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.

The city of Gelsenkirchen, a center of mining located in the most industrialized part of Germany, the Ruhr region in the west, had the dubious honor of inspiring a mocking name for interior design: from the 1930s onward, the heavy, ornate furniture the working class showed a taste for was known as “Gelsenkirchen Baroque,” a term that lampooned how an ascending group did not know the difference between propriety and pompousness. While the city of Gelsenkirchen forged a “Barock Krieg” to eradicate the term in the 1950s, it chose a more successful strategy to change the feeling rules toward Gelsenkirchener Barock in the early 1990s. With the city grappling with the consequences of deindustrialization, the municipality aimed at rehabilitating its image and the original pride of the furniture’s working-class owners by celebrating a Gelsenkirchener Barock festival, the city’s biggest PR initiative to this day. Marrying conceptual history, emotions history, and design history with social history, the article goes beyond the individual case study and shows that to understand taste-making processes, the emotional politics they entailed are crucial. The highly emotional debates over value and taste in specific historical and spatial contexts are vital for grasping the development and change of feeling rules.

In 1584, Antón Zape, a Black enslaved African originally from Sierra Leone, received his manumission letter after a long trajectory of military service to the Spanish Crown. Although his enslaver was reluctant to grant him freedom, the Audiencia de Panama considered Antón’s services worthy of a royal grace. The president of the Audiencia himself intervened by writing to King Philip II to force his enslaver to grant Antón the manumission he deserved. The king heard the Audiencia’s recommendation and granted Antón freedom along with a substantial annual pension of 50 gold pesos to live according to his calidad (“quality,” but better translated as status). Philip II ordered Antón’s former enslaver to pay him this annual pension and to supervise the correct distribution of the stipend for his entire life; until Antón’s death, his enslaver’s descendants were required to fulfill the duty of paying him his annual pension. Because the pension was financed by Antón’s past enslaver, it subverted the enslaved person–enslaver relation, requiring the enslaver’s lifetime commitment to his former enslaved person. In addition to freedom and a pension, Antón was granted the privilege of bearing arms, signifying a public and official royal sanction of honor and calidad.1

This article compares and connects two episodes of political violence in the late nineteenth century: the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886 and the bombing of the offices of the De Beers Company, chaired by Cecil Rhodes, at Kimberley on the South African diamond fields in 1891. These episodes were connected by the existence in both countries of an American and then global movement, the Knights of Labor/Labour. The Knights’ American history was shaped by Haymarket. Their South African history was radically altered by the De Beers explosion, which both the Knights and their enemies interpreted through the prism of Haymarket. They drew lessons from it that determined their own conduct and may have contributed to the demise of the South African Knights less than two years later. This article charts those connections and the context to the De Beers explosion, the trial that followed, and the lessons that South African Knights drew from the experiences of their American brothers and sisters.

L’évaluation de deux ouvrages récents sur l’histoire des Indiens d’Amérique du Nord, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America de Pekka Hämäläinen (2022) et The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History de Ned Blackhawk (2023), qui se veulent rénovateurs, offre l’occasion d’un état des lieux. Les deux auteurs soulèvent deux des grandes questions qui animent le champ, celle de la capacité d’agir des Amérindiens, reconnue et acceptée de façon consensuelle par les historiens, et celle de leur raison d’agir, pour laquelle des visions contrastées se font jour. Dans cette note critique, nous nous demandons dans quelle mesure l’importance accordée par N. Blackhawk et P. Hämäläinen à la capacité d’agir des Autochtones n’a pas précisément pour effet d’enfouir la réflexion sur leur raison d’agir. Si P. Hämäläinen, à la différence de N. Blackhawk, insiste sur l’écueil de la téléologie et s’efforce de valoriser la variété des modes d’intrusion coloniale, les deux historiens se retrouvent dans leur renoncement à une forme d’anthropologie qui, par le passé, a été soucieuse de restituer l’intégrité culturelle des Autochtones. Le lexique analytique choisi, à l’exemple du terme « empire », conduit parfois à un effacement de la différence culturelle et à une torsion de l’histoire. Cette note plaide ainsi pour une complémentarité retrouvée entre histoire et anthropologie.

