The Congress Medical Mission to Malaya was the last Indian non-state relief initiative that was sent abroad to provide humanitarian aid during late colonial rule and in the early postcolonial years. Whereas South Asian humanitarian initiatives had provided comprehensive aid for Indian and Allied soldiers at various fronts during the world wars and had given assistance to war victims in China and Malaya, the summer of 1946 became a turning point for their work when in mid-August, Calcutta was ravaged by the communal violence that broke out between Hindus and Muslims. Trapped in the riotous city for a few days was Dr C. Siva Rama Sastry, who was part of the Congress Medical Mission that had just returned from Malaya. When Sastry was finally able to return home to south India, he had to leave all his belongings behind.

After the so-called Great Calcutta Killings, the violence spread throughout British India, leading to riots and massacres in East Bengal, Bihar, Bombay, the United Provinces, Punjab and in other places before reaching its climax with partition. The end of colonial rule with the formation of two new nation states, India and Pakistan, in August 1947, was accompanied by large-scale violence that may have caused up to 1 million deaths and led to the displacement of approximately 12 million people.3 The unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in South Asia, however, did evoke a mixed international response. Several non-state humanitarian organisations from around the globe forwarded aid in cash and kind; some also sent relief workers to South Asia or already had volunteers on-site.

In 1937, Herbert Selpin directed Alarm in Peking, which revolves around the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-Christian and anti-Western mass movement that culminated in the Boxers besieging representatives of eleven imperialist nations in the Legation Quarter in Peking from June 21 to August 14, 1900. The film lists Walter Zerlett-Olfenius and Selpin as co-screenwriters and stresses in the opening credits that the plot and characters are fictitious. However, a notice published in the Viennese newspaper Mein Film on March 19, 1937, cited a literary source for the film: “Gustav Frohlich is secured to play the lead role of the film Alarm in Peking, which Herbert Selpin is filming based on the play Neun Offiziere [Nine Officers, 1936] by Georg Fraser.” The German playwright Fraser was employed as the chief dramaturge of the Scala Theater in Vienna at the time, so the reviewer was giving a nod to a local artist. A comparison of the plots and personae of Alarm in Peking and Neun Offiziere bears out the anonymous reviewer's observation that the film is a loose adaptation of the drama. Given the many similarities between Neun Offiziere and Alarm in Peking, it is curious that Fraser and his play went uncredited in the film and were scarcely mentioned in reports and reviews.

This essay unravels for the first time the complicated adaptation and reception history of this obscure film, revisiting in the process a littleknown case of censorship during the Third Reich.

The introduction explains how the book complements existing historiography. Where existing scholarship sees the early sixteenth century as a caesura, the book directs attention instead to topics such as uncertainty about dogma, the relation between indulgences and penance, judges delegate, control of entry into marriage and problems connected with baptism. It suggests that the relevance of the Papal States to papal religious governance should be relativised: they constitute a sub-plot, not a key to the early modern papal system. The main archives used are the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, the Archivio del Dicastero per la Dottrina della Fede and the Archivio Storico di Propaganda Fide. These are used to construct an analytical history of the papacy rather than a more conventional pope-by-pope narrative of events.

Introduction

On 24 October 2019, the remains of General Franco were exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen. This imposing mausoleum, built by the Franco regime and located to the north of Madrid, is perhaps the most important monument erected by the regime in all the years it held power in Spain. It is the “El Escorial” of the regime. Despite the government's decision to seek a new burial place for the Generalísimo, the valley still houses the remains of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange movement, and those of no less than 30,000 Civil War combatants. Not for nothing did the Francoist propaganda of the time present the Valley of the Fallen as a monument to all the combatants who had lost their lives in the conflict.

The decision of the socialist government, which at the time had only been in power for a few months, led to a furious backlash and heated debate in Spain. It attracted the attention of the international press and the live broadcast was followed with uncommon interest by over seven million people in Spain.3 The court battle that took place in order to impose the wishes of the government of Pedro Sánchez – in the face of resistance from the Franco family and the Benedictine community in the valley – had the predictable effect of generating renewed interest in the monument itself.

On May 16, 1890, Brahms traveled from Vienna to Bad Ischl for his annual summer holiday. Packed in his bags that day were the first two volumes of Heinrich von Sybel's Die Begründung des Deutschen Reiches durch Wilhelm I. (The foundation of the German Reich by William I). These books were a birthday present from Laura von Beckerath, whose inscription is found on the flyleaf of the first volume: “May 7, 1890. In grateful memory of beautiful times in the past.” As Brahms would discover, Sybel's project was, in effect, a history of Bismarck's foreign policy during the period 1850–70.

