful in the states and have failed at the national level. The idea regained prominence in France when Emmanuel Macron supported it during his 2017 presidential election. Although Macron eventually abandoned the proposal, the revival of this debate is an opportunity to draw broad parallels but identify critical differences between the two nations in the philosophical debates over term limits and the ways that leaders have embraced or abandoned them to fulfill their political goals. We show how the idea circulated between the two nations, without a parallel exchange of evidence about its effects.

Discussions of term limits are happening in the United States and abroad. In July 2024, President Biden announced his support for limiting the number of years that federal judges may serve. Surveys suggest that limits for judges are popular with Americans.1 Relatedly, voters have historically supported term limits for members of Congress, with the most recent survey (from July 2023) finding support among 87%.2 For now, limits are unlikely to be imposed on federal judges or members of Congress, but there are recent changes in the states. Voters in North Dakota imposed limits on their state legislators in 2022, and those limits will take effect in 2028. In Michigan, also in 2022, voters shortened the long-standing lifetime limits for their legislators from 14 to 12 years. Discussions or reforms, including the elimination of limits, have also occurred outside of the United States. In Russia, voters seemingly reset the term limits that applied previously to President Vladimir Putin, thereby allowing him to serve in office until 2036. In China, where limits for various leaders including the president were first added to the country’s constitution in 1982, limits were abolished in 2018. Although these are prominent examples of limits being lifted, a remarkable number of new limits have been enacted elsewhere, with limits on executives being imposed in 17 countries within the past decade alone. To date, only a handful of countries, most of which are in the Americas, have legislative limits.3 Conversely, nearly every country limits the service of judges.4

We examine how political participation and political competition are shaped by two class-based extensions of the franchise in twentieth-century India. Creating a new dataset of district-level political outcomes between 1920 and 1957, we find that both the partial franchise extension of 1935 and the universal suffrage reform of 1950 led to limited increases in citizen participation as voters or candidates, and neither reform had a significant effect on increasing political competition. Despite the limited effects on political outcomes, districts with greater enfranchisement increases experienced higher education provision by provincial governments.

This paper uses newly digitized data on the growth of the telegraph network in America during 1840–1852 to study the impacts of the electric telegraph on national elections. Exploiting the expansion of the telegraph network in a difference-in-difference approach, I find that access to telegraphed news from Washington significantly increased voter turnout in national elections. Newspapers facilitated the dissemination of national news to local areas. Text analysis on historical newspapers shows that the improved access to news from Washington led local newspapers to cover more national political news, including coverage of Congress, the presidency, and sectional divisions involving slavery.

This article describes the multifaceted origins and dynamics of pedagogic progressive educational ideas among Mormon educators in the Utah Territory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We propose four principal avenues through which progressive educational ideas reached these Mormon educators. These include the exigencies of desert frontier living that predisposed early Utah Mormons to progressivism’s focus on practical education; the arrival of denominational schools sponsored by the New West Education Commission (NWEC), which sparked educative improvement within Mormon communities; the Pestalozzian teachings of Karl Maeser via the Brigham Young Academy’s Normal School; and the visits of eastern progressive educationalists through Benjamin Cluff’s leadership at the BYA Summer Institutes. We additionally situate nineteenth-century national perceptions of Mormon educational ideas within this more nuanced backdrop of the migration of progressive ideas to Utah. We describe unique dimensions of Mormon educational progressivism that might set it apart from educational progressivisms elsewhere, including tensions within Utah’s Mormon educative community.

The year 2025 marks the 120th anniversary of Lochner v. New York, a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down legislative limits on work hours in the baking industry. U.S. scholars generally agree this decision harmed workers and was a setback to the labor movement in the United States. The essay borrows from some of the historian E.P. Thompson’s writings on the relationship between historical inquiry and normative values in order to reflect on Lochner and the relative consensus among scholars opposing the decision. That reflection in turn serves as a point of entry for thinking about the role of normative values in doing labor history, what values we propound in the present by writing and teaching about the history of working-class people, and how those issues relate to different ways labor historians can understand what is arguably our field’s central category, class. The essay suggests that, with regard to the Lochner decision and in general, labor history is something of a different activity if the field’s orientation is toward the amelioration of time- and place-specific problems in working-class people’s lives, toward class as inherently a category of violence and injustice, or both.

Across the twentieth century, hundreds of women worked as nurses, cooks, cleaners, and teachers on Mexico’s railroads. They have been overlooked in histories of the railroads and Mexican industrialization more broadly, their limited number perhaps suggesting that their work is not of analytical importance in understanding processes of economic development and class formation. On the contrary, these women’s work constituted many of the most coveted labor rights of the postrevolutionary railroad workforce, itself a symbolic vanguard of Mexico’s working class and one of the most important beneficiaries of the expansion of social and economic rights ushered in by the Mexican Revolution. The gendered division of labor characteristic of the railroads was neither accidental nor insignificant. Railroads used the feminization of the work of social reproduction to write off structural failures and predictable shortcomings in welfare provision as failures of femininity. Women became scapegoats for the consistent violation of workers’ rights through underfunding and understaffing. In tracing this process, the article models a historiographical and methodological intervention with broader relevance. It suggests that the social and labor rights that expanded around the world in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries must be studied not only from the vantage of legal or political history, but as themselves questions of social and labor history. Making these rights real depended on socially reproductive work that has often been marginal in accounts of industrialization and economic development. It is impossible to understand the political economy of social and economic rights without understanding women’s work.

This paper examines the ways the Colonies in the American streaming service Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale utilize western myth to reimagine the American West as an entirely female space. Relying on popular understandings of the significance of the mythic West, traditional conceptions of the West as masculine, and the narrative function of the western, it argues that the Colonies offer regeneration and renewal for the women whose agency has been stripped in the hypergendered oppressive nation of Gilead. By reinstilling a sense of power and freedom in the women sent there, the Colonies operate much like the West of the imagination, allowing these women to escape the confines of Gilead and the chance to both return to their authentic selves and foresee a better world.

This paper, building on new archival research and the social table method, presents comprehensive estimates of income inequality in Mexico in 1895, 1910, 1930 and 1940. Inequality grew from 1895 to 1910, driven by economic expansion within the context of an oligarchic economy. While real income increased for the lower classes during this period, the main beneficiaries were large landowners and entrepreneurs. In the revolutionary period from 1910 to 1930 inequality decreased especially as a result of land reforms, benefitting peasants at the expense of the large landowners. However, the economic structure of the country was not fundamentally changed, and in the 1930s inequality raised as incomes of peasants and those in the informal sector fell behind manufacturing and other high-earning sectors. The Mexican case shows the complex interaction of economics, demography and politics in determining economic inequality.

The objective of this article is to explain the characteristics of the agri-food exporting boom experienced by the Latin American countries between 1994 and 2019 and its determining factors. In so doing, we analyse the evolution of exports, their composition by product, the principal origins and destinations, the importance of regional trade agreements and the behaviour of export prices. Furthermore, a series of gravity models are estimated, using the agri-food exports of nineteen Latin American countries to their 186 main trading partners between 1994 and 2019. These models are estimated for total agri-food exports and for their breakdown into three product groups. Among the main determinants identified, our results suggest that external demand and the proliferation of regional trade agreements were the primary reasons for this export boom. Finally, we evaluate these results within the context of the region's economic history.