The repeated proliferation of restraints to competition should not overshadow the agency of downstream firms when confronted with the ability of cartels to challenge the established innovation strategies of their consumers. This article explores the relations between Renault and the aluminium cartels during the first half of the twentieth century, in peace and war. Strategies were similar on both sides: the creation and maintenance of a balance of power, compromise, and the reopening of competition. Yet, when the cartel set up an automotive department and then rallied to the idea of a people’s car, it attracted the interest of broader stakeholders—engineers, other suppliers, the government, and even trade unions—but failed to persuade carmakers. Large industrial consumers can limit the impact of cartels, and destabilize them, by resorting to vertical integration. However, their underlying aim is not necessarily to destroy the cartel but rather to obtain better terms for their own business. Ultimately, their market power enables them to achieve relative stability. Who derives the main benefits from these compromises, both vertically and horizontally, as they sometimes limit or extend the scope of action of both parties?

Depuis quelques années, en France et dans le monde anglophone, les savoirs des artisans mobilisent l’intérêt des chercheurs et des chercheuses. Récemment, la notion d’Artisanal Enlightenment a contribué à inspirer certaines études : la rencontre des cultures artisanales avec l’élite savante et éclairée aurait suscité des hybrides culturels et favorisé des transferts de savoirs. Cet article entend mettre à distance cette approche, en resserrant la focale sur les artisans au travail, en proposant une analyse au ras des pratiques, à partir de corpus inédits restituant les techniques mises en œuvre dans les ateliers. Il convient de prendre la mesure du retournement de perspective. Pendant longtemps en effet, les historiens et historiennes ont repris à leur compte des lieux communs sur les artisans, forgés par les contemporains, tels que l’enserrement dans des corps de métiers figés et rivaux entre eux. Un puissant mouvement de relecture a mis en cause ces stéréotypes. D’une part, l’histoire des sciences a souligné le rôle des praticiens dans l’émergence des sciences expérimentales. D’autre part, le mouvement de relecture de la révolution industrielle a réfuté un récit centré sur les ingénieurs, les industriels et les savants et montré les capacités inventives des artisans. Il apparaît de plus en plus que les savoirs artisanaux ont évolué indépendamment des mondes savants, ce qui incite à reconsidérer les relations entre savants et artisans et notamment l’intérêt des élites pour les techniques. Plusieurs thèmes sont ainsi mis en avant par les recherches récentes et développés dans cet article : la captation des savoirs artisanaux par les mondes savants, les relations de pouvoir qui sous-tendent la codification des pratiques artisanales, enfin les ressources de l’atelier, en plaçant au cœur de la réflexion les ressorts cognitifs du faire, du rapport à la matière, au geste et à l’outillage.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, John Labatt Ltd., one of Canada’s oldest and most successful breweries, attempted to gain a share of the British beer market. This article examines the push and pull factors of why foreign brewers like Labatt decided to enter the competitive British marketplace and analyzes the strategies of the winners and losers of the “lager war.” The article pays attention to the branding efforts of marketing managers and how some used product–place associations to imbue their brands with authenticity. While positive country images often lead to a favorable assessment of the products from that country, it is also true that unfavorable perceptions often foster negative assessments of their products. By examining the entrepreneurship and structural barriers of the beer industry in the United Kingdom toward the end of the twentieth century, the article adds to our understanding of the dynamics of business failure.

This essay uses gender analysis to interrogate the modernization of labor organizations in Ecuador from 1890-1950, with a focus on why domestic servants were excluded in this process. Although labor organizers challenged other forms of paternalism in labor relations, they remained silent on domestic service even though it was the main source of female labor in Ecuador's growing cities. Using publications by labor organizations, laws, and social welfare records, this essay seeks to understand not what life was like for domestic servants, but to explore the contours and contradictions in the relationships between workers, labor organizers, and the state during a critical period of modernization and state formation in Ecuador. I argue that the absence of domestic servants from labor discourses defined and reinforced specific forms of masculine dignity as the core of the modern worker identity. This masculine worker identity made possible the inclusion of indigenous hacienda workers in the labor movement, but women could be incorporated only if they worked in public settings (mainly factories). Domestic servants belonged symbolically to the realm of traditional labor, and their ties to the home placed them beyond the paradigm of class exploitation.

The late nineteenth-century policy of allotting tribal lands into individually owned tracts is appropriately interpreted as a destructive federal effort to expropriate Native land and eliminate tribal identities. The Ottawa Tribe in Indian Territory, however, had divergent objectives in supporting allotment. This article argues the Ottawa advocated for allotment and U.S. citizenship to escape intrusive federal control over their lands and resources. Although they embraced policies aimed at eliminating tribal existence, the Ottawa rejected the intentions behind those policies, and instead, they drew on long-established community attributes of mobility and interconnection with outsiders to resituate their nation within American society. By centering Ottawa perspectives, this article disrupts progressive narratives that denote the pursuit of U.S. citizenship as an effort to secure equal inclusion. It underscores U.S. citizenship and allotment as tools of settler colonial domination and demonstrates how the Ottawa subversively deployed U.S. citizenship and private property rights to combat colonial administration and maintain tribal sovereignty. Examining a policy often glossed over as invariably imposed on Native nations, this article underscores the necessity of analyzing Native community dynamics and political strategies to understand the implementation and impact of allotment.

This essay examines the relationship between race, work, and exclusion during the Long Red Summer of 1919. I focus on several “transportation towns” of railroad employees in Appalachia to argue for the combined importance of labor history and racial ideology in attempts to understand wartime violence. Academic and federal government investigations inform my analysis, as does the robust body of scholarship on railroad labor. After examining racism embedded in railroad work, unions, and community life, the essay then turns to the Wilson administration’s nationalization of the roads during the war. Wartime changes resulted in higher wages for Black workers and many perceived threats to the racialized labor hierarchy. What was once white railroaders’ effort to exclude African Americans from certain jobs became one to expel them from the industry entirely. In several transportation towns that experienced wartime migration, however, this impulse transformed into a campaign to remove Black people from their communities once and for all. I cite testimony from a grand jury trial of an expulsion, railroad union journals, and newspaper accounts of mob violence that made it clear that the transportation towns belonged to white labor at the end of the Long Red Summer.

Formal membership in a state has been an essential political status for well over a century. It is typically gained at birth, either jus soli or jus sanguinis. Jus soli assigns nationality by birth in a nation's territory; jus sanguinis assigns children their parents’ nationality. This article provides an alternative intellectual history of the modern dominance of these principles for attributing nationality. Contrary to prior scholarship, soli and sanguinis were not restatements of existing principles. The soli/sanguinis binary was a nineteenth-century invention. Old-regime European empires attributed membership in the community under one or another single natural law principle. Parentage and birthplace were mostly evidence of conformity. In the early nineteenth century, officials in multiple jurisdictions began prioritizing positive law above natural law and transformed parentage and birthplace into competing principles for assigning nationality. This movement crystallized in 1860 when Charles Demolombe introduced jus soli and jus sanguinis to nationality law as competing, ostensibly ancient legal traditions. The framework spread quickly because it was a useful way to assign nationality despite states’ conflicting approaches to political membership. Yet, as its role in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) helps illustrate, the invented tradition has also obscured our understanding of more complex historical dynamics.