Chapter 4 examines Mexico’s transition from hegemonic-party rule to competitive elections and the rise of one of the most influential autonomous EMBs globally. It traces the creation and consolidation of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE, later INE), emphasizing how partisan negotiations and power-sharing arrangements built credibility and administrative strength. The chapter shows how Mexico institutionalized transparent, rule-based procedures informed by party input and federal oversight. Drawing on interviews and archival documents, the chapter demonstrates how partisan inclusion became central to the development of technical capacity, accountability, and resilience. It also highlights moments where political pressure tested the institution and how the mechanisms of consultation mitigated post electoral conflict and allowed political actors from all ideological backgrounds to peacefully alternate in power after the country’s 2000 democratic transition.

He was disarmed by this gaze, and in the same moment, his heart was touched; he took Franziska's hand and kissed it, and then rapidly taking his leave, he spoke of letters to be written and went over to the other wing. Here he sat down at his desk but soon stood up again, to restore some peace to his mind by walking back and forth.

“It was a confession, the way she looked at me and asked for forgiveness with those intelligent eyes of hers. But what am I to forgive her? What is there to forgive? Nothing. During all the time I warned her against looking at life as a fairy tale, I’d invented a fairytale of my own, and her goodwill in bowing to my will strengthened my belief that a fairytale was possible. Yes—her goodwill in bowing to my will! That was it; she simply spoiled me. If she had said at the beginning, ‘There is one essential thing, Petofy, and I insist on it: we will stay in Vienna, with people around us, and I will not bury myself in the solitude of a castle; I must have followers and admirers around me, saying nice things to me, taking me to a concert one day, to the opera the next’—yes, if she had adopted a free tone like that from the outset, the freest possible, and kept things on the social and personal footing to which she had every right, then I would have been content with her conversation, and the fresh air of her bon sens and the sunshine of her unfailing good humor would have been my happiness. That was what I wanted, back then in Oslau.

Abstract: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg presented his inaugural lecture as professor of mathematics at the University of Göttingen in 1770 on a contested topic of the time: probability theory and its relationship to gamblers’ choices in games of chance. This article considers Lichtenberg's lecture, in conjunction with his trenchant commentaries on the lottery in letters and aphorisms within the context of the fascination with the lottery prevalent in the late eighteenth century. Lichtenberg reflects on games of chance both as a scientific test case for the mathematics of probability and as a window into the social world and its individual actors. His engagement with the figure of the gambler in the context of mathematical probability and of life experience illuminates both the shifting contours of the discipline of mathematics and emergent conceptions and disciplinary understandings of subjectivity in the late eighteenth century. With attention to linguistic nuance, Lichtenberg probes the epistemic capacity and limitations of these diverse modes of inquiry to explore questions of mathematical models, individual circumstances and subjective judgment, and forms of rationality and irrationality that shape human behavior.

Keywords: Lichtenberg, probability, games of chance, lottery, subjectivity, rationality, modes of inquiry, interdiscursivity

“Ein wichtiges Spiel”

A few weeks before his death on February 24, 1799, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg recorded his dream from the night of February 9. He found himself in an establishment where others were eating and playing games of dice: “Bei dem Würfel-Spiel saß eine lange, hagere Frau und strickte.

In the early medieval period, manuscript production depended fundamentally on pastoral agriculture, since livestock provided the hides on which most books were written during this period. This entanglement of intellectual life with pastoral work is related vividly in the story of St. Ciarán of Clonmacnoise (ca. early–mid-sixth century). A precocious and troublesome young man, Ciarán tended his family's herds, performing miracles to compensate for the cows he gave away in his generosity, including his uncle's valuable plough-ox. On one occasion, when Ciarán's mother refused a drink to thirsty travelers, the saint, waiting until his elders were at their work (operibus), demonstrated his disapproval by destroying their provisions: he dumped the milk, put sheep's manure in the butter, and fed the bread to the dogs, arguing that anyone who would deny food to visitors does not deserve to consume it. When Ciarán departed for Clonard to study with St. Finian, he requested a cow from his mother and father so ‘her milk [could] sustain him’ at school (ad scolam duceretur, causa lactis eius pro sustentacione eius). His mother refused, since ‘“others who are in that school have no [cows]”’ (‘alii qui sunt in illa scola vac[c]as non habent’). Disregarding her objection, Ciarán acquired his cow in a somewhat extra-legal fashion, overriding his parents’ rights of ownership: ‘coming to the cattle of his parents, he blessed a cow, and commanded her in the name of the Lord to follow him…. [and she] followed him with her new-born calf’ (veniens ad armentum parentum suorum benedixit vnam vac[c]am, et iussit ei in nomine Domini, ut sequeretur se. Et … vac[c]a secuta est eum cum vitulo suo nuper nato).