Although many historians have explored the theoretical relationship between progressive education and the teaching of Black students in segregated schools during the interwar years, far less is known about what pedagogical progressivism looked like in Black schools, why Black teachers chose to adopt and implement these new methods, and how their methods and goals evolved over time. In this article, the authors trace the origins and development of pedagogically progressive experiments by Black educational leaders and classroom teachers. We argue that Black educators introduced progressive methods that fused academic and practical content not only to better engage their students with a relevant curriculum, but, more importantly, to protect the academic content from White educators’ pressure to focus the curriculum exclusively on manual training. This approach later expanded to include the development of democratic dispositions toward the fight for racial advancement.

This article considers the material practices of forging ‘Hindu’ spaces in colonial India, through an examination of a cremation charity’s movement against a mechanical crematorium in interwar Calcutta. Established around 1926, the mechanical crematorium was advertised by the municipality as a cost-effective alternative to traditional Hindu pyres, disposing of unclaimed corpses and dissected parts by employing stigmatized Dalit labour, in a region of the city marked for ‘offensive’ trades. However, by 1932, a cremation charity led by municipal councillors and Indian capitalists contested the existence of the crematorium, arguing that its technological process, labour practices, and location were an affront to Hindu sensibilities. This article examines the rise of the charity and the decline of the crematorium within the context of electoral politics, the politics of the location, and the broader impact on interwar labour crises and famines in Calcutta. By analysing the anti-crematorium movement, this article offers a colonial material history of the construction of the emotional resonance in ‘Hindu spaces’ in India, outlining how it emerged at the interstices of communal and caste boundaries.

We report the results of radiocarbon dating performed at the ETH laboratory on soft tissue of the mummified body found in September 1991 on the Hauslabjoch in the Ötztaler Alps (near the Similaun Mountain), South Tyrol. Over the past three decades, additional analyses of the sample, which had been stored frozen in a glass jar, have improved the precision of the first published radiocarbon ages. The frozen jar and the story of a mummified body found in the Alps fascinated visitors to the laboratory, mostly primary and high-school students. As part of educational projects, 11 samples were prepared and analyzed, yielding a combined radiocarbon age of 4525 ± 7 BP. This agreement with 4550 ± 27 BP, i.e., the very first results by Bonani et al. (1994), highlights the quality of the analysis performed decades ago. The combined age of all the 14C ages measured at the ETH laboratory is 4527 ± 7 BP.

The content of Kant’s Enlightenment text has received much critical reception, but the very stance Kant takes as its author has been largely ignored. Similarly, there has been much critical discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment” in terms of the theses they (purportedly) endorse, while their authorial voice has mostly received either no attention or been criticised as problematically rhetorical. In this paper, I take a different approach, focusing on the two respective writerly stances. I suggest that Kant’s text harbours an implicit epistemic authoritarianism, in contrast to the self-therapeutic stance Adorno and Horkheimer’s text exemplifies.

Motivated by recent breathtaking progress in the synthetic study of Lorentzian geometry, we investigate the local concavity of time separation functions on Finsler spacetimes as a Lorentzian counterpart to Busemann’s convexity in metric geometry. We show that a Berwald spacetime is locally concave if and only if its flag curvature is nonnegative in timelike directions. We also give another characterization of nonnegative flag curvature by the convexity of future (or past) capsules, inspired by Kristály–Kozma’s result in the positive definite case. These characterizations are new even for Lorentzian manifolds.

