After an absence of more than fifteen years, Russian and Soviet themes began to reappear in contemporary Arabic fiction around 2005, as Russia started to regain prominence in Arab politics and Arabic writers began rediscovering some of the transnational entanglements that the Cold War’s unipolar ending had largely occluded. Contemporary Arabic fiction writers have put Russian and Soviet material to many uses; this essay focuses on four: satirizing Soviet internationalism through depictions of dormitory racism; mocking the gender assumptions behind Arab nationalism and internationalism; humanizing jihadi fighters; and speaking beauty to power. The sheer diversity of these uses (and of others not covered here) shows that “How has Russian literature influenced Arabic literature?” is the wrong question. Future research should ask, rather, what local hungers the Russian/Soviet legacy has fed, what artistic and rhetorical resources it has offered, and how Arab writers have reimagined it.

Between 2022 and 2023 I ran two experimental DJing workshops in a school in East London with Year 10 GCSE music students. They were experimental in the sense that I had not run workshops with this age group before and that I was sharing some experimental techniques with digital DJ technology (DDJT) that I had been exploring in my own practice. They proved to be highly engaging for the young people and highlighted significant, and sometimes unexpected, benefits of using DDJT in the classroom. The results of the workshops are analysed in the context of the 2016 addition of DJing as an ‘instrument’ for the performance component of the GCSE assessment, alongside claims that this is a ‘challenge to colonisation’. While the addition is viewed as positive, it is questioned whether viewing DJing as being equivalent to other instrumental playing captures the plurality of a practice that is distributed across sonic, social and discursive realms. Historical and conceptual precedents for viewing DJing both as an instrument and as an art are explored, and it is suggested that it could also be assessed under the GCSE Art & Design criteria.

Mollusk shells are often found in archeological sites, given their great preservation potential and high value as a multipurpose resource, and they can often be the only available materials useful for radiocarbon (14C) dating. However, dates obtained from shells are often regarded as less reliable compared to those from bones, wood, or charcoals due to different factors (e.g., Isotope fractionation, reservoir effects etc.). The standard acid etching pretreatment for mollusk shells is the most used in many 14C laboratories, although another protocol known as CarDS (Carbonate Density Separation) was introduced just over a decade ago. We compare these two methods with two newly proposed methods for intracellular organic matrix extraction. We applied all four methods to samples selected from different archeological layers of the well-known Upper Paleolithic site of Vale Boi, rich in mollusk specimens throughout the stratigraphic sequence. Here we compare our results to previous dates to determine which of these pretreatment methods results in the most reliable 14C dates. Based on the results of this study, all four methods gave inconsistent ages compared to previous dates and the stratigraphic attribution.

Richard Nixon was the first president who examined the possibility of introducing a value-added tax (VAT) at the federal level in the late twentieth century. By 1970, his administration had considered recommending it alongside other domestic programs to overcome the criticism against the VAT’s regressivity, potential conflict in the federal–state tax authority, and the fragmented decision-making authority between the executive and legislative branches of the government. However, in 1971, the Nixon administration shifted their policy priority toward gaining the middle-class political support by linking local property tax relief to a federal VAT. Although they combined the two measures with a rebate to obtain consent to and confidence in them from the “opponents” among the “internalists” of policymaking and societal actors, their attempt failed to accomplish it. As a result, Nixon abandoned the federal VAT. This abandonment was a missed opportunity to introduce a federal VAT, leading the United States to become a fiscal outlier among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries: it has not yet implemented a national/federal VAT. Furthermore, this outcome marked the origin of certain historical characteristics of the American fiscal state: the use of tax expenditures, “fend-for-yourself federalism,” weak extractive capacity, and fiscal inflexibility.

