The collapse of the three empires governing divided Poland after the First World War left thousands of imperial civil servants out of work and forced to recalibrate their political affiliations. Those who did not flee with retreating armies faced a rigorous filtration process that screened them for loyalty, stressing their commitment to ‘Polishness’. This article argues that despite what has been characterised as a nationalising state, the early years of the Polish Second Republic witnessed a negotiated filtration process, in which functionaries demonstrated their commitment to Poland by appealing to a combination of non-national characteristics, including ties to locale, to professional acumen, and to the civil service in general. Officials who were not ethnically Polish thus succeeded in retaining their positions in the government hierarchy. This surprising outcome of post-imperial vetting suggests that lingering elements of respect for national difference continued to resonate in postwar Poland and that pressure for an ethnically pure nation-state was far from universal.

From 1942 to 1945, the Indian National Army (INA) and its civilian wing, the Indian Independence League (IIL), operated in Japanese-occupied Asia to prepare for wars against Britain. Led by first Rash Behari Bose and then Subhas Chandra Bose, the INA recruited members from diverse Indian communities in Asia. This article examines the spiritual training that the INA launched in Malaya in 1943 to unite Indians outside the subcontinent. Through twenty-three lectures, the spiritual training taught a strand of Indian nationalism by creating a historical narrative, which helped reproduce the Indian National Congress’s vision for India. Contrasting with existing literature that attributes the lectures solely to Chandra Bose, this article traces the lectures to the works of Behari Bose, Mohandas Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru. It further argues that Behari Bose’s leadership of the IIL and the INA and the spread of Nehru’s political ideas in Malaya shaped the lectures. Accordingly, the article restores the importance of the lesser-known Behari Bose in the INA and the Indian independence struggle. More broadly, it demonstrates the relationship between violent and non-violent movements, and questions the historical memory about the anti-colonialists who worked with the Axis powers.

Though historians have often traced the evolution of LGBT ‘communities’ in the United States, they have left the genealogy of queer ideas of ‘community’ underexamined. This article begins to address this lacuna by charting the bifurcated early history of these ideas in the nation’s ‘gay capital’, San Francisco. It identifies homophile activist José Sarria’s 1961 campaign for San Francisco city supervisor as the event that introduced the notion of a ‘gay community’ to lasting effect into local homophile organizing. Sarria’s camp mobilized the idea as a resistance tool for the fight against state repression. In the following years, the concept established itself across local homophile activism. Simultaneously with the rise of ‘gay community’, some homophile leaders also developed coalitional visions of ‘community’. These were inspired by Black freedom organizing and prioritized building community with other marginalized groups. Only a mid-1960s struggle over the orientation of the country’s first homophile community centre led to a lasting sidelining of this coalitional tradition. The reconstruction of this bipartite history challenges enduring myths of a monolithically conservative homophile movement, and helps explain the subsequent success of a homonormative gay politics in the late 1960s and 1970s.

This article conceptualises a transatlantic diplomacy of gratitude that developed in the context of the Marshall Plan as a case of emotional diplomacy by focusing on a Dutch commemorative tradition that celebrates the US aid programme. It shows that US Marshall Planners carefully refrained from explicit demands of gratitude and that it was the Dutch government, rather, that initiated a discourse of gratitude for US aid. Through the ways in which they invoked and embodied expressions of gratitude, the Dutch mediated and reframed their country's post-war demotion from a global empire to an aid-dependent country. This case, then, allows us to understand how the Netherlands strategically reconceptualised its position in a post-Second World War power structure dominated by the United States, while demonstrating how the careful navigation of the international emotional landscape played an important but as yet underexplored role in the diplomatic interactions of the post-war years.

At the beginning of the 1970s, college sports were on turbulent ground. “Colleges prepare for the impact of rising costs and more campus unrest,” warned the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times was a bit blunter in its prognosis, reporting that “like housewives everywhere, athletic directors of the nation's colleges [were] having budget trouble.” National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Executive Director, Walter Byers, warned of “cadres of disgruntled athletes,” demanding rights, money, and control. Byers was also troubled by Title IX, the new educational amendment mandating gender equity in federally funded schools, including in athletic departments. “The possible doom of our collegiate sports is near,” Byers proclaimed. “There is not an athletic department in the country where officials are optimistic,” University of Michigan's Athletic Director (AD), Don Canham, lamented. Norv Richey, University of Oregon's AD concurred, declaring, “The future of intercollegiate athletics are in peril.”

In April 1970, the African American defensive end Houston Ridge's $1.25 million lawsuit put the issue of drug use in professional football in the public eye. It also raised questions about the league's exploitation of athletes for the sake of profits, at any cost. Plagued by a hip injury sustained during a game in October 1969, the twenty-five-year-old former San Diego Charger's suit charged conspiracy and malpractice, naming team personnel and both the American Football League (AFL) and the National Football League (NFL) as defendants. Ridge's suit claimed that he was permanently disabled, in part, because of the mix of amphetamines, barbiturates, and methandrostenlone given to him by the Chargers, “not for the purpose of care,” but for the purpose of performance enhancement. And they had done so “without warning him of the consequences.” An X-ray later revealed that he had broken his hip, but the drugs had so dulled his sensation of pain that he had continued to play, exacerbating the injury. A married father of four who now had to walk with the help of crutches, Ridge also filed a worker's compensation claim, accusing the Chargers with willful misconduct.

This article analyzes the affective economy of West Germany's postwar society. After delineating the intellectual history of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research's “Gruppenexperiment,” which consisted of 137 group interviews with different segments of West German society, my article focuses on one transcript of a 1950 group discussion of young fashion-designer apprentices. Based on a close reading, I study how the younger generation in West Germany constructed a passive and privatist self-image in which they could both articulate their emotional dissociation from National Socialism while clinging to antidemocratic, racist, and antisemitic feelings in metamorphosed form. The micrological focus of the analysis of the group's emotions is balanced by a rereading of both Helmut Schelsky's study about the “skeptical generation” and texts by researchers associated with the Institute for Social Research who came to markedly different conclusions about the West German youth.

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.

This article considers the political theory and political theology of Arnold Ruge during the years he edited the Hallische and Deutsche Jahrbücher, paying special attention to his relationship with a variety of “liberalisms” circulating at the time. It argues that Ruge's central and consistent commitment was to the “absolute state,” which he described as “an end in itself.” Such a state, Ruge believed, would constitute a space in which citizens could realize their public freedom. I show how Ruge constructed this approach through critical engagements with three forms of liberalism: the Romantic nationalist liberalism of Ernst Moritz Arndt; the ethical pluralist liberalism of Franz von Flourencourt; and the pragmatic economic liberalism of Karl Biedermann. I conclude with reflections on Ruge's 1843 “Eine Selbstkritik des Liberalismus.”