During World War II, the German theologian Paul Tillich, then a professor at Union Theological Seminary, partnered with the United States’ organization Voice of America to deliver over 100 religious addresses in the German language into his homeland. In these broadcasts, Tillich utilized the Lutheran categories of Law and Gospel to identify and discuss the sins of the Nazis (and Hitler in particular) and to remind the German population that there was still hope in redemption. Remarkably, well before the war's end, Tillich argued for German collective guilt and the need for the atonement and expiation of the German people. He continually warned them of impending judgment and inescapable punishment – both human and divine – as the Allies advanced on the battlefield in a race toward Berlin. Yet Tillich often tempered this focus on judgment with an emphasis on the Gospel, the certain hope Germans have in God's salvation. This prism of Law and Gospel pervades the religious addresses. I will place these broadcasts in the context of the war, the wartime work of Voice in America, and what we know of other religious addresses delivered over the airwaves to Nazi Germany, to reveal how Tillich preached resistance to Nazi Germany.

The wig was the quintessential accessory of eighteenth-century European culture, but the wearing of wigs by clerics became a subject of heated controversy across Catholic societies. Critics of clerical wig-wearing pointed to its inherent vanity, to Paul's proscription against men covering their heads in Church in 1 Corinthians 11, and to its apparent denial of the tonsure's importance as the visible outward sign of clerical status. However, defenders pointed to arguments about the need to cover up imperfections in the priest's body and avoid scandal. Various bishops moved to restrict the use of wigs amongst their diocesan clergy. However, no bishop was more active in legislating than the bishops of Rome themselves. Popes from Clement IX (r. 1667–69) to Pius VI (r. 1775–99) all issued instructions about clerical wig-wearing and their legislation betrays shifting attitudes and approaches. The most zealous rules from the 1720s gradually gave way to more pragmatic ones which attest to the persistent desire of Roman clerics to engage in male status competition and to the growing difficulty that the Church's leadership had in persuading them of the intrinsic superiority of their clerical status.

The Ohio-based Black songwriter, Joshua Simpson, published two books of antislavery songs in the mid-nineteenth century, Original Anti-Slavery Songs in 1852 and Emancipation Car in 1854. Unlike most other known songsters, which were compilations of poetry from several authors, Simpson authored original lyrics for borrowed melodies, and he did so with extraordinary care, engaging the original song to enhance his activist messages. Employing the rhetorical practice of signification, his linkage of new lyrics with preexisting songs sometimes builds upon meaning from the original text, reusing it to add weight to the moral and political arguments against slavery. He also extends nature imagery and lyrics about the comforts of home and family in traditional ballads and contemporary sentimental songs to his new lyrics, but more often his signifying practice is ironic. He inverts the original song's sentimentality in deliberately discomforting ways that could persuade Americans to assist self-emancipating people and work toward wholescale abolition of slavery. Simpson's most radical songs talk back irreverently to the originals, especially minstrel tunes containing degrading caricatures and proslavery propaganda as well as patriotic anthems proclaiming hypocritical platitudes. Simpson did not simply write new songs; he transformed some of the most popular and beloved songs of his era, harnessing their renown to sharpen his activist messages.

Since the late nineteenth century, the “Indian” as symbol has been a recurring trope in the art music of Mexico and the United States. Composers in both countries have often turned to representations of Indigenous Peoples as symbolic of nature, spirituality, and/or aspects of the national Self. This article seeks to place James DeMars's opera Guadalupe, Our Lady of the Roses (2008) in the context of two major cultural trends: Indianism in the U.S., and the representation of Mexico by U.S. composers. DeMars's use of Indigenous instruments in Guadalupe, including Mexican pre-Hispanic percussion, and flutes performed by famed Navajo-Ute flutist R. Carlos Nakai, continues the Indianist tradition of associating the Indigenous cultures of both countries with nature, spirituality, and authenticity. Similar associations emerge in the development and reception of both “world music” and the Native American recording industry since the 1980s, as exemplified by Nakai's career. DeMars uses these instruments in combination with Plains Native American features and generic exoticisms to represent both the Mexican Indigenous Peoples and the spiritual message of the opera. The sympathetic treatment of Indigenous cultures in Guadalupe nevertheless exists in tension with their exoticism and Otherness; in this the work is representative of U.S. cultural responses to Mexico stretching back throughout the long twentieth century.