The shift towards cultivating domesticated crops was a pivotal development in ecological, economic, and human behavioural systems. As agriculture expanded beyond its origins, it faced diverse environments, often unsuitable for the originally cultivated domesticates. Farmers in Central Europe had to adjust and transform their farming systems, typically cultivating only five domesticated crop species. Here, we present new archaeobotanical data comprising 7955 determined charred remains and 22 radiocarbon dates from South Bohemia. This region, with higher altitudes, colder climates, and less fertile soils, lies on the periphery of Early Neolithic settlement. Our results reveal increased crop diversity as a form of adaptation to the harsher environment that bolstered resilience against crop failure. The earliest 14C-based evidence of deliberate cultivation of barley and Timopheev’s wheat in the region also provides new insights into the interplay between crop diffusion, landscapes, and food choices in the Neolithic Central Europe.

This article examines two venues where historians of education have in the past addressed serious, publicly significant questions: commissions of inquiry and courtrooms where education rights and educational injustices are litigated. The article argues that these two examples demonstrate historians’ particular skills and abilities as evidence-gatherers, clear communicators, strong generalists, and experts in making sense of change over time. The article also suggests that these particular skills and abilities can be the basis for historians’ continued contributions to answering questions of public significance.

This essay considers the usefulness of history of education, first, through the history of Australian university-based teacher education and then through the history of how, in the postwar period of schooling expansion, the provision of public schooling was transformed discursively from a policy solution into a policy problem—with opposing viewpoints from “left” and “right” projected through the print media. With a particular focus on “conservative” critique, two contrasting snapshots are presented of public writing from the 1970s-1980s to illustrate how, by this period, the focus of public debate about education policy in Australia was no longer on the principles and logistics of widening access, but on questioning the trustworthiness of the schools themselves—what and how they were teaching the nation’s children. The essay concludes by proposing that history itself is constantly invoked in debates about schooling by people who are trying to explain what needs to be changed or preserved.

The recent surge in inflation has led to an increase in research by academic economists into various aspects of central banking: in particular, central bank communication and trust in central banks. In addition, the move towards introducing Central Bank Digital Currency has increased the need for research in this area. This Special Issue of the National Institute Economic Review brings together some of this recent research and includes contributions from academic and policy-oriented researchers and leading experts on these recent developments in central banking research.

In 1901, Cemaleddin Dağıstani, a newly enrolled student at a madrasa in Bursa, sent a letter to his family in the district of Quba (now in Azerbaijan) in the Russian Empire. He excitedly shared what he had witnessed during his journey to the Ottoman Empire. Upon crossing the Russo–Ottoman border from Batum (now Batumi, Georgia) to Rize, he was met by Ottoman officials who registered him as a muhajir (refugee or immigrant). Alongside other muhajirs from Russia, including Circassians, Dagestanis, Tatars, and Muslim Georgians, he boarded a state ferry to Istanbul. In seven days, he arrived at the Ottoman capital. He recalled meeting Muslim refugees from Bulgaria, Greece, and Habsburg-occupied Bosnia, and Muslim subjects of the British, French, and German colonial empires. The lion’s share of muhajirs, however, like Cemaleddin, were former Russian subjects. In his letter, Cemaleddin marveled that at times of need Muslims from all over the world sought and found refuge in the Ottoman domains.1

We formulate and prove the archimedean period relations for Rankin–Selberg convolutions for ${\mathrm {GL}}(n)\times {\mathrm {GL}}(n-1)$. As a consequence, we prove the period relations for critical values of the Rankin–Selberg L-functions for ${\mathrm {GL}}(n)\times {\mathrm {GL}}(n-1)$ over arbitrary number fields.

In 1788, Andrew Jackson acquired an enslaved woman named Nancy. According to most accounts, Nancy followed Jackson from Jonesborough, Tennessee to Nashville and lived out the rest of her days at the Hermitage. Except she did not. A close review of the legal record suggests that Nancy never made it to Nashville and either left Jackson somewhere along the Wilderness Road or died at his hands trying to escape. Her act of resistance, this article posits, may have profoundly affected Jackson's views of race and sex on the southern frontier.