The second Trump Administration, in office since January 2025, has disrupted the prevailing trade consensus. The corner stone of the new US trade policy is the re-introduction of old-style tariffs at substantial levels to create a so-called ‘tariff wall’ turning away from long-standing practices of tariff liberalization. According to the US Administration, the tariffs pursue multiple objectives. They incentivize re-industrialization, generate revenue, and lower trade deficits with many trading partners. The imposition of new tariffs is coupled with the pursuit of bilateral deals to extract business-type concessions from governments and to encourage investments into the US.

The Third Conference on African History and Archaeology, sponsored by the School of Oriental and African Studies of London University on July 3-7, 1961, followed in the series of four-yearly meetings begun in 1953 and continued in 1957. It was already abundantly clear in 1957 that African history had come into its own as a recognized field of study. The Journal of African History, now in its second year and preparing to expand from two to three annual issues, was an outcome of the second conference. It marked the coming-of-age.

Using an explicit Eichler–Shimura–Harder isomorphism, we establish the analog of Manin’s rationality theorem for Bianchi periods and hence special values of L-functions of Bianchi cusp forms. This gives a new short proof of a result of Hida in the case of Euclidean imaginary quadratic fields. In particular, we give an explicit proof using the space of Bianchi period polynomials constructed by Karabulut and describe the action of Hecke operators.

It is a high honor to be with the distinguished Africanists who form the African Studies Association.

Five years ago, you had the vision to recognize that what most people then thought was esoteric learning about a dark continent was, in fact, the essential understanding which would permit the people of America to live fruitfully with one of the most dynamic movements in world history.

This unique position in the intellectual world gives you not only an unusual opportunity to influence the events of your time, but a heavy responsibility to make certain that the fruit of your labors is of the very highest quality. Though I am but a neophyte in the field, I know many of you well enough to appreciate your recognition of and devotion to this awesome trust.

The first of a series of meetings at which material concerning the current status of social research in Africa was considered, was opened by the chairman, the editor of the African Studies Association's forthcoming volume on this topic. At this plenary session John Fage, of the University of London, spoke on recent developments and trends in African history, Arthur Schiller of Columbia University on law, and Joseph Greenberg of Stanford University on linguistics.

Taking historical studies on Africa from their beginning, Dr. Fage indicated that there had been a continuous output of historical material relating to Africa from the time of Herodotus up to the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the writing of African history ceased to be respectable. One reason for this was a change in the character of historical research, with great emphasis being placed on written sources. By comparison with the western world, Africa was deficient in written history and records, and the attitude that Africa therefore had no history came to prevail. This attitude was not unconnected with the supremacy of Europe, with the feeling that Europe would have to civilize Africa, and it was considered that the study of Africa was the job of the ethnographer rather than the historian. Secondly, there emerged a new branch of historical enquiry, that of colonial history in Africa, with its emphasis on European rather than African activities. The result was that academic historians had no contact with Africa. In fact, however, historical materials on Africa did exist, and in ignoring them the historian had simply left the field to anthropologists, or to amateurs. Anthropologists established a close association with Africa but were little concerned with the past and suspicious of “conjectural history.” Their concentration on simple societies and the relative lack of attention given to political structures kept the social anthropologists from developing too close an interest in African history.