Luchino Visconti is widely recognised as a high-culture director. However, in his films of the period 1943–63 there was a firm engagement with consumer culture and modernity in terms of themes, characters and references. This article explores this often overlooked dimension in Visconti's films by analysing a number of key sequences and moments that relate directly to consumption, consumer culture, leisure, modernity, Americanisation and youth culture. The analysis shows how these representations related to the ongoing changes in Italian postwar society and to incoming Americanisation in particular. My research is informed by the work of Gary Cross, Victoria De Grazia and Emanuela Scarpellini on consumer culture and contextualises how Visconti's referencing of consumer culture and modernity was received by the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano or Italian Communist Party).

The most influential English translation of Henry VIII's Assertio septem sacramentorum against Martin Luther, which is still widely available online and through e-publishing, was originally printed in London in 1687. Its translator, known only by the initials ‘T. W.’ that appear on the title page, is commonly identified in library catalogues as one Thomas Webster. Closer investigation reveals this identification to be based on a series of misunderstandings. It is suggested that this Thomas Webster never existed, and that the more likely translator was the Yorkshire-born controversialist, Thomas Ward.

We explore the complexity of Sacks’ Splitting Theorem in terms of the mind change functions associated with the members of the splits. We prove that, for any c.e. set A, there are low computably enumerable sets $A_0\sqcup A_1=A$ splitting A with $A_0$ and $A_1$ both totally $\omega ^2$-c.a. in terms of the Downey–Greenberg hierarchy, and this result cannot be improved to totally $\omega $-c.a. as shown in [9]. We also show that if cone avoidance is added then there is no level below $\varepsilon _0$ which can be used to characterize the complexity of $A_1$ and $A_2$.

Rationing and illegal food trade in Second World War Italy have received very little scholarly attention in comparison to the scale and impact they had on people's daily life. This article contributes to filling this gap, first by providing an overview of the dynamics that already in the early years of the war determined the development of an illegal system of food trade. It then considers the experience of the black market through two wartime diaries, one published and the other unpublished, written by women of opposite political views, both living in Rome and its outskirts. The analysis of the diaries considers women's attitudes towards the black market. The article argues that the Fascist propaganda of duty to the homeland, so intensively practised through domestic literature during the 1920s and 1930s, was again exploited in wartime in the discourse around the black market and hid the political responsibilities of the government.

This paper presents a kinematics modeling and hybrid motion planning framework for wheeled-legged rovers. It is a unified solution for wheeled-legged rovers to traverse multiple challenging terrains using hybrid locomotion. A kinematic model is first established to describe the rover’s motions. Then, a hybrid motion planning framework is proposed to determine the rover’s gait patterns and parameterize the legs’ and the body’s trajectories. Furthermore, an optimization algorithm based on B-spline is utilized to minimize the motors’ energy dissipation and generate smooth trajectories. The wheeled and legged hybridization allows the rover for faster locomotion while maintaining high stability. Besides, it also improves the rover’s ability to overcome obstacles. Prototype experiments are carried out in more complex environments to verify the rover’s flexibility and maneuverability to traverse irregular terrains. The proposed algorithm reduces the swing amplitude by 83.3% compared to purely legged locomotion.

In the early twentieth century, economic and religious antagonism between Sinhalese and Moors in Ceylon escalated into widespread, deadly violence. In the immediate aftermath of the 1915 pogrom, which involved the targeting of Moors and their property, the Sinhalese nationalist Anagarika Dharmapala observed that ‘Muhammadans’ had accumulated wealth through ‘Shylockian methods’. Even prior to Dharmapala’s claim, Moors were repeatedly depicted as the ‘Jews of Ceylon’ by both influential Sinhalese actors and colonial state actors. As Ceylon did not have a local Jewish population, this article investigates the use of a rhetorical device that was familiar within the broader networks of empire to ‘other’ a non-Jewish mercantile minority. The article accordingly enquires into how and why antisemitic epithets came to be used in prejudicial speech against Moors. It also explores propaganda portraying Moors in terms of ‘hostile’ Jewish stereotypes and the way in which such stereotypes were deployed in Sinhalese interactions with Moors. By tracing the connections between antisemitism and anti-capitalism, this article aims to contribute to a broader discourse on the positions of Semitic groups in British imperial ideology.

What qualifies as a political event is a core question for social and historical research. This article argues that the use of temporal structures in narratives of political and social developments contributes significantly to the making and unmaking of events. We show how arguments that draw upon history play a particularly important role in transforming the everyday unfolding of politics into discernable events with a clear time bracket. Through this lens, we investigate the 2016 Brexit referendum as an event that has triggered extensive debates about both Europe’s experiences of the past and political expectations for its future. Conflicting assessments of history are crucial for understanding how and when Brexit became an event of European significance and why it then ceased to be so. This case also enables us to distinguish more clearly between the agent-centered focus on the event itself, and the analytical ex-post assessment as a critical juncture. Methodologically, the article demonstrates the value of a multi-perspective approach for qualitative analyses with a focus on Brexit narratives articulated across several EU countries and the United Kingdom.

The tactics of Cretan citizen armies differed markedly from those utilized in most regions of the Classical and Hellenistic Greek world: instead of fighting in phalanxes, Cretans fought in open order, specializing in archery, skirmishing, ambushes and night actions. These tactics (and the cultural attitudes that went with them) were disparaged by mainland Greeks such as Polybios and explained in terms of moral deviancy: a sign of the duplicitous nature of the Cretans. This article demonstrates that these descriptions of Cretan tactics and behaviours are factual, but argues against the idea that they derive from moral deviancy. Rather, they represent the outcome of a different line of historical development than that followed in mainland Greece. Cretan tactics and attitudes stand far closer to those described by archaic poets (especially Homer, Archilochos and Kallinos); in this regard, Cretan city states displayed strong continuities with archaic social practices and values, detectable in other areas of Cretan society and culture. The stability of Cretan sociopolitical organization from the late seventh century down to the Roman conquest fostered the endurance of such practices and attitudes, leading to cultural divergence from mainland Greece and, accordingly, a generally hostile representation of Cretans in our main historiographical sources.

Across medicine, key scientific advances in the past couple of decades have deepened knowledge of fundamental mechanisms of disease, leading to new treatments and the possibility of increased personalisation of care. Some of the most important developments in fields as diverse as immunology, the microbiome, genetics, stem cells and artificial intelligence are summarised in this article to raise awareness among psychiatrists and to help understand the opportunities and challenges they may present for mental healthcare in the future.

Since the new history of capitalism (NHOC) trend received national publicity in 2013, American historians have enthusiastically pursued the complexities and varieties of capitalism, producing a body of scholarship that offers a plethora of capitalism-modifying adjectives yet leaves capitalism undefined. “A Brief History of the History of Capitalism, and a New American Variety” asks how historians developed these varieties and interpretations, and whether any gaps or limitations remain. To answer these questions, the essay begins with a survey of the many histories of capitalism, from the first use of the term, to America’s first business histories in the early twentieth century, to world systems theory, and up to the NHOC. It then makes the case for continued attempts at redefinition and specification by offering a new variety.

This new variety, martial capitalism, has its roots in the early national and antebellum eras and influenced the evolution of capitalism in the United States. It is a system of political economy in which concealed military power, rather than abstract market forces, serves as an invisible (“invisible,” at least, to those not subjected to it) hand and bestows economic opportunity upon some individuals. Under this system, government officials and private citizens coercively acquired resources, knowledge, territory, and “free trade” agreements in the service of aggressive economic opportunism. Steady military conflict, along with scattered and localized violence, intersected with honor, a mainstay in early American politics and culture, to engender a set of masculinized economic relations that shaped both the what/where and the how of capitalism in the United States.

This article examines ‘parental harm’ – a harm that occurs when a parent loses or faces the threat of losing a child. We contend that the manipulation and severing of relationships between parents and children has played a central role in war and oppression across historical contexts. Parental harm has long-term and pervasive effects and results in complex legacies for carers and their communities. Despite its grave impact, there is little research within International Relations into parental harm and understanding of its effects. We conceptualise parental harm through two frames – the ‘harm of separation’ and ‘harm to the ability to parent’ – and theorise gendered dimensions of how it is perpetuated and experienced. As such, we advance feminist understandings of family as a gendered institution that shapes the conduct of war and institutionalises racialised oppression. Our conception of parental harm offers novel insights into the relationship between intimate relations, the family, and state power and practices. We illustrate our conceptual arguments through two examples: the control and manipulation of family in antebellum slavery in the United States and the targeting of Tamil children in disappearances in Sri Lanka. These examples demonstrate the pervasiveness of parental harm across contexts and forms of violence.

A dominant narrative, produced and reproduced especially by terrorism scholars, holds that terrorism in its worst form is religious. The most dangerous and non-negotiable form of terrorism, in other words, is the religious kind. At the same time, there is a recurring implication, proposed by many terrorism scholars and reflected in public discourse, that terrorism, no matter its official designation, is always inherently ‘religious’ or ‘religious-like’. Both this implication and the dominant narrative about the uniquely dangerous character of ‘religious terrorism’ – which I summarise as the Religious Terrorism Thesis – builds on colonial knowledge and assumptions about ‘religion’. Religion is also, as I argue, written into the category ‘terrorism’ and enables its negative discursive power and the colonial imagination of ‘terrorism’ as racialised and a system-threat to (Western) modernity. Terrorism, therefore, can never constitute a neutral signifier of a specific kind of political violence. Instead, it functions as a negative ideograph to Western societies, which means it functions to uphold the project of Western modernity/coloniality. The Religious Terrorism Thesis, which I identify as the foundation for the dominant discourse on terrorism today, is a crucial element of coloniality and justifies many controversial and contemporary counterterrorism practices.