Free Steiner triple systems (STSs) are infinite structures that are naturally characterised by a universal property. We consider the class of free STSs from a model-theoretic viewpoint. We show that free STSs on any number of generators are elementarily equivalent. We axiomatise their theory and show that it is stable.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has described the UK economy as being in its worst state since 1945. Unlike the Labour Government of 1945, Reeves has rejected Beveridge-style public investment, in part because of claims of public support for fiscal restraint. We report findings of innovative, iterative mixed-methods survey (1) n = 693; 2) n = 10; 3) n = 2200) analysis of a programme for progressive tax reform designed to achieve comparable post-war outcomes conducted between November 2023 and January 2024 of adult UK residents. We analyse the findings of survey 3 to assess public support for the policy, impact of narratives and associations with demographic, socio-economic and health data. We find high levels of support for tax and spend, particularly where burdens are placed on wealth and business; significant impact of four narratives to persuade initial opponents to support the policy thematically organised around absolute gains, relative gains, security and environmental benefit; and clear associations between risk of destitution and various other socio-economic characteristics, health status and levels of support. We present structural equation modelling (SEM) of these associations and find moderately strong positive correlations with levels of support for key infrastructural policies. This suggests high levels of support for progressive taxation.

Readings of the history of penal expertise trace its rise to the late nineteenth century and its decline to the late twentieth century, with the crumbling of the welfare state. Despite stark differences along Whiggish and Foucauldian lines in evaluations of that history, a consensus has emerged that the penal-welfare complex peaked around mid-century, dependent on correctional experts. Most studies of that phenomenon have focused on the institutionalization and “treatment” of “problem” populations while neglecting the role of penal expertise in critiques of capital punishment. When Britain and Canada undertook major inquiries into the death penalty in the 1950s, they turned to the world’s foremost expert on the subject: sociologist Thorsten Sellin. Yet, these government-appointed studies devalued his academic capital in favor of the lived expertise of police. By examining the contestation of Sellin’s sources, methods, and conclusions, this paper puts the chronology of penal welfarism and its experts into question. Not simply a case of ill-informed opinion prevailing over criminological evidence, the dismissive treatment of this penal expert highlights the need to apply a more capacious understanding of contending forms of expertise at numerous points in penal history, rather than setting the devaluation of penal expertise in the recent past.

Although conditional cash transfers are a cornerstone of Latin American welfare states, little is known about the public opinion dynamics that sustain or challenge their long-term viability. Drawing on original, nationally representative surveys conducted in 2022 in seven Latin American democracies (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru), this article examines public support for cash transfers toward children across three dimensions: existence (yes/no), breadth (who should receive them) and adequacy (benefit levels). Across all countries, we find widespread support for such transfers, challenging the notion that only universal policies can create broad social support. However, preferences for expansion vary significantly across countries, with only partial alignment with existing coverage: support is highest in countries with extensive and minimal program coverage. Logistic regression models reveal that gender and household composition (living with children and being of reproductive age) are strong predictors of individual preferences, in addition to ideology and income. These findings contribute to existing scholarship by highlighting the role of gender and household composition in shaping social policy preferences.

This paper explores how unrecognised separatist entities in Eurasia – de facto regimes such as Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics – engage with international law. It examines whether, and to what extent, these regimes comply with international law, analysing court decisions and legislation to move beyond simplistic views of non-recognition or assumed legality. The findings reveal that de facto regimes tend to mirror the international law approaches of the states they are most closely connected to – whether the territorial state (e.g. Ukraine) or an outside state exercising effective control over the entity (e.g. Russia or Armenia). This pattern is explained by the theory of “acculturation to statehood”: through sustained legal and institutional interaction, these regimes internalise and replicate the legal systems of their reference states. The study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the role of de facto regimes in the international legal order.

We prove that the spectrum of Van Douwen families is closed under singular limits. For any maximal eventually different family Raghavan defined in [10] an associated ideal which measures how far the family is from being Van Douwen. Under CH we prove that every ideal containing $\mathrm {Fin}$ is realized as the associated ideal of some maximal eventually different family. Finally, we construct maximal eventually different families with Sacks-indestructible associated ideals to prove that in the iterated Sacks-model every $\aleph _1$-generated ideal containing $\text {Fin}$ is realized.

Redo cardiac surgery is often needed for right ventricular outflow tract complications after tetralogy of Fallot repair. Common approaches include redo sternotomy or anterior thoracotomy. We report a case of pulmonary valve replacement performed via vertical left axillary thoracotomy, which effectively minimises cardiac injury risk during reentry and offers a safe, cosmetic alternative to conventional thoracotomy approaches.