In 2023, Claudia Goldin received the Nobel Prize for her groundbreaking research in economics. In this article, I use Goldin’s research to reflect on the role of history of education in academic research. I argue that Goldin’s remarkable achievement underscores the need for historians of education to reach a wider disciplinary audience in the humanities and social sciences. Goldin’s success lies not in isolating her focus to a subfield, but in connecting historical research to wider concerns in the discipline of economics. Goldin’s research thus reminds us of the skills required of historians of education: to understand the research interest and terminology of other research fields, and to use historical methods to address the key problems that those research fields explore. That is, we need to learn how to apply historical methods to what are essentially nonhistorical problems.

An attempt was made to develop a novel dairy-based dip-like product from heat-acid-induced milk gel and whey. Based upon preliminary trials, the combination of cream (15–35%), whey (60–70%) and common salt (0.8–1.0%, all three as weight of heat-acid-induced milk gel) was selected for optimization of the dairy dip through factorial design of response surface methodology (RSM). Addition of glycerol monostearate, trisodium citrate and sodium hexametaphosphate each at the rate of 0.3% (as weight of heat-acid-induced milk gel) in the formulation was previously standardized. The optimization was carried out by analysing the textural and sensorial parameters of the dairy-based dip. The sensorial parameters (flavour, body and texture, colour and appearance and overall acceptability) and textural parameters (firmness, stickiness, work of shear and work of adhesion) were significantly (P < 0.05) correlated with the ingredient formulation. RSM analysis suggested the use of cream, whey and common salt at amounts of 27.92, 60.26 and 0.8% of the weight of heat-acid-induced milk gel for preparing dairy-based dip with a desirability of 0.84. The formulated product contained a lower fat but higher protein and lactose content than cheese dip.

On May 15, 1972, the Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Algeria’s President Houari Boumedienne arrived in the workers’ town of El Hadjar, near Annaba, to celebrate what appeared to be postcolonial Algeria’s most important economic achievement. In a festive atmosphere, Castro cut the ribbon inaugurating a powerful blast furnace constructed by the Soviet Union and a rolling mill made by the Italian firm Innocenti in the steel plant of El Hadjar.1 Promised by the French colonial state, but built step by step after Algeria’s independence by the government of the Algerian Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale; FLN), the El Hadjar steel plant was the heavy industry the country hoped would spur its industrialization, much like the heavy industry that once constituted the cornerstone of industrialization in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a major source of inspiration for Algeria; it also was a key provider of technology, training, and further technical assistance. Reporting on El Hadjar’s opening ceremony, the French newspaper, Le Monde, did not fail to observe that, “The Algerian government entrusted the USSR to expand the plant, increasing its production capacity [from 400,000] to nearly 1.5 million tons [per year] in 1977.”2

This article demonstrates how the Enlightenment model of sentiment and sympathy is performed in embodied gestures of affective empathy-building, cross-cultural fraternity, and concern for human rights in three Romantic Regency tragedies: Pizarro (1799) by the Romantic dramatist August von Kotzebue, adapted from the German by the Irish dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan; Remorse (1813) by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and The Apostate (1817) by the Irish dramatist Richard Lalor Sheil. In these plays, protagonists are moved towards sympathy and solidarity with others across cultural divisions and conflict. The discussion also examines how human rights issues are addressed in two plays by Scottish dramatists: Archibald MacLaren’s The Negro Slaves (1799) and Joanna Baillie’s Rayner (1804). Here the protagonists express remorse for engaging in conflict, colonialism, slavery, violence, and human rights abuses against others. All these texts share a common internationalist desire to unite humanity against oppression, injustice, and inequality, advocating human rights, equality, religious tolerance, and cosmopolitan citizenship.

Renowned for its 400-year-old Ottoman/Turkish/Armenian past and produced by “America's oldest family-run business,” the Zildjian cymbal is paradoxically rendered an unremarkable “humble object” in its assumed inclusion in orchestras and bands around the world. Tracing the lineages of the Zildjians and their cymbals through historical documentation, ethnography, and the materiality of the instruments themselves, I first discuss the cymbal's shifting musical contexts and functions in Ottoman Janissary mehter bands, European orchestras, American jazz bands, and many other ensembles over the past four centuries, as well as the role of the Zildjians in this musical expansion. Then, I examine how twentieth-century negotiations of Zildjian kinship emerged in contentions over the authenticity and ownership of cymbal production. Finally, I consider how the assimilatory pressures of nation-states shaped narratives of cymbal production as well as the Zildjians’ mobilities, particularly in the context of the ethnoracialization of minority populations in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic as well as the struggle of Armenian migrants to the United States to be recognized as valid U.S. American citizens at the turn of the twentieth century. By approaching the cymbal itself as the main interlocutor of this exploration, I aim to foreground the ways in which cymbals have sounded and resounded the mobility and kinships of its human creators. In doing so, I regard musical instruments as essential mediators of histories of cultural and musicological development as well as constructions of human identity and relationship, glimpsing how such objects may both reify and unsettle our epistemologies and the institutions of modern life.

In this article, DJ and scholar Jake Williams speaks with Maria Chavez and Elijah about their ideas concerning education and pedagogy in electronic music. Although they come from very different musical backgrounds, the rationale for the joint interview was twofold: first, they are both DJs who think deeply about their practice and have strong pedagogical commitments; and second, their pedagogical practices have led to them to work between informal and formal educational spaces, across a range of age groups. The talk touches on their views on music education, academia, definitions of success, what it means to be ‘open source’ and, of course, DJing.

There have many developments since the publication in International Legal Materials of the initial United Kingdom–Rwanda Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in 2022, not the least being the unanimous judgment of the UK Supreme Court published below. In addition, the present government has secured the passage of several new laws, including the Illegal Migration Act 2023 and the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024, intended to both buttress its policy of removing asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing of their claims and meet the objections of the Court. It has also “translated” the MoU into a binding treaty, since ratified by both parties, and Rwanda has enacted new asylum laws, as it had agreed.

Once considered an underclass, Gurage people have emerged as Ethiopia’s quintessential entrepreneurial class over the last seven decades. Studies on entrepreneurialism often focus on factors contributing to entrepreneurial success, such as ethnicity. The Gurage case study rethinks entrepreneurialism as nation making, demonstrating how Gurage entrepreneurialism was essential to the formation of Ethiopia’s modern economy and nation state in the twentieth century. The success of Gurage entrepreneurialism partly depended on support from the Ethiopian imperial state. The principal argument developed here is that Gurage entrepreneurs’ struggle against the ‘expatriate’ domination of Ethiopia’s capitalist commerce came to be constituted as a struggle for national economic independence, which was central to the nation-making project in this post-liberation period. In the process, Gurage transformed their own previous marginalization and denigration as ‘foreigners’ to become quintessential Ethiopian nation builders. It is a story about Gurage entrepreneurialism’s input into the Ethiopian nation-building project, one that contributes to larger theoretical discussions about entrepreneurialism, nation making, the state–market nexus and threats of foreign dominance in African markets.

Understanding population change in late medieval English towns is crucial for interpreting urban development and economic shifts. Traditional estimates, based on taxation records from 1377 to the Tudor period, provide arbitrary population figures at two fixed points and fail to capture short—term fluctuations. This study proposes an alternative methodology that integrates multiple strands of evidence, including court records, tax lists, and archaeological data, offering a more nuanced understanding of demographic change. Using Nottingham as a case study, it challenges prevailing models of urban population decline. The evidence suggests that after sustained population growth into at least the 1330s, approximately 60 per cent of the townspeople died during the Black Death of 1349. However, significant migration by the early 1350s, and again in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, led to periods of population recovery. Archaeological evidence, together with documentary sources, indicates urban expansion from the second half of the fourteenth century, with substantial growth by the early sixteenth century—contradicting traditional narratives of abandonment and decline. The findings demonstrate that demographic change was far more complex than traditional methodologies suggest and that this alternative approach provides deeper insight into population trends. This approach is applicable to towns with comparable source material.

On March 24, 2023, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances (the Committee or CED) delivered its unanimous “Views adopted under art. 31 of the [International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances],” concerning communication no. 4/2021 on Mexico. The decision relates to the disappearance of Yonathan Isaac Mendoza Berrospe on December 11, 2013, in the city of Veracruz, Mexico. The decision determined that he was a victim of enforced disappearance and that the state failed to guarantee the rights to an effective search, a prompt and effective criminal investigation, and reparations, including the right to know the truth. The Committee considered that his mother was also a victim of the violation of